One recent Thursday lunch hour at the Stone Soup hot bar, I was in line behind a woman filling her plate when she paused suddenly and doubled back for a takeout container. As she scooped about half a dozen deeply caramelized chicken wings into a plastic tub, she said, “My 8-year-old daughter loves them — even though they’re a little spicy.”
Another devoted fan, about 30 years older, had alerted me to what he called “the best wings ever” at the downtown Burlington fixture officially named Zabby & Elf’s Stone Soup. Little did I know that the wings owe their exceptional character to another exceptional character in Burlington’s historic culinary firmament: Five Spice Café co-owner Jerry Weinberg, who died in 2019.
But first things first: Yes, the wings — labeled simply “Misty Knoll Chicken Wings” for the New Haven poultry farm where they are raised — are special. With sticky skin bronzed to the edge of burnt sugar and fall-off-the-bone tender meat, the wings read sweetly tangy at first, partly from molasses in the recipe, before they perform a stealth flip into mildly tingling heat, thanks to sambal chile sauce and abundant black pepper.
“No one owns a recipe. I’ll give mine away freely, and I’ll also take your ideas.”
Tim Elliott
Like everything else on the Stone Soup bar, they are $16 per pound. If you pile your plate with just a pound of wings, you’d get about 12 to 13, Stone Soup co-owner Tim Elliott said.
When queried about the secret to the wings, Elliott, 57, immediately noted that he’s adamantly opposed to secrets in the kitchen. A large wooden box behind the Stone Soup counter holds all the restaurant’s recipes on laminated cards, and anyone who asks can snap a photo. Over his long cooking career, Elliott has developed the philosophy that “no one owns a recipe,” he said. “I’ll give mine away freely, and I’ll also take your ideas.”
The unwitting source of the wing recipe had a very different perspective.
From 1993 to 1997, Elliott worked at the pan-Asian Five Spice Café on lower Church Street for Weinberg and Weinberg’s ex-wife, the late Ginger Hobbs, who owned it from its 1985 launch until they sold it in late 2006. Shortly thereafter, a fire destroyed the building. The restaurant never reopened, leaving devoted fans bereft of Evil Jungle Prince curry, Indonesian wings and Five Spice fritters.
When cooking at Five Spice, Elliott developed a huge respect for Weinberg and the work he put into developing his recipes, he said. The young cook did not have quite as much respect for his boss’ “heavy threats to not steal them.”
Elliott secretly copied down some of his favorites, including the “Indo” sauce for the wings. He had no specific plans for them at the time but didn’t want the recipes to be lost. “It was just like, This is too good,” Elliott said. “I just had to.”
The recipes sat, unused, in notebooks for close to a decade after Elliott and business partner Avery Rifkin opened Stone Soup in 1997. “In desperation for variety,” he said, he remembered the Five Spice recipes and decided to dust them off.
Elliott also vividly remembered how protective Weinberg was of his recipes. Hobbs and the couple’s daughter, Cheryl Carmi, were Stone Soup regulars, and Elliott recalled hiding in the dish area “terrified” about their reaction the first time the pair came in when the Five Spice Hunan noodles and the wings were on the menu.
“But they welcomed it with open arms,” he said with relief. “They were just really glad — glad to eat them, so glad that somebody else was making them.”
The wings quickly went from an occasional special to a hot-bar staple. Stone Soup now sells about 1,000 a week.
Elliott credits his foresight (and disregard for authority) for saving the recipe, which he calls “ingenious” for its technique of puréeing a gallon of raw onions with an equal amount of oil as the sauce base. (The recipe is nothing like the one labeled Indonesian Wings on the blog Five Spice Café: Recipes From the Vault. “As far as I know, my dad only once knowingly gave out an accurate recipe,” Carmi noted dryly.)
Misty Knoll Farms also gets credit, Elliott said, as does Rifkin. He is “the tender of the wings,” who cooks them daily, carefully stirring the pans at least four times during their 80-minute bake.
Elliott has no regrets about stealing the recipe, though he knows it may entail a “very uncomfortable meeting with Jerry Weinberg in the afterlife,” he added, only half joking. “I really loved that man, and if I had to face him on this, I would crumble a little bit. I feel bad because I know how he felt.”
Carmi believes it will be OK.
“I like to think that, in whatever atheist-Marxist-Jewish afterlife where my dad is hanging out,” she said, “there’s a reasonably curmudgeonly amount of gratitude and happiness that delicious food is still being served up and there are still folks who remember the Spice.” ➆
“One Dish” is a series that samples a single menu item — new, classic or fleeting — at a Vermont restaurant or other food venue. Know of a great plate we should feature? Drop us a line: food@sevendaysvt.com.
Zabby & Elf’s Stone Soup, 211 College St., Burlington, 862-7616, stonesoupvt.com
The original print version of this article was headlined “Spread Those Wings | Stone Soup’s sweet-and-spicy chicken wings owe a debt to another legendary Burlington restaurant”
This article appears in Dec 3-9 2025.
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