I know updates are important for computer security, but I close no window faster than the pop-up that tells me macOS Tahoe 26 will give me eight new emojis. No way I’m gonna restart my laptop and risk losing my carefully curated tab collection.
When it comes to eating, I’m less resistant to change. New menus and new locations keep Vermont’s food scene interesting, as we discovered when we visited the 2.0 versions of several Chittenden County restaurants last fall. When it happens within 15 minutes of my house? Even better.
Addison County Businesses
In the almost five years I’ve lived in Vergennes, I’ve built a regular roster of Addison County restaurant stops. Over the past six months, three favorites have embarked on new adventures, whether moving up the block or opening a second shop. I headed out to check on those new spots running north to south, from Ferrisburgh to Middlebury.
You could make a day out of a similar excursion, with breakfast at Vergennes Laundry, a quick trip drive north for lunch at Gilfeather’s Fine Provisions, then back south for a creemee or cookie at Vermont Cookie Love in Middlebury. If you’re lucky enough to live in Addison County, I’m sure I’ll see you there.
Take Me to Church
Gilfeather’s Fine Provisions, 3323 Route 7, Ferrisburgh, 802-870-7315
Since Gilfeather’s Fine Provisions launched in 2017 at the crossroads in Ferrisburgh, its tagline has been “Great Food to Go.” Rick and Nancy “Nan” Benson bought the former Ferrisburgh United Methodist Church just up the road in late 2024 seeking more space for their market and prepared-food biz. Their motto hasn’t changed at the new spot, which opened February 21, and neither has their service model.
“People come in and go, ‘Oh, we thought you were going to have tables. Why don’t you have tables?’” Rick said. “I learned my lesson several times,” the longtime chef continued, laughing. “If we wanted a restaurant, we would have built a restaurant.”
The Bensons closed the original Gilfeather’s on Christmas Eve to make the 500-foot move to the Brown Church, which is now clad in gray siding after an extensive renovation. The church’s 19-foot ceilings elicit lots of “wows” when customers first walk through the door, Rick said.
The larger space has enabled the Bensons to double their market’s retail offerings, adding everything from produce to puzzles. While groceries historically made up slightly more than half of sales, “now people grab baskets to shop,” he said.
Those baskets might be loaded with dill pickle chips, local cheeses, house-packed pantry goods and sardines from what’s likely the area’s largest selection of tinned fish. Art supplies, wine, nonalcoholic beverages, Asian ingredients, ice cream, Republic of Vermont honey, bean soups and books by local authors fill the metal shelves where pews had sat since 1890.
If you look closely at the floors, you’ll see the scuffs of a century’s worth of parishioners’ feet. The Bensons have removed the church’s damaged stained-glass windows, but they carefully salvaged several frames and plucked out the best of the panes. After about 60 hours of work, the repurposed multicolored glass hangs above the kitchen where a frosted transom used to be.
The sandwiches the Bensons make in that kitchen are the familiar Gilfeather’s favorites, such as spicy blueberry-bacon grilled cheese ($8.99) and year-round Maine lobster rolls (market price). Semi-regular bánh mì specials ($13.99) are a new hit, as are build-your-own options that range from turkey to BLTs to liverwurst to egg-and-olive salad. Rotating salads and prepared entrées fill the cooler.
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Nan prepared a steady stream of orders, pausing only to tell Rick with a gesture that she needed more lettuce. He grabbed some from the produce fridge in the market — an old habit from the storage-scarce previous shop, where the couple had to keep ingredients in the bottom of the beer cooler.
There’s more fridge space in the back now, and their cooking area has tripled. This fifth commercial kitchen the Bensons have built, Rick said, is still a work in progress, with the hood waiting to be installed, after which shelves will go up. He has plans for a wine cellar and a walk-in cooler in the basement, which currently stores the picnic tables waiting to go outside.
Gilfeather’s front-of-house pro, Drew Price, rang me up for a lobster roll ($27.99) and a slice of baked spaghetti pie ($8.99). The team is currently just Price and the Bensons, though they hope to hire an experienced kitchen person and counter help before summer, Rick said.
Some of the store’s old signs are out front, but the new Gilfeather’s hardly needs them.
I ate my lobster roll in the car, savoring the view of the Adirondacks from the parking lot along with every buttery bite. As I picked up the big chunks of lobster meat and the tiny, briny capers that had fallen into the foil spread on my lap, cars continued to roll in off Route 7. Some of the store’s old signs are out front. But, with its steeple catching travelers’ eyes, the new Gilfeather’s hardly needs them.
Rick told me he often heard a refrain when first-time customers stopped at the old location: “I’ve been driving by for years but never stopped in because it didn’t look like much.”
“Now,” he said, “we’ve got a place that looks like something.”
Now in Color
Vergennes Laundry, 205 Main St., Vergennes, 802-870-7257
Since Nadia Dole bought and reopened Vergennes Laundry five years ago, she has posted photos of the bakery’s cardamom buns, baguettes, souk plates and sourdough croissants almost exclusively in black and white. Now, after four months in its new home a block away, Vergennes Laundry’s Instagram is full of color.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that’s the only change Dole made. The bakery feels so familiar that some customers haven’t even noticed it relocated 220 feet to the former Jackman Fuels office.
“People keep asking if we redecorated,” Dole said with a laugh.
The airy new space has the same warm yet minimalist feel, the same white beadboard wall paneling, the same long bench along the wall and the same giant pomegranate oil painting. The flow is different — the register is where you used to pick up espresso drinks, and vice versa — and there’s a full-on brunch kitchen bustling in the middle of the room. But it’s immediately recognizable as Dole’s version of the bakery.
People keep asking if we redecorated.
NADIA DOLE
The one-block journey wasn’t something she had planned. Landlords Didier and Julianne Murat, who founded Vergennes Laundry in 2010, unexpectedly decided not to renew Dole’s lease last year, and she closed the bakery at 247 Main Street in mid-August. (Its original home remains empty.)
When Dole peeled the paper off the large front windows of the new storefront in early December and the light streamed in, “It was like, Oh, this is right. It’s gonna be OK,” she said.
Like many Little City residents, I returned to Vergennes Laundry almost as soon as the paper was down and the door unlocked. My toddler, a devotee of its chocolate croissants, spent the fall pretending to visit “the bakery.” I missed sneaking away for a luxurious plate of Turkish eggs on a quiet weekday morning, swiping bits of steaming hot pita through rich, herby labneh and perfectly runny poached eggs spiked with peppery Aleppo butter. We’d both built up quite the appetite.
The new spot has a few more seats, despite not being much larger in terms of square footage, and for customers, it feels “brighter and bigger,” Dole said. Now the café is bathed in natural light throughout, unlike the long and narrow old room that grew darker beyond the enormous wood-fired oven, which was dismantled and didn’t make the move.
The team prepares dishes such as oeuf cocotte ($18) and a winter Caesar salad ($18) in the open kitchen right in the café. There’s an intimacy to the new arrangement: Regulars chat with staff as they work, as if at a friend’s house for brunch.
In the basement below the street-level café, two full-time bakers — Kelsey Martin, who previously worked at the Tillerman, and former Vergennes Laundry barista Lindsay Yamrick — prepare the bread and pastries along with two assistants.
The additional staff allows Dole and the team to experiment with items they’ve lacked the capacity to offer regularly, such as canelés and sweet and savory tarts. Retail foods such as hummus with brown butter will soon return, too, and some will make it onto the menu as small plates. French-Middle Eastern dinners on Sunday and Monday are slated to start in June, with potential for other pop-ups sooner.
In the meantime, I’m still ordering the things I always did, whether that’s a quick iced chai ($6.25) with a flaky, buttery chocolate croissant ($6) to split with my son or the Turkish eggs ($16), which deserve the time to reflect on every bite. No matter when I visit, I run into someone I’ve been meaning to see — including a friend with her newborn baby, local food folks and colleagues who live nowhere near Vergennes.
“It’s like a tree,” Dole said of the bakery. “Everyone takes shade here.”
More to Love
Vermont Cookie Love, 40 Main St., Middlebury
Matt Bonoma already had expansion on his mind when he bought Vermont Cookie Love in 2021. The North Ferrisburgh “Love Shack,” as the bakery and creemee stand on Route 7 is called, had been a community spot since 2008, and its new owner saw growth opportunities.
“Everybody loves cookies,” he told Seven Days at the time.
In October 2025, Bonoma opened his second Vermont Cookie Love location on Main Street in Middlebury. The shop has the exact same menu and hours as the North Ferrisburgh original, which remains open year-round. As of mid-March, creemees are back from their winter hiatus at both spots.
Opening between ice cream seasons has afforded the crew at Cookie Love Middlebury time to get used to their new space, which was Chim Chimney Bakery from June through October 2024. It boasts one major difference from the Love Shack: In Middlebury, you can walk inside.
The original location offers window service exclusively, its interior closed to customers since the start of the pandemic. “It’s hard to trial new products [in North Ferrisburgh], because people can’t see them,” Bonoma said. “They’re stuck on the other side of the wall.”
In Middlebury, cookies are at eye level in a glass display case beside the register. Eventually, that location will start to roll out new treats, Bonoma said, calling it “phase two.” In the longer term, that might mean opening earlier in the morning on summer farmers market days with breakfasty scones and puff pastry items.
Production will stay in North Ferrisburgh, where the small team also whips up cookie dough for school fundraisers, frozen dough and scones for wholesale at local grocery stores, and gift boxes that they ship nationwide. It’s a lot harder than it looks to mix 90 pounds of cookie dough at a time consistently, Bonoma explained, so they don’t want to upset a system that works. And semitruck drivers already have a tough enough time delivering ingredients to the original location without having to navigate Middlebury’s narrow Main Street as well.
Bonoma, who has a background in food and beverage consulting, said the No. 1 rule when he took over at Cookie Love was “don’t screw up what’s already here, because this place punches way above its weight in terms of the community and how people feel about it.” If Middlebury is “a smashing success,” he continued, a third location “or beyond” could be in the cards.
Now we know what works in a roadside, snack-shacky-type place, and we know what works on Main Street.
MATT BONOMA
“Now we know what works in a roadside, snack-shacky-type place, and we know what works on Main Street,” Bonoma said.
Though I live a couple miles closer to the original Cookie Love, I’ve split my loyalties between the locations since the Middlebury shop opened. The latter’s café offers plenty of seats to linger over a Forbidden Love triple chocolate chip cookie ($1.85 each or three for $5) and a cappuccino ($4.50) — especially nice while reading something new from the Vermont Book Shop next door.
I’ve also made several Middlebury stops with my toddler, who never says no to a creemee. Last week, we put in a takeout order down the hill at the Mad Taco and strolled up for an ice cream appetizer. I got Cookie Love’s excellent maple-coffee twist ($4.50 for a small) because I struggle to order anything else, though sometimes I add cookie crush ($1). My husband chose a scoop of mint chocolate chip hard ice cream ($4.50), and my son went for a vanilla creemee ($3.50 for kids’ size), as toddlers tend to do.
We sat on the bench in the window, from which my son pointed out the “silly cow holding ice cream” and “birdie with a cookie — what!?” decals that decorate the shop. The creemees were our first of the year. Bonoma uses a preservative-free mix with a short shelf life, which makes keeping creemees in stock in the slow season impractical, he said.
I’ve probably eaten Cookie Love’s maple-coffee creemee a hundred times over the years — with a regularity that increased exponentially when I moved to Addison County in 2021. But in the business’ sweet second location, after a long winter, even my go-to order tasted shiny and new. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Addison County Nouveau | Sampling version 2.0 of beloved food businesses in Vergennes, Ferrisburgh and Middlebury”
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