From 2014 until 2021, the Swingin’ Pinwheel slung plate-size hash browns, pressed-waffle sandwiches and cowboy coffee in downtown Burlington. Regulars from the restaurant’s early days might recall seeing the owners’ infant son in a playpen behind the counter. These days, weekend customers at Wendy Piotrowski and Andrew Machanic’s reborn Pinwheel in Essex might spy that same kid, now 11, helping out in front of the counter.
Waylon Machanic joins his mom and dad at the recently opened breakfast and lunch spot most Saturdays and Sundays starting at 7 a.m. He said he’s happy to pitch in mopping floors, cleaning tables and rolling silverware in napkins. That his contributions are loosely tied to his weekly allowance doesn’t hurt, the young man added, but he seems genuinely proud to contribute.
“Not that many kids get this amazing opportunity to have their parents, like, have a whole restaurant,” Waylon told Seven Days. (His parents swore they had not coached him.)
Waylon and his two half-siblings from Andrew’s previous marriage — including 15-year-old Amelia, who also sometimes helps at the Pinwheel — were a key reason the couple took a break from the intensity and long hours of running their own restaurant. In the intervening years, they operated the Sweet Wheels Donuts bus near their Essex Junction home and Andrew, 56, plied his chef skills in other kitchens.
“I was raised by a pack of wild cowboys.” Andrew Machanic
But the couple said they always expected they’d get back into the restaurant ownership game. “We both are drawn to being entrepreneurs,” said Wendy, 42.
And the Western-influenced menu from their original Center Street spot kept calling. “It was just sort of asleep, hibernating,” Andrew said.
The husband-and-wife team opened Pinwheel in mid-February in the spot vacated by Cody’s Irish Pub & Grille roughly a year prior. It has about double the seats of the Burlington original and a streamlined name. People mostly called it the Pinwheel, anyway, Andrew said, or mistakenly dubbed it the Spinning Pinwheel — which he acknowledged made sense since pinwheels do spin.
“We always liked to say that ours swings because we do things a little differently,” Andrew said. “And we played a lot of Western swing,” his wife added.
The couple still play swing music and do things a bit differently. Their restaurant décor is an unusual ode to the American West in Vermont, with antlers, cacti, stirrups and other ephemera sprinkled about the two-section dining room.
The collection includes a classic enamel cowboy coffee pot, though cowboy coffee is one popular menu item that did not make the move from Burlington. It was hard enough to juggle three pots on the stove to meet demand for the steeped, strained coffee in the original, smaller restaurant, Andrew said.
The rest of the menu will be familiar to those who dined in Burlington, with some additions for lunch. A case holds the signature jam-dolloped pinwheel pastries ($4), fat apple dumplings ($5.50), glazed cinnamon rolls ($4.50) and muffins ($3.75).
The kitchen churns out fluffy popovers stuffed with eggs ($14); flaky biscuits with eggs and bacon gravy ($15); and eggs Cassidy with corn cakes, Mexican-style braised beef, poached eggs and a lemony house hollandaise ($17.50). Due to high egg prices, the restaurant is currently charging 50 cents extra per egg.
Moving through the day, dishes range from the waffle-panini mashup called Wafflini ($9 half/$16 whole); to substantial salads, such as spinach apple-pecan with goat cheese and house-baked rosemary focaccia ($14); to an expanded sandwich selection including a burger ($16) and achiote grilled chicken sandwich ($16) with Pepper Jack, avocado salsa and lime crema. All the bread is baked in-house except for the English muffins and the gluten-free bread, which comes from West Meadow Farm Bakery a few doors away.
Overall, the Pinwheel menu reflects Andrew’s years of cooking and living out West on guest ranches and resorts in Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Alaska, starting with summers in his late teens.
“I was raised by a pack of wild cowboys in Wyoming when I moved out there at 17,” he said with a grin.
That image of pure Americana, Andrew noted, is, like all things in this nation, a cultural mix of those who settled there. His Basque Breakfast ($14) with a spicy tomato stew and Manchego cheese, for example, is an ode to the Basque shepherds of Wyoming. The housemade cheesy spaetzle ($17) pays homage to the many Germans he met out West, as well as his German mother.
“It just wraps up my entire experience of food,” Andrew said of his menu.
The chef was actually raised in the Washington, D.C., area, but his father was originally from Burlington and Andrew came to Vermont to earn a degree from New England Culinary Institute in 1993. After heading west again, he returned in 2011 and soon encountered Wendy, a Burlington native who had a tea shop downtown.
Neither can recall what style of music was playing when they met dancing at Nectar’s. “I usually break into swing dancing no matter what the music is,” Andrew said.
Hank Williams was crooning over the sound system on a mid-February Friday while Matt Milewski, 36, of Jericho lunched with his almost year-old daughter, Valley. Milewski said he lived in Utah for 13 years and was delighted to “randomly find a little taste of the West here.”
By the family’s second visit, he said they’d already settled on a “usual” order: the Haystack Hashbrown topped with melted cheese and an egg ($9 plus $2 for the egg) for him and a buttermilk pancake ($5) for his daughter. Despite the amount of pancake on the floor below her high chair, “she gives it a five-star review,” Milewski said. He added that the server had remembered them and brought extra orange slices for Valley before he’d asked.
The Haystack was a Burlington Pinwheel go-to for me, and it was my inaugural order at the new spot, topped with additional bacon ($3.75) and a poached egg. The crisp nuggets of bacon and crunchy hash brown exterior under melty cheddar and a molten-yolked egg rang all the comfort bells for me.
In the name of research, I also ordered a popover with maple butter ($4.50), a signature flaky pinwheel jam-hearted pastry and a warm apple dumpling with vanilla sauce. After taking a couple test bites of each, I was torn about which to polish off and which to save for later, should I ever become hungry again.
The friend to whom I brought a house-baked, gluten-free almond-cranberry scone ($4) for evaluation had the same problem. “I planned to just have a bite and ate the entire scone,” she texted, praising its texture in contrast with the often gummy or crumbly gluten-free pastries she endures.
The apple dumpling is among the recipes with a family connection. It starts with Andrew’s mom’s recipe for a rich, buttery yeast dough wrapped around chunks of apple. Each tray of dumplings is baked on a luxurious bed of butter and sugar and then flipped to display its caramelized underside.
“Oh, I love that,” Waylon piped up as his dad explained the recipe, “especially the French toast.” That permutation ($14) involves egg-battered and fried slices of apple dumpling served with extra sautéed apples and whipped cream.
The flavor combo is one of Waylon’s faves, honored by the menu’s Waffle for Waylon ($12.50) topped with apple compote and a fluff of cream. Waylon noted that the dish’s namesake “could be me and also the country singer,” referring to the late Waylon Jennings.
The waffle is not made with a standard batter but traces its lineage to another Machanic heirloom. Andrew recounted how his mother made a buttery, quick puff dough for holidays and other special occasions and shaped it into the charming pinwheels that have become the restaurant’s eponymous delicacy.
Occasionally, his mom rolled the same dough thin and baked it in a waffle iron to make what Andrew described as a “delicious, crispy, crunchy, flaky pastry,” which he would dust with powdered sugar and devour. That evolved into the Wafflini sandwiches, for which two pieces of the pastry dough are pressed around fillings such as prosciutto, Gouda and honey (another Waylon pick); turkey, cheddar and cranberry-apple chutney; and spinach, red onion, red pepper and feta.
On my second visit for lunch, a friend and I shared three dishes, including the spinach Wafflini. Each crunchy bite of the savory sandwich was dusted with powdered sugar and drizzled with a balsamic glaze. My friend picked our second sandwich, the new TBLT ($18), piled satisfyingly high with baked trout, thick-cut smoked bacon, lettuce, tomato and lemon-sage mayo between sturdy, lightly toasted slices of house white bread. It came with a heap of fresh-cut, deeply bronzed fries.
The combo had intrigued me, and it worked with the mild trout subbing in beautifully for turkey — reminiscent of a club sandwich. Andrew later said he’s surprised by how much trout he’s selling, noting that the cornmeal-crusted, pan-fried rainbow trout with eggs and fried cheddar scallion grits ($16.50) is popular, too.
While I was happy to share both sandwiches, I definitely regretted giving up any of the chewy, Swiss cheese-topped spaetzle dumplings fried with ham, mushrooms and red onion and their excellent side of vinegary, tart-sweet red cabbage.
Next time I swing on through, it will be all mine.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Put a Pin in It | The Pinwheel brings cowboy cuisine to Essex with a new version of the owners’ shuttered Burlington restaurant”
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This article appears in Mar 12-18, 2025.
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