Benjy Adler, founding owner of the Skinny Pancake, elaborated on last week’s public announcement that the restaurant group has closed its Stowe location at least through the winter and spring. When it opened in July 2020 at 454 Mountain Road, the 60-seat restaurant was the 10th location of the crêperie, which started in 2003 as a food cart on Burlington’s Church Street. Adler, 44, said he hopes to reopen next summer but might also consider leasing or selling the property to another operator.
The closure leaves Skinny Pancake with 10 restaurants or kiosks: seven Vermont locations, including three in the Burlington Airport; a pair in Massachusetts; and one in Albany, N.Y. Adler said he is working on a possible second Albany location.
In a post on the Skinny Pancake’s website, Adler explained that the group struggled to consistently staff the location. He elaborated in a phone interview that his regional manager had essentially become a full-time line cook in Stowe, where Adler himself worked the line at least 20 days this year.
“If I did not cook, we would not have been able to stay open,” he said. “All of those really important resources that we want to pour into other outlets to help them prosper were just getting sucked dry.”
Adler attributed the staffing shortage partly to lack of local housing. “It was really common for people to be driving an hour to Stowe to work,” he said. Across the four Vermont counties where Skinny Pancake operates, he believes the affordable housing crisis is most extreme in the Lamoille County town.
In addition, Adler said, the area is especially competitive for wages, and business is more intensely seasonal there than at any other location. With starting pay of $22 to $25 per hour, Stowe cooks were among the highest-paid cooks in the company, he said.
Adler saw the pay inequity between kitchen and tipped front-of-house staff as another fundamental problem. “If and when we reopen,” he said, he aims to restructure hourly pay rates and institute tip pooling.
“Staffing in Stowe is unlike any other town that we have operated in,” Adler added. In fact, “Staffing in Vermont is unlike any other state we’ve operated in.” In his view, “Vermont has a unique problem compared to New York and Massachusetts … If we want to have a tourist economy, if we want to have a flourishing food-service economy, we need to address our labor shortage, which does tie back to housing and cost of living.”
This article appears in Nov 5-11 2025.
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