Nobody ever said the restaurant industry, with its long hours and low pay, is hard to get into. Mastering the skills of a chef and moving up through the ranks in the kitchen — that’s a different matter. An even dice or chiffonade and a killer palate can only take a young cook so far without the guidance of a supportive teacher.
For decades, Vermonters found that support at the New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier. Founded in 1980, NECI had nearly 800 students at its peak, with a satellite campus in Essex and a restaurant on Church Street in Burlington. Its graduates lead dozens of kitchens around the state.
But NECI’s final class of just five students graduated in April 2021, and the school closed. In its absence, where will the next generation of creative, professional Vermont chefs come from?
Some will still go to culinary school, heading out of state to Culinary Institute of America or Johnson & Wales University. For others, Vermont’s 14 high school culinary programs will provide basic skills to get them started. But for many, the answer will be found in Vermont restaurant kitchens, learning on the job.
“You’ve just got to keep learning.” Hervé Mahé
Restaurant kitchens, after all, are built for training and moving up. The hierarchy has been clearly outlined since Auguste Escoffier codified his brigade de cuisine in 1903: Start as a dishwasher or a lowly apprentice with nothing but thyme, picking tiny leaves for hours a day. Then move up to chef de partie, responsible for a station on the line, whether grill, pastry or the cold food of garde-manger. Leadership comes with the steps to sous chef and chef de cuisine.
“You’ve just got to keep learning,” said Hervé Mahé, 57, chef-owner of Bistro de Margot in Burlington.
What’s changed about that method, especially in recent years, is its tone. To attract and retain good staff, an executive chef — at the top of the hierarchy with eyes on everything and rarely a knife in hand — is likely to swap the traditional militaristic screaming for something that looks more like mentorship. Nurturing the next generation is both good business and the right thing to do.
Mahé should know: He’s French and trained in Escoffier’s French system. After graduating from the prestigious Ferrandi École Supérieure de Cuisine Française in Paris, he worked in several of that country’s Michelin-starred restaurants and hotel kitchens. Years and brigade ranks later, he was an instructor at NECI starting in 2006 and finally executive sous-chef of its Montpelier campus.
Mahé thinks a culinary school degree still has value, especially for the exposure it provides to the history, culture and business of restaurants. But his small team at Bistro de Margot — just three in the kitchen this spring, including him — represents the full range of education backgrounds.
His chef de cuisine, Stefan Pellman, came to the restaurant from British Columbia last November with a culinary degree and 20 years of experience. But Ian Michaels, a recent University of Vermont business school graduate, had only worked at sandwich spots before starting at Mahé’s fine-dining restaurant two years ago. Michaels learned how to butcher a duck and cook classic French dishes such as pan-seared veal sweetbreads and chocolate mousse working alongside Mahé.
“He came here super open-minded, passionate,” Mahé said of Michaels. “That’s what you need to have. If you’re not passionate in this line of work, it’s way harder.”
This summer, Mahé helped Michaels land an internship at La Meunière in Lyon, where he’ll work under Mahé’s old friend Olivier Canal. When Michaels comes back from France, the chef will encourage his protégé to find somewhere else to work.
“He has his Bistro de Margot experience, and that’s good experience,” Mahé said. “But now he needs to go learn from someone else.”
If, in a few years, Michaels wants to return, Mahé said he would welcome his call. Michaels might have picked up a thing or two to teach his mentor by then.
Mahé’s supportive adaptation of the French model is one of many ways mentorship looks in Vermont’s restaurant kitchens. Another example: Tyler Comeau and Henry Long became business partners with their former high school culinary teacher, Adam Monette. Education is central to their soon-to-open restaurant in St. Albans, and not just because that’s how they found each other.
In another high school program, at Middlebury’s Patricia A. Hannaford Career Center, mentoring includes helping high school students figure out if culinary school, or the restaurant industry in general, is right for them.
Nick Frank, Avery Buck and Micah Tavelli, three of Burlington’s highest-profile chefs, credit a good kitchen culture — where mentors work both above you and alongside you — for their respective culinary achievements. Even at the top of the brigade, they’re pushing each other to keep learning.
Student-Teacher Ratio
Next month, Monette, Comeau and Long will open Café Monette at 97 North Main Street in St. Albans. It’ll be a French brasserie but done in a Vermont way, with a little bit of everything to suit their Franklin County community. Through windows into the kitchen and prep area, diners will be able to watch the chefs making marmalade and laminated pastries for brunch or breaking down primal cuts of meat and extruding pasta for dinner.
A couple of days after the gas was turned on in May, Monette, Comeau and Long were in the kitchen playing around with pâté and pickles and cooking a dish with potato purée and two sausage variations. They debated the results: a little lemon zest here; more salt on the pâté; double the garlic in the Toulouse-style sausage. The ramp sausage, they agreed, tasted like the filling of a soup dumpling.
“Just to be clear, we haven’t bought plates yet,” Monette said, stabbing a piece of sausage with a plastic fork. “These are my grandmother’s.”
As they were testing recipes, writing menus and letting Long tinker with the natural wine list, they were also figuring out how to build coaching into the foundation of the restaurant. If they can re-create their own teacher-student relationships, they’ll be off to a good start.
Monette, 39, left his 13-year teaching job at Northwest Career & Technical Center in St. Albans at the end of this school year to jump full time into the restaurant that bears his name. All three men are culinary school grads: Monette and Comeau from NECI; Long from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. But Comeau and Long, both 27, might not be in the industry at all if Monette hadn’t been their first cooking teacher, expecting them to live up to high standards from the start.
“He’d do line check: face, nails, hair, uniform,” Long recalled of classes at the technical center. “Like the military. For 15- and 16-year-old boys, that was the shit. We were super proud about everything.”
On top of that, Monette showed them everything a culinary career could be, beyond just cooking on the line: teaching, working in chocolate or food media, farming. For a couple of kids obsessed with “Iron Chef” — it was the early 2010s, after all — Monette nailed the mix of being a serious pro and a supportive mentor.
He maintained the same approach throughout his time at the technical school. He could inspire students to want to learn how to cook, but he couldn’t hold the knives for them.
“It’s not Ghost,” Monette said with a laugh, referring to famous hands-on pottery scene in the 1990 Patrick Swayze/Demi Moore movie.
Not all of his students stuck with cooking or stayed in touch, but Long and Comeau did. Monette helped with Long’s Burlington-area catering biz, Good Grocery, when his former student needed an extra set of hands. And when Comeau got a call to compete on Food Network’s “Holiday Baking Championship” in 2021, he passed on his former teacher’s information instead.
“I told them I didn’t think I was ready, but I had the perfect guy,” Comeau said. He was right: Monette won.
Now, they’re stepping into first-time restaurant ownership together, as business partners. It was a conscious choice to do it in Franklin County, where all three are from, rather than Burlington. And if Café Monette is successful, it could be a boon for the dining scene in the northwest corner of the state, much as NECI in its heyday was for Montpelier.
“You’d see people in chef’s whites walking down the street and all these interactions around food and conviviality,” said Monette, who’s also a former NECI instructor. “Losing that, we lost a lot of momentum for food culture.”
Without NECI, Vermont would likely not have Café Provence in Brandon, Mirabelles Bakery in South Burlington or the Kitchen Table in Richmond — all founded by NECI instructors or attendees. It might have missed the robust farm-to-table movement, as the school played a role in founding the Vermont Fresh Network and championed chefs’ connections with local farms.
Monette feels an obligation to fill that gap by helping to train the next generation of Vermont cooks. Now leaders themselves, Comeau and Long have the same goal as they think about hiring and training their restaurant staff.
“Hopefully we’re as good as him one day,” Long said.
Monette quickly corrected him: “Better.”
Long said he’d like to create an official seal along the lines of Vermont Fresh Network’s Gold Barn distinction, which recognizes restaurants that meet strict local food purchasing guidelines. His seal would distinguish businesses that commit to hands-on staff training beyond the kitchen’s day-to-day tasks — or to start, an unofficial pledge restaurant leaders could sign.
He believes that would send a message to industry newcomers. Even after culinary school, Comeau said, it’s often up to the individual to go out and find the right opportunities. He himself did a lot of cold-calling.
It worked out for him, with jobs at the now-closed Red Barn Kitchen in Charlotte and Fancy’s in Burlington, where he found additional mentors in the chef-owners of those businesses, Matt Jennings and Paul Trombly, respectively.
“You have to find these individuals that are highly skilled, that are willing to teach, that are going to foster a good environment,” Comeau said. “Then you have to spend time there. That’s the unglamorous part.”
“The glamorous part is that you’re not spending $280 a day plus interest to blanch stock, like you would at culinary school,” Long added wryly. “You might even get paid $15 per hour.”
In 2014, Seven Days reported that NECI’s tuition for a 24-month associate’s degree was $73,520; a 39-month bachelor’s degree program in culinary arts cost $113,560. None of the Café Monette partners think that degree is necessary in today’s restaurant world, with its cost-to-opportunity ratio. You can learn a lot of the basics on YouTube, they said.
As with other trades, it’s more important to find a craftsman who’s spent years working “with their head and their hands,” Monette said.
The team is in the early stages of devising a formal training program through Académie Culinaire de France — the oldest professional chef organization in the world. Monette is a member of the group, which offers the opportunity to pair young cooks with vetted mentors. So far, figuring out how to fund the idea is the most complicated part; it involves setting up a franchise of the program in Vermont that can accept donations, which would go toward paying a promising cook’s expenses for six months in a New York or Paris restaurant. The mentors, such as Monette and now Long and Comeau, are eager to share their knowledge.
“That’s my mandate,” Monette said.
Café Monette needs to open first — permitting and final details have been slow going for the built-from-scratch restaurant. When the doors do open, the trio will have even more of Monette’s former students in the kitchen. They’ve already hired two.
100 Fingers
While Escoffier’s military-inspired brigade system has a long track record of training chefs, it has traditionally relied more on boot camp-like rigidity than encouragement. In many kitchens, “Yes, Chef,” is the expected reply to even the harshest criticism — that’s one thing the hit TV show “The Bear” gets right.
Hands-on culinary arts programs such as the one Monette taught at Northwest Career & Technical Center — and those at 13 other tech ed centers around the state — can give aspiring high school-age cooks a supportive start before they face anything like that.
“It’s like job placement but with guardrails,” Jill Huizenga said. “I can’t fire you.”
Huizenga, 34, is wrapping up her second year in charge of the culinary arts program at Middlebury’s Patricia A. Hannaford Career Center. The yearlong course puts 11th and 12th graders to work running the Glass Onion Eatery, an on-campus restaurant and commercial catering kitchen.
“There’s plenty of space to make mistakes and learn, but the expectations are really high,” Huizenga said. “We are selling food to real people for real money.”
The academic year starts with ServSafe certification — a food safety program run by the National Restaurant Association — followed by a month and a half of learning how to handle knives and communicate safely in the kitchen. Once saying “behind” and “corner” are second nature — by late fall — the Glass Onion opens for business.
On a busy Thursday in May, this year’s batch of 10 culinary students showed off their skills by catering the school’s awards breakfast and prepping a dessert buffet. That weekend, they’d serve cheesecake bars, cupcakes, cookies, lemon bars and brownies to 65 attendees per night during intermission of the Addison Repertory Theatre’s final performances of the year.
Asher Bent, an 11th-grade student, donned a sharp gray suit and stepped confidently into the role of maître d’ when a reporter arrived. Bent’s tour of the large learning kitchen included stops at the dish corner, walk-in cooler, sandwich cooler, bake shop and the two big ovens.
“Somehow people trust us to use these,” he joked.
“It’s a lot of big, stainless steel, scary machines,” Huizenga explained, as Bent gestured to a smoker and a bread slicer to drive the point home.
Learning to navigate the physical dangers of a kitchen, obviously, is key. Huizenga was happy to report that the group started and ended the year with 100 fingers intact.
“Restaurants are really intense, and part of my job is to say, ‘Hey, maybe don’t do this as a career.'” Jill Huizenga
Several in this year’s group — including Bent — said they just wanted to learn to cook for themselves. As a result of learning what the food industry is like, not all of the students are planning to pursue culinary careers. When it came time for students to find apprenticeships, Huizenga connected one to an electrician instead of a chef.
“Restaurants are really intense, and part of my job is to say, ‘Hey, maybe don’t do this as a career,'” she said. “I just want you to be a successful human in the world.”
Whatever the students do, they’ll have versatile, employable skills thanks to their kitchen training — problem solving, discipline and teamwork among them, curriculum director Gillian Zieger said.
“Jill’s greatest strength as a teacher is her ability to connect with students, motivate them and mentor them endlessly through all of this discovery,” Zieger continued. “And they need that.”
Gunnar Boe, an 11th grader, has been thinking about a cooking career since watching “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives” and took the lead on the Glass Onion program’s “Savory” station during the second semester. Huizenga has helped Boe research culinary schools, including Paul Smith’s College in the Adirondacks.
Senior Dominic Jones will be there next year.
“I took this class because I didn’t want to live off microwave meals,” Jones said. “Now I’m going to college.”
Like kitchens in the real world, the Glass Onion kitchen needs its station-running chefs de partie. Last year, Carley Cook was one of the students who stepped into a leadership role, honing the softer skills of management with help from Huizenga —aka “Chef Jill” — at the same time she captained her Mount Abraham Union High School basketball team.
“I had to learn to delegate without being bossy,” Cook said with a laugh.
Cook, 18, took a year off after high school. This fall she’ll join several program alums at Johnson & Wales University’s culinary school in Rhode Island, where she’ll study baking and pastry arts.
That gap year was all food. She spent the winter working on organic farms in Europe. Back in Vermont, she was a prep cook at Little Miss Taco — now Preppi Meal Prep, based at Preppi Market and Eatery at Hula in Burlington. Preppi owner Clarina Cravins called Cook “an absolute rock star.”
“I wouldn’t have found that job if I hadn’t come here,” Cook said of the Hannaford Center.
It’s a path Huizenga knows well: She attended the Hannaford Center’s culinary program as a high school student, learning from longtime instructor Woody Danforth, who shaped the program into what it is today.
“I was definitely not college-bound,” Huizenga recalled.
But Danforth saw her potential. “He pushed me out of the nest,” Huizenga said, to the Culinary Institute of America. When Danforth retired two years ago, she took his place.
Collabs de Cuisine
There’s no sign of culinary school on the résumés of Burlington’s current crop of top chefs. For a group of friends who have graduated from young cooks to James Beard Award nominations, the path to executive chef was charted on the job.
Nick Frank, Avery Buck and Micah Tavelli no longer work together, but the formative years of their careers converged in 2016 at Hen of the Wood, Eric Warnstedt’s highly acclaimed Burlington fine-dining spot. These days, each man leads a local restaurant, but they’re still pushing each other — and figuring out how to continue the kitchen culture that got them where they are.
Frank’s first cooking jobs were for beer money while he was studying at Castleton University to be a teacher. He didn’t end up in the classroom, but that education degree has come in handy in his role as executive chef at Hen of the Wood.
“Ultimately, you’re still teaching,” Frank, 38, said. “That’s what the job is.”
Tavelli, 33, has a similar story. At 18, “I was getting myself into trouble,” he said. A dishwashing job helped straighten him out, and he soon went to college to become a high school English teacher. His grants ran out junior year, and he decided to drop out and cook instead of taking on student loans.
Tavelli came to Hen as a short-term stage — pronounced “stahj,” from the French word stagiaire. He didn’t immediately get a job after this unpaid internship, but he showed up at Hen’s door once a week for seven weeks until he did. He left for Dedalus in Burlington, then a James Beard-recognized stint at now-closed Paradiso Hi-Fi and his own pop-up biz, Into the Wolf’s Mouth. Now Tavelli is head chef at Majestic, the small weeknight-only restaurant that opened late last year in the city’s South End.
Avery Buck also started as a dishwasher. When he was 14, his mom told him he needed to get a job. By 16, he was doing prep work during his dish shifts at Kevin’s Sports Pub & Restaurant in North Bennington. When Buck was 17, the chef left early one day, leaving him in charge of the line.
“It went terribly,” Buck said.
He applied to NECI, got in, got nervous and decided not to go. Instead, he worked at Manchester’s Silver Fork and eventually applied to NECI again — though Silver Fork chef-co-owner Mark French told him not to.
“He said I’d be fine on my own,” Buck recalled. “So far, I have been.”
Fine, indeed. Buck, now 32 and chef de cuisine at May Day in Burlington, was a finalist in this year’s James Beard Awards for Best Chef: Northeast. His food is both old school and unfussy — think patty melts and huge, shareable platters of steak frites — and simply elegant, especially when vegetables are involved.
During Tavelli’s fateful internship at Hen in 2016, Buck was working the grill station and Frank was on the pass — kitchen lingo for expediting food — soon to be promoted from junior sous to chef de cuisine.
“I was working garde-manger and remember putting a plate up,” Tavelli said. “I walked away and heard Avery go, ‘Chef, can we keep him?'”
“Someone from grill or sauté would come down the line and be like, ‘Dude, your station’s disgusting. Clean up. Now.'” Micah Tavelli
That was a special time at Hen, Frank said. They worked under Jordan Ware, who has since moved on to open Burlington hot spot Frankie’s with fellow Hen general manager Cindi Kozak. Alongside them were even more cooks now running restaurants around the state: Taylor Adams is now at the Tillerman in Bristol; John Rottinger works at Burlington Beer; Amanda Wildermuth is pastry chef at Honey Road and the Grey Jay.
“It was a perfect collision of a bunch of young, talented people working in the same place,” Tavelli said. “But it’s also a testament to the culture at Hen. It’s not just one person holding you accountable.”
Frank would send a plate back from the pass if it wasn’t quite right, he continued. Ware would scrutinize his mise en place, or setup. “And someone from grill or sauté would come down the line and be like, ‘Dude, your station’s disgusting. Clean up. Now.'”
That level of professionalism is what maintains Hen’s reputation as one of the top restaurants in New England, not just for diners but also for eager young cooks.
In 2016, each young chef’s “focus was singular,” Frank said. “This plate, right now, today.”
“As you get older, start taking ownership of businesses and grow, and families start, your focus becomes bigger,” he continued. “But you need to keep the people around you who are helping you grow.”
Buck, Frank and Tavelli are now the guys in charge. They haven’t formally worked together in at least five years, and their restaurants could be seen as competing with one another in Burlington’s small market. Still, they’re on one another’s 4 a.m. phone call list.
“I’m not picking up for many people,” Frank said. “My wife, Jordan Ware and these two.”
All three have the skills to make it at restaurants in Chicago, New York or San Francisco. But they’ve stuck around and made Vermont’s dining scene a more interesting place, where young cooks can learn the trade.
Tavelli thinks back to how Frank supported his creativity. If he and Buck came up with an idea for a dish, whether from a cookbook, Instagram or “pulling it out of our ass,” he said, Frank might say, “I have no idea how to do that. Let’s try.” If a small test batch was good, it went on the menu. If it sucked, Tavelli said, they tried again until it was right.
Buck has seven cooks on staff at May Day. Frank has 20 at Hen. Tavelli works with just one in his relatively new role at Majestic.
For a Monday interview with all three chefs, Tavelli and Frank showed up wearing May Day merch.
The three help each other in other ways. Buck texted Frank about a recent stage he didn’t have a spot for at May Day, helping him get a job at Hen. Buck’s new sous chef previously worked for both Frank and Tavelli.
And they collaborate, cooking special dinners in Hen’s private Butcher Room — Buck cooked one the night he found out he’d made this year’s James Beard list — and for wildly popular pop-ups. The collabs are mostly for fun, they said, though they help introduce each other’s restaurants to new customer bases. The events push the chefs’ creativity, too. Often, they scrap existing menus and go all in on creating something new, such as Buffalo sweetbreads or mussels in hollandaise.
“We get to go back in time to when we were young and try to outdo each other,” Buck said.
For a Burgers & Bottles pop-up at Leo & Co. in late April, the three chefs and two others from that mid-2010s Hen crew — Leo & Co. executive chef Brian Woychowski and Trenton Silver, who’s since left the industry — seemingly drew half of Burlington out to the Essex Experience. They were slammed.
Next on the list is Coop Day, an annual July 3 hot dog fundraiser at May Day in honor of their late friend Adam Cooperstein, who died in 2022. They don’t have any other collabs scheduled but started brainstorming on the spot when asked: something fine dining, maybe a tasting menu, with all three in the kitchen. Local, seasonal ingredients; whole animal cooking; no waste — common themes in their respective approaches.
Their spitballing resulted in a solid and fitting idea: What if they reimagined the 2017 Hen of the Wood menu? Think mushroom toast, beef tenderloin, pastrami-cured hearts and other dishes they had some part in developing as young cooks. It could showcase Frank’s meat game, Tavelli’s skill with vegetables, Buck’s balance of high and low.
They could have planned the whole thing on the spot, but they had to get to work. Their staffs would be waiting, ready to test new ideas of their own.
Heading for the door, Frank quipped, “Mentorship never stops.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “On the Line | How are Vermont’s cooks learning the trade? School or not, mentorship is the recipe.”
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This article appears in The Food Issue 2025.
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