Sugar House Hotel food and beverage director Jacob Ennis in the Moss Café + Bar Credit: Melissa Pasanen

The 115-room Sugar House Hotel slated to open on October 21 at 111 Winooski Falls Way in Winooski will host two eating and drinking destinations open to the public — and offer complimentary welcome maple creemees for guests — according to food and beverage director Jacob Ennis.

In the lobby, Moss Café + Bar will serve espresso drinks, pastries, and sandwiches and salads from a grab-and-go cooler during the day; in the evening, the menu will include wine, beer and cocktails with small bites. On the eighth floor, the 75-seat Treetops restaurant will serve breakfast and dinner. Forty outside seats and a separate private-event space provide expansive views of the neighboring 100-acre nature preserve bordering the Winooski River.

The hotel, which is part of Marriott Bonvoy’s Tribute Portfolio, is a partnership between Vermont’s Nedde Real Estate and national hospitality firm Lodging Capital Partners. It is being touted as the first all-electric property for Marriott International, and Ennis said the owners are hoping to receive Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum certification, the highest rating awarded by the U.S. Green Building Council.

Creemees are among many Vermont touches at the new hotel, which boasts light fixtures by Burlington’s AO Glass, locally crafted woodwork, rooms named for real sugarhouses around the state and the Nedde family’s own syrup in bottles behind the registration desk.

Sugar House Hotel’s eighth-floor restaurant, Treetops Credit: Melissa Pasanen

The restaurant menus will similarly emphasize local, Ennis, 42, said. The New York native moved to Vermont in 2019 to become executive chef at Warren’s Pitcher Inn after working at several other luxury Relais & Châteaux properties around the U.S. He left for the opportunity at Sugar House Hotel and has since hired a team including executive chef Steve Zeno, formerly of Montpelier’s Capitol Plaza Hotel, and sous chef Sean Richards, who owned Burlington’s Queen City Café.

Their menu will lean classic, Ennis said. Breakfast offerings will include buttermilk pancakes, breakfast sandwiches, and maple granola with Larson Farm & Creamery yogurt from Wells. Dinner will range from starters, such as maple-glazed meatballs or a warm beet salad with goat cheese, to a cider-brined pork chop or grain-and-kale-stuffed squash.

Melissa Pasanen is a Seven Days staff writer and the food and drink assignment editor. In 2022, she won first place for national food writing from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia and in 2024, she took second. Melissa joined Seven Days full time in 2020, 18 years after the paper published her first (and last, for a very long time) freelance story on church suppers. During the intervening years, she wrote — mostly about food, drink and agriculture — for outlets ranging from the Burlington...