When I dined at Starry Night Café last spring, I ate deconstructed steak tartare, coal-roasted root vegetables with Cabot clothbound cheddar espuma and mafaldine with wild morel ragù. This spring, I got a Philly cheesesteak.
Starry Night’s rendition of the sandwich, which was about the size of my forearm, isn’t a concept shift or a one-off special for the Ferrisburgh destination restaurant. It’s an everyday addition to the new two-item bar menu, featuring just the cheesesteak ($25) and crispy fingerling potatoes ($14).
Chef Robert Smith III‘s full menu of Italian-inflected California cuisine is also available in the restaurant’s front barroom, which was renovated last year. Unlike the rest of the restaurant, the bar is typically saved for drop-in diners without reservations. The cheesesteak, Smith explained, is a more low-key option that he hopes will encourage more casual visits.
“It’s what people want to eat,” Smith said, noting that he never thought he’d put a Philly on the menu.
“My mom makes the best cheesesteak I’ve ever had … until now.” Katie Rose Seward
While a burger would have been the expected bar-menu move, the simplicity of a cheesesteak — just bread, onions, meat and cheese, no substitutions — makes it more practical for the kitchen team. That simplicity also makes it hard to get right, especially for those who grew up eating the sandwich at the source.
“I’m from Philadelphia, and I rarely enjoy a cheesesteak outside of Philly,” said Katie Rose Seward, owner and farmer at Charlotte’s Head Over Fields. Starry Night’s version — with local beef, housemade hoagie rolls and Cooper Sharp, an American cheese that’s been a Philadelphia staple for more than a century — “rivals the best,” Seward said.
“Let me put it this way,” she continued. “My mom makes the best cheesesteak I’ve ever had … until now.”
That hoagie roll is the result of a two-day ferment, baked at a high temperature to ensure a nice rise. Each loaf — which ends up being two sandwiches — is coated end to end in benne seeds, an heirloom variety of sesame seed that packs an earthy punch and gives the bread a third contrasting texture: chewy, in addition to crusty and fluffy.
Paper-thin rib eye is the classic cheesesteak cut. At Starry Night, Smith opts for chuck roll from Ferrisburgh’s Deer Valley Farm — a “fatty cut right where the rib eye and the chuck meet,” he said. Slicing it while it’s frozen is the secret to getting it super thin.
When a Philly ticket comes through — the busy kitchen can make up to 12 a night — chefs throw onions in a pan with beef fat, salt and pepper. When the onions are cooked, they set them aside and crank the heat before adding the meat while it’s still frozen, which keeps it from sticking together in the pan.
“The meat’s so cold that it drops the temperature, so you have to have the pan really hot,” Smith said. “Then it just sears right up.”
Then the onions return, along with the ever-so-important Cooper Sharp cheese, which melts as if it had no other purpose in life.
At this point, diners in the barroom will hear the telltale cue that their sandwich is almost ready: A rhythmic clanging starts on the line as a cook repeatedly chops the whole mess, using metal tools Smith described as “paint scrapers.” Once the sandwich contents have become a gooey, undifferentiated mess, they slap the meat onto the seeded baguette.
That clanging was Pavlovian when I recently dined at Starry Night with my husband and son. I wasn’t that hungry, so we decided to split the cheesesteak, crispy potatoes — which come with sauce gribiche, a punchy dipping sauce that’s part egg salad, part tartar sauce — and a spicy, crunchy Calabrian kale salad ($16) from the main menu. (The meal came with complimentary housemade focaccia and vadouvan curry butter, as all meals at Starry do.)
The chopping symphony immediately triggered my appetite. I sipped my Hill Farmstead Brewery Difference & Repetition IPA to hide my drooling.
$25 might seem like a lot for a cheesesteak, though it’s a bargain at Starry, where entrées are typically $40 and up. And when one sandwich is enough for two people, the price is equally easy to swallow.
Smith said he can tell who’s eating a cheesesteak by watching heads nod through the window from the kitchen into the barroom. He certainly could have clocked my first bite, as my satisfied nod stretched the range of my neck. My husband was less subtle, dropping an expletive loud enough that I thought our toddler might repeat it.
Then we got quiet, each eating our hefty half in one go and savoring every cheesy, gooey bit. Our toddler, nibbling meat I begrudgingly shared, looked around the room and broke the silence, asking, “Ball?”
He had clearly picked up on the vibe. There are no TVs in Starry Night’s elegant barroom, but with an excellent cheesesteak and a cold beer, watching a baseball game would have made perfect sense.
“One Dish” is a series that samples a single menu item — new, classic or fleeting — at a Vermont restaurant or other food venue. Know of a great plate we should feature? Drop us a line: food@sevendaysvt.com.
Bite-size cheesesteaks and other snacks will be available at Starry Fest — a community event celebrating the restaurant’s 25th birthday — on Saturday, June 7, 4 to 7 p.m.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Say Cheesesteak | Starry Night Café’s new bar menu delivers on a Philly classic”
This article appears in The Animal Issue 2025.
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