Winter is usually quiet for Vermont’s food truck and wedding venue operators. After a jam-packed run from Memorial Day through Labor Day, the offseason is a time of planning, updating and, hopefully, rest.
But this year is different for Solomon Bayer-Pacht, cofounder of Farmers & Foragers food truck. Last spring, he and a group of investors purchased the venue space at Charlotte’s Old Lantern Inn & Barn from Lisa and Roland Gaujac (who retained the inn and continue to operate it). Now, neither of his seasonal businesses is resting.
This month, Bayer-Pacht, 36, and his team officially launched regular Wednesday dinner service and Saturday brunch as Farmers & Foragers Hillside in Charlotte. The weekly meals are part of Bayer-Pacht’s plans to make the most of the newly rechristened Old Lantern Events Barn with year-round community offerings that go beyond weddings and other private events.
Open to the public, both dinner and brunch feature locally sourced dishes that Farmers & Foragers regulars will recognize from its summer residency on the Burlington waterfront, with cold-weather updates from head chef Ryan Brigante. The full bar — a rarity in Charlotte — is reason enough to stop by, especially on Saturdays when TVs around the lounge play Premier League soccer matches.
Bayer-Pacht and his partner, Lauren Johnson, founded the Farmers & Foragers food truck in 2015. Since 2020, the truck has been parked in its seasonal Dockside location at Burlington Harbor Marina from late May through September. Those Adirondack views across Lake Champlain are tough to beat, but the season is short.
Now, the Old Lantern fills the food truck’s off-season void and serves as Farmers & Foragers’ commercial kitchen and home base. The Hillside name nods to Barber Hill, which rises beside the parking lot, with a grassy section of Charlotte’s Village Loop Trail leading to its top.
I considered sledding down that hill on a recent Wednesday evening but headed into the sprawling red barn with my husband and 2-year-old son instead. The main entrance, on the building’s side, opens into a large ballroom. We followed a chalkboard sign to a smaller lounge in the back, which is the heart of Farmers & Foragers Hillside. There, we grabbed chairs at one of the communal tables before ordering at the bar.
Regulars will know it’s Farmers & Foragers, but with entrées that flex, if you’re feeling fancy.
We chose a roasted artichoke flatbread ($15) to share, and I opted for a Japanese eggplant sandwich ($17). My husband went for the Hillside burger ($19) — a new, rotating offering, served that night with tomato-bacon jam and Cabot Creamery cheddar. Drinks in hand — an All Eyez on Me cocktail ($17) for me and a Frost Beer Works Little Lush IPA ($8) for him — we surveyed the games.
Pool and darts are a little risky with a toddler, but tossing beanbags at the Boston Bruins-themed cornhole setup in the ballroom was a great way to tire him out while we waited.
Back in the lounge, other diners were spread around the spacious 10-top tables. Two groups soon moved closer together to chat over their blackened shrimp po’boys and bowls of vegetarian brodo.
Our appetizer soon arrived, and we took our seats by the fairy light-wrapped tree that seems to grow out of the floor in the middle of the room. The fluffy flatbread was loaded with chunks of roasted artichoke, sweet caramelized onions, dollops of goat cheese and a drizzle of honey.
Brigante, 34, joined Farmers & Foragers in May. The chef has been in kitchens since he was 15, first at the original Junior’s Italian in Colchester, then at the now-closed Silver Palace in South Burlington, then back to Junior’s Winooski, where he became a co-owner in January 2023. With business slow due to construction on Winooski’s Main Street, “I needed a change,” Brigante said.
“I was a little skeptical, because it was on a food truck and I’m so used to being in a kitchen,” he continued. “But the first day there, just the vibe of the place and the view, I knew I made the right call.”
This winter, Brigante’s pulling from his varied Italian and pan-Asian cooking backgrounds for a constantly changing menu “to keep people coming week to week,” he said.
My Japanese eggplant sandwich was an excellent example, full of punchy flavors from Sriracha mayo and housemade pickles made with ginger, garlic, soy and rice wine vinegar. Brigante par-baked the long slices of eggplant with a soy-ginger glaze, he said, then seared them on the flattop grill to order, getting a nice brown crisp. He topped the whole thing with a juicy Napa cabbage slaw.
Other offerings befitting the chef’s background might include pasta dishes, rice bowls with ahi tuna, or the triumphant return of Farmers & Foragers’ pork belly bánh mì, depending on the night.
That bánh mì was a popular item for the two years the food truck offered brunch, Bayer-Pacht said. But it was hard to execute alongside the sheer volume of lobster rolls and cheesesteaks the truck serves at dinnertime.
“People asked for it for years,” Bayer-Pacht said. “It’s something we enjoy making and that we have the suppliers for. Now it’s back.”
The venue’s on-site kitchen removes some headaches that come with cramped food truck life. But it doesn’t have a fryer, so the truck still needs to park outside when French fries are on the menu. Since that’s a cold proposition in January, oven-roasted red potatoes ($6) replace fries most nights.
The Vermont cheesesteak, a Farmers & Foragers staple, is another item that requires the food truck’s specific setup. The solution is a slightly different steak sandwich ($29): a marinated and grilled local fillet with sharp provolone cheese, caramelized onions and chimichurri.
The menu is familiar enough that summer regulars will know it’s Farmers & Foragers, but with entrées that flex, if you’re feeling fancy. Last week, those included beef Wellington ($35); the week before, filet mignon saltimbocca ($31) was on the menu.
Brigante dreams of adding a smoker and, this summer, cranking up the full-size pizza oven out back. So far, the new owners’ tweaks to the space have been minimal: refinished floors, some new kitchen equipment. The Old Lantern has great bones, Bayer-Pacht said, and he wants to enhance its functionality without changing its rustic character.
The Hinesburg native has a long history with the Old Lantern. He played in a concert there in eighth grade, he recalled, and his sister was the first to get married at the venue when the Gaujacs opened their adjacent Old Lantern Inn in 2012.
“I’ve known Sol since he was super young,” Lisa Gaujac told Seven Days last spring when the sale was announced. “I know he’s going to carry on the legacy of this place and not make it something it’s not.”
The Old Lantern has been an event space since the 1960s, with storied runs as a dance hall and live music venue in its earlier years. That history, which predated Charlotte’s town zoning, helped the Gaujacs win a lengthy legal battle over noise with the property’s neighbors in 2018.
Bayer-Pacht’s plans for weekly live music — both indoors and out — are a throwback to the days when touring acts such as Taj Mahal, Little Feat and Los Lobos took the low wooden stage. A full slate of Friday-night music is likely to start in February, he said. The 750-person-capacity barn currently hosts line dancing every other Thursday and will kick off almost-monthly, full-moon dance parties with the Snow Moon on Sunday, February 1.
The Wednesday and Saturday meal schedule allows Bayer-Pacht to keep the venue free for rentals during popular times, he explained. Weddings and private events will continue to be an important part of the Old Lantern’s business model.
Word had already gotten out about brunch when I arrived for the first one with my family, a friend and his daughter on Saturday, January 10. Groups once again spread around the lounge, some watching Manchester City’s 10-1 FA Cup routing of Exeter City, others playing pool between bites of eggs Benedict.
I ordered the nonalcoholic version of the same cocktail I’d had a few days before, which is called a Holiday Shrub ($8) without the Beefeater gin. The tart turmeric-rosemary shrub with carrot juice and soda water was complex enough that I didn’t slug it back like a glass of orange juice. We all got coffee ($4), too, and refilled regularly from the self-serve carafes.
As a personal rule, I order biscuits & gravy whenever I see it. The Farmers & Foragers Hillside version ($15) hit all the right notes, with a fluffy housemade biscuit valiantly holding up rich sausage gravy despite being completely smothered. I appreciated a sweet touch of local maple syrup and fresh sage on top, too.
Around the table, the toddlers were happy with their English muffins. My husband liked his, too, the foundation of a breakfast sandwich ($14) with thick-cut bacon and a drippy over-easy egg. I caught only a glimpse of a friend’s corned-beef hash ($20) before it was gone. We lingered over our meals, watching the game even though neither is our team. The sunlight spilling into the barn made it too cozy to leave on a cold day.
The Old Lantern has been a lot of things to a lot of people over the years, from a place to catch a show to the start of happy marriages. It’s still all that, of course. But the barn’s new restaurant encourages spontaneous stops, and I’m glad it’ll be there year-round with bánh mì and brunch.
Farmers & Foragers Hillside at the Old Lantern Events Barn, 3260 Greenbush Rd., Charlotte, 802-425-2120, oldlantern.com.
The original print version of this article was headlined “The Lantern’s Lit | Farmers & Foragers settles into its winter home in Charlotte with weekly dinner and brunch”
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