Most tables in the main dining room - past the bar and the open kitchen with its white-domed oven - were full at 7 p.m., and conversations jumped among them. It certainly felt that way the night I visited. "Every single person that walks in here knows each other." "It's been like having a large family dinner party every night," Kirmse said.
But Wright's connections in the community have combined with the draw of the new to give the restaurant a busy first month. Outside the small town of Bristol, just past where Route 17 heads up and over the Appalachian Gap, the customer base is a little less obvious. "You always know you're gonna get people on the day you open." "In cities, you have a built-in population of people that live above you, beside you, all around," Kirmse said. This isn't the first time each of these industry veterans has opened a restaurant, but starting a business in a small town requires a different mindset from a market such as San Francisco - or even Burlington, where Wright helmed C'est Ça in fall 2020. He gave white and red wines equal billing on the restaurant's wine list, but customers aren't gravitating toward glasses of Chablis or grüner veltliner the way he expected.
"I love drinking white wines year-round," Kirmse said. "California is just an endless supply of things that are green and delicious all year round, and people eat and drink differently there." "And beets," Wright joked, because sourcing locally in Vermont means relying on root vegetables in the winter. Sitting at a long, fireside table in the Tillerman's parlor on a snowy morning, Wright and Kirmse talked about adapting - or readapting - to Vermont's seasonal rhythms.
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