click to enlarge - Melissa Pasanen
- Laura Wade and Aaron Josinsky at Onion City Chicken & Oyster
The team behind Misery Loves Co. has revealed details about its second Winooski restaurant, scheduled to open at 3 East Allen Street in August. The evening venue will be called Onion City Chicken & Oyster and feature a raw bar; Misery's much-loved fried, bone-in chicken with honey butter; and "absolutely delicious vegetables," chef and co-owner Aaron Josinsky said.
"It's all in our name," Josinsky's wife and co-owner, Laura Wade, said with a laugh.
The raw bar will include a selection of oysters, shrimp or crab cocktails, and a rotation of seafood crudos and ceviches. Josinsky said the vegetable dishes will "lean into all the vegetable cooking techniques we've been working on. They will be shining sides that go with our chicken but also stand alone."
Those sides might include collard greens, creamed corn, succotash, vinegar slaws and spicy pickles. "And there will always be some type of onion on the menu," Josinsky added, "like creamed onions or whole grilled onions with a dynamic vinaigrette."
A few other Misery favorites will resurface on its new sister spot's menu, including the steak tartare and housemade tater tots with smoked char and trout roe.
The bar program will be "all about nostalgia ... classic and concise," Wade said. "We will offer the best martini, the best possible daiquiri." Nonalcoholic options will include a root beer float and housemade sodas. The small wine list will pair well with both fried chicken and oysters. "Champagne's good," Josinsky said.
The restaurant's hours are still being fine-tuned, but Wade said the full kitchen and bar will most likely be open from about 4 to 11 p.m.
Across the Winooski rotary, Misery Loves Co. is still undergoing renovations. It will reopen in late July for daytime hours with a menu of soups, salads, quiches and sandwiches, such as the Good Egg breakfast sandwich and Rough Francis fried chicken sandwich. In addition to offering coffee drinks and daytime cocktails, Misery will continue to run a market with food to take home.
"It's not so much about us opening a new restaurant," Wade said. "It's about the relationship between the two.
"We have done a lot of things at Misery, gone through a lot of iterations," she continued. "We have enough, and then some, to fill two spaces."
"Now we have two homes," her husband said.