One gooey reason motivated many of the guests at the recent Adventure Dinner Clubhouse Fondue Feast to plunk down $82.50 in advance for the ticketed dinner in Colchester.
“I solely showed up for the cheese,” said Caitlyn Bain, 27, of Essex.
“It was his birthday, and he loves cheese,” Essex resident Kat Yun, 36, said of her dining companion, Andy Hagyari, 48, who lives in Williston.
“In the middle of January, who doesn’t love fondue?” asked Matt Kasvinsky, 56, of South Duxbury, clearly posing a rhetorical question.
As their 49 fellow diners trickled into the Clubhouse for the single-seating, communal dinner, Kasvinsky and his wife, Heather, sat in the ebony-toned library under a wall of shelves filled with vintage cookbooks and other collectibles. Matt sipped an espresso martini ($14) from the busy cash bar while Heather enjoyed a dirty martini ($15) and predinner snacks.
“This is super fun,” Heather, 47, said. “There’s cheese balls!”
Heather, a self-identified foodie, said she had “obsessively” followed Adventure Dinner on social media for several years but this was the first event the couple had attended. She was enticed by the company’s Instagram feed, which has featured such events as a steakhouse barn dinner on a grass-fed cattle farm in Charlotte and a two-mile leaf-peeping trek and progressive dinner of fire-cooked dishes at Rupert’s Merck Forest & Farmland Center.
Such offerings seemed a little too costly and involved for the couple, who have two sons, Heather said. The Fondue Feast felt more affordable and approachable, although it was still a special-occasion outing for the Kasvinskys, who were celebrating their 18th anniversary.
Five years ago, Adventure Dinner owner Sas Stewart spun off her events and catering business from Stonecutter Spirits, the Middlebury craft distillery that she and her ex-husband founded in 2013 and sold in 2020. Since then, most of her public offerings have involved themed, multicourse destination dinners with full beverage pairings and price tags of close to $200 per person.
The company’s 2024 move into its first permanent headquarters has permitted Stewart and her team to expand their calendar by hosting more frequent, less expensive ticketed events and à la carte pop-ups at the two-story Adventure Dinner Clubhouse at 70 Roosevelt Highway. After major renovations and a busy summer and fall on the road, they threw their first Clubhouse events in October — Stewart’s favorite “spooky season.”
Beyond the practical advantages of having their own building, the move marks a milestone for the previously nomadic company and its 41-year-old founder. “It feels like coming home,” Stewart said.
She started Adventure Dinner by hosting annual events with guest chefs and the help of friends lugging tables. The business now supports six employees, including a full-time executive chef, Eric Hodet, and an operations manager — aka “party captain” — Lauren Hayes. Dozens more part-timers help run 100-plus events a year, roughly half of which are open to the public. The Adventure Dinner email newsletter goes to about 7,500 people.
One of the two mid-January events I attended, the ticketed fondue dinner, showcased the well-oiled machine that Adventure Dinner has built. A more impromptu pop-up the next night surprised the team with its popularity and tested its capacity, providing lessons for future similar events. Both indicated that people are happy to have a fun, immersive new venue to escape into.
Adventure Dinner’s low-profile home, tucked beside Vermont Bagel, boasts a large commercial kitchen and three rooms that, combined, can host 75 guests at once. The building is probably best known to longtime locals as the original Junior’s Italian, though its most recent tenant, bevo catering, operated there for 13 years. Bevo still uses part of the building while in the process of relocating to Stine Orchard in Monkton.
Guests enter through the library, which is anchored by the bar and serves as a welcome area. Stewart, a Michigan native who earned a master’s in sustainable planning and development from New York City’s Pratt Institute, thinks a lot about how people interact with spaces and how to design them for richer interactions and connection.
“I wanted it to be somewhere when you walk through the doors, you are transported to someplace else.” Sas Stewart
Stewart said her graduate studies taught her things such as how to calculate the weight of a roof garden with soil and plants in a rainstorm, but what really interested her was “how do I get people to participate in the roof garden?”
She described the library’s décor as “dark academia,” which she called “my heart and soul.” In January, the two-floor space was still bedazzled with holiday sparkle and frosted pine trees. Communal tables held candelabras and vintage lamps throwing soft light.
“I wanted it to be somewhere when you walk through the doors, you are transported to someplace else,” Stewart said.
Fondue was a natural fit for Adventure Dinner’s Cozy + Candlelit series, which also includes an upcoming sold-out ramen night, a five-course Italian dinner, another almost sold-out fondue night and a pi(e) night on March 14, or Pi Day. All are priced at $82.50 per person, including taxes but not drinks or tip.
For that amount, fondue night guests got cocktail hour nibbles and a first seated course of kale and cabbage salad satisfyingly crunchy with apple, cucumber, celery and savory-sweet seeded granola under a charred scallion dressing. The salad was followed by bottomless pots of velvety Jasper Hill Farm cheese fondue, accompanied by platters loaded with charred broccoli florets, roasted delicata squash rings and Brussels sprouts, fingerling potatoes, seared local mushrooms, focaccia cubes, tiny tart pickles, apple chunks, and marinated steak tips.
The cash bar offered a small selection of beer and wine and a compelling list of cocktails, including equally good nonalcoholic choices, such as the Island Spritz made with an NA amaro and cinnamon-passion fruit syrup ($11).
At the group tables, to which guests were assigned randomly upon arrival, food was served family-style, and conversation flowed as smoothly as the fondue. Servers circulated, replenishing platters and taking drink orders.
The evening wrapped up with a sweet finale of chocolate-dipped pineapple presented theatrically on skewers stabbed into purple cabbages, in the library where everything had started.
Teresa and Robert Davis of North Ferrisburgh said they loved the whole experience, which they had booked with a gift certificate. “Through this little tiny entrance, the magic is inside,” said Teresa, 62, adding that the evening felt far more special than a good meal out.
Their fellow diners represented a mix of ages and backgrounds. “Our table was vibing,” Teresa said.
Among the Davises’ tablemates was 27-year-old Bain of Essex, who had joked that she came just for the cheese. More than delighted with her first Adventure Dinner, she said she already planned to attend another.
While the Fondue Feast went smoothly, the Tinis & Weenies Pop-Up that took place the following night was a little rockier.
One of a few casual, non-ticketed happenings that Adventure Dinner hosts at the Clubhouse, the pop-up promised a menu of martinis (from $15) plus nonalcoholic versions (from $8); baskets of fries (from $6); and kale salad with dried cranberries and pepita brittle ($12). The roster of weenies ranged from a classic hot dog topped with sauerkraut and Russian dressing ($8) to one garnished with Jamaican goat curry and charred scallions ($10).
RSVPs were requested but not required, and Stewart was uncertain how many people would venture out for fancy hot dogs and drinks on a frigid January night, she said before the event. Based on a similar December pop-up, the team anticipated selling about 100 franks, although RSVPs had reached almost that number by the morning of the event.
At 6:30 p.m., the line to order at the bar snaked across the entryway, and people circled, looking for free seats. Customers gobbled through the 100 hot dogs before the night was half over, so Stewart dispatched a team member to buy more, advising customers that they could order only drinks, salad and fries in the meantime. The food and drink runners were in the weeds. Those guests who chose to wait it out seemed happy to be there, but at least one table had to wait for the hot dog restock after another hungry crew mistakenly claimed its order.
“We kind of reached a level we hadn’t before,” Stewart said ruefully a few days later, “a level that I was like, Oh, my God, I’m afraid.”
The point-of-sale system Adventure Dinner uses does not tally guests, but Stewart estimated that over the course of the four-hour event, the count reached 125 to 150.
Stewart is no stranger to unexpected complications during events on the road, which involve the schlepping of ingredients, culinary equipment, tables, chairs and tablewares, not to mention the variables of cooking in different venues. But events at the new home base were supposed to be simpler to manage — one reason they can cost less than the far-flung, grander adventures.
As Adventure Dinner executive chef Hodet, 33, likes to say, “We’re more than happy to load up the truck, but we’re happier not to.”
Stewart was gratified that so many people were excited for Tinis & Weenies, she said, and the team learned a lot from the experience. For two Love Bar pop-ups planned for February 6 and 8, they will schedule more staff and take other measures to ease the flow of guests and orders.
“If we’re lucky enough to have as many people come out again, then we’ll be ready,” Stewart said.
For now, she’s reluctant to require or cap RSVPs for this kind of spur-of-the-moment event, which she hopes will introduce more people to Adventure Dinner.
“I want it to be like, ‘Just come by and see what we do here,'” Stewart said.
Adventure Dinner Clubhouse, 70 Roosevelt Hwy., Colchester. Find pop-up info on Instagram (@adventuredinner) or sign up for the newsletter at adventuredinner.com.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Spirit of Adventure | In its new Colchester clubhouse, Sas Stewart’s event and catering business invites more people to the party”
This article appears in Jan 29 – Feb 4, 2025.
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