When Woodbelly first started cooking up wood-fired pizzas in 2008, the business was freewheeling — and not just because its oven-on-a-trailer could be driven to any venue that requested it.
In those days, the pizza makers lived in tents on a farm, grew vegetables, mixed dough and served up pies at Vermont farmers markets. When a customer pointed to a slice and asked what was on it, the answer was usually a shrug and the word “vegetables.” It wasn’t because staff were contrarian, exactly (although cheekiness was practically a hiring requirement). The array of seasonal and local toppings was so vast — and the business ethos so focused on creativity — that by the time a pizza was cooked, sliced and served, not even the maker could recall what was perched atop the cheese.
“There was a lot of excitement and energy,” recalled cofounder Jonah Bourne, 40, of Cabot. “There was a lot of talk of vision, but there wasn’t a clear vision. We just wanted to work together and do something that was meaningful and not shitty for the planet.”
Nearly two decades later, a new vision has come into focus. Woodbelly’s flavorful sourdough, made with organic flour milled by Red Hen Baking, is still mixed by hand in a wooden trough, but nearly everything else has changed: ownership, business structure, location and vibe. With a breakfast and lunch café that opened in May at Camp Meade in Middlesex, two new business partners are serving up consistency.
“It’s gone from chaos into systems,” said chef and co-owner Frederick MacKenzie, 56, of Barre. “I have nothing but love for the people who ran it prior, but they weren’t restaurant people.”
MacKenzie, by contrast, landed his first cooking job — at the long-lost Lickety Split restaurant and ice cream shop in Plainfield — in 1984. As of late summer 2024, he’s one of just two Woodbelly owners, along with operations and finance manager Eric Andersen, 46, of East Montpelier (aka the “money chef”), who acquired an ownership stake a year prior.
It’s gone from chaos into systems.
Frederick MacKenzie
At that time, the business was located on Barre Street in Montpelier and consisted of a catering operation and commissary kitchen, which is still operational, plus a restaurant that had been somewhat sporadic since the 2023 Montpelier flood and had closed in July 2025. The Middlesex spot, which Red Hen vacated when it moved its eatery to Montpelier, marks the comeback of Woodbelly’s restaurant.
There, an outdoor pizza oven fires up Wednesday through Sunday, while the creemee window and café serve daily. A menu of sandwiches, salads and sides is crafted by another key player in Woodbelly’s transformation: chef Bill Jenkerson, 43, of Moretown, an alum of local pizza restaurants including American Flatbread and the Blue Stone. Later this year, after building a wood-burning oven indoors, the owners plan to add dinner dishes, ranging from burgers and fries to housemade pastas and roasted broccolini with a squeeze of lemon.
MacKenzie began at Woodbelly around five years ago, when it was a somewhat chaotic Montpelier-based worker-owned cooperative. To take care of the team, provide consistency for customers and maintain his own sanity, MacKenzie now strives to ensure that the dishes on the menu look and taste the same no matter who makes them. The Yoga Mama pizza ($17 for a 12-inch; $31 for an 18-inch) always features pesto, goat cheese and garlic confit. The Egg Tu, Brute breakfast sandwich ($9) always comes with the same measure of cola-braised chicken piled with kale Caesar salad and a fried egg.
For Bourne, a Morrisville native who cofounded Woodbelly with his lifelong best friend, Jeremiah Church, now a sought-after master mason, the infinite flexibility was a crucial part of the charm. “We wanted [our pizza] to be interesting and different and something you’d remember,” he said. A white pizza with peaches, Jasper Hill Farm’s Bayley Hazen Blue cheese, garlic and arugula? Definitely. Nettle purée as pizza sauce? Why not? Pepperoni? It wasn’t even on the menu.
Bourne and Church share a love of baking. They were working at a biodynamic farm in Bolinas, Calif., when they hatched the idea to sell focaccia topped with vegetables as a way to use up excess produce. “We made a bunch of money selling greasy bread,” Bourne said with a laugh.
Back in their Vermont hometown, with a crew of childhood friends and a few newer ones, they switched their focus from focaccia to pizza and started Woodbelly. The business became a regular at the Montpelier and Stowe farmers markets, and catering gigs began to flow in. In 2012, Bourne and his mother, Dawn Andrews, purchased a farm in Cabot to use as a base of operations. Provender Farm, as they dubbed it, also served as home for numerous Woodbelly staffers. The crew would farm five days a week, truck already-lit ovens to markets on weekend mornings, and show up at weddings or festivals in the evenings.
Sometimes, if it was hot, dozens of rounds of dough would overproof. More often, an exhausted staffer would forget to pack salt, or tongs, or pizza sauce. Well-worn trucks were known to break down during late-night post-catering drives. Once, a propane torch was accidentally left in the kindling inside a mobile oven parked on a Montpelier street. When an unsuspecting helper lit the fuel, a small explosion ensued.
“There are brilliant things that come from the chaos and disruption and the swirling and mixing of things,” Bourne mused, “and then you get all of the consequences of that.”
The new Woodbelly is also ambitious, but the current owners said they have a firm handle on smoothing out the daily operations. By homing in on consistency and being conscientious about ingredients, Andersen and MacKenzie boasted that they have been able to raise their starting hourly wage to $23 and cut pizza prices: On average, despite rising ingredient costs, whole pies ($16 to $22 for a 12-inch; $27 to $31 for an 18-inch) are around $5 cheaper than they were at their peak in Montpelier.
Chef Jenkerson is also focused on creating and executing a breakfast and lunch menu that maintains “the ethics of supporting local farms and dairies without creating sticker shock for our customers,” he explained. And, while Woodbelly is still sharing some space with Red Hen’s production kitchen, which will soon move to a new location just down the road, he’s doing it with minimal equipment: “a small flat top, a dual induction burner and a temperamental convection oven.”
Nevertheless, by being clever about using some of the same toppings on pizzas as well as sandwiches, the menu manages to be sizable and diverse. At one count, it included 10 breakfast sandwiches ($4 to $9), plus sides such as crispy home fries ($3) and housemade maple breakfast sausages ($4). Lunchtime sandwiches and wraps include the Hip to the Craft ($14), with black bean patties from Vermont Bean Crafters, cheddar, pickled red onion and “hipster” mayo; and the Dirty Bird ($14), spicy blackened chicken with pickled jalapeños and zingy aioli.
And then there are the pizzas. Cooked in the restaurant’s backyard wood-fired oven, pies arrive with ample toppings, lightly browned cheese and bubbled, flame-licked crusts. The Plant Power ($17 to $27), with romesco sauce, mushrooms, artichokes and tempeh sausage, recalls a Woodbelly pizza of the past. The Meatlunker ($17 to $31), on the other hand, with its combo of sausage, bacon, mozzarella and the once-verboten pepperoni, better resembles a pie from a familiar Italian American pizzeria.
Passion for pizza was requisite for MacKenzie and Andersen to take over ownership of Woodbelly, but there was more to it than that, they said.
“I don’t want to be cliché,” MacKenzie explained, “but it’s always been about community for me.” He loves seeing drop-in customers turn into regulars. He’s also moved “when food tells a story,” he said, something he attributes to partnerships with local farms, such as Small Axe Farm in Barnet, Dog River Farm in Berlin and 1000 Stone Farm in Brookfield.
As Jenkerson put it, “What I love most is making food that makes people happy — tapping into nostalgic flavors to create cuisine that feels familiar but is infused with genuine heart.”
Although his tactics were different, all of this resonates with Bourne, who was involved with the business — often as owner and sometimes as veggie grower, bartender, builder, oven-and-truck driver, and wood-fuel provider — until fall 2024. (He’s currently in talks with MacKenzie and Andersen about helping to build their new indoor pizza oven.)
Bourne said the goal was always to bring people together over every blissful, blistered bite. Youthful energy, general verve and naïveté allowed him and his friends to launch Woodbelly and let it evolve as a punky, farm-forward company at which no two pizzas were the same. Nevertheless, he recognizes that the mission benefits from the current, more methodical means.
“Woodbelly is a mantle that can be taken up by whomever wants it,” Bourne said. “Fred and Eric now have it. I leave it in their hands to make it bigger and better.” ➆
Disclosure: The author of this story was part of the Woodbelly cooperative from 2013 to 2016.
The original print version of this article was headlined “All Fired Up | With a fresh vision, new owners bring breakfast, lunch and pizza to Woodbelly’s Middlesex café”
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