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View ProfilesPublished May 9, 2023 at 2:05 p.m. | Updated May 10, 2023 at 10:06 a.m.
As is family tradition, Heidi LeVell expects to celebrate Mother's Day at home with her husband and four children at a campsite on their farm. They will set up a buffet dinner, light a bonfire and relax in Adirondack chairs under café lights strung between birch trees.
"We love sitting out there late into the night, just chatting and unwinding and listening to the crickets," she said.
But first, she and her 18-year-old daughter, Zoe, will complete the daily mother-daughter ritual they established 18 months ago: running Barn Owl Bistro & Goods, the East Berkshire country store they operate as partners. It's open 9 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. seven days a week.
"So, yeah, we will be working a bit," Heidi said. "What's nice about Mother's Day is that people will bring their moms into the store, and so we can help celebrate other people's moms."
Coffee, upscale pastries and an ice cream shop make Barn Owl a gathering spot. Many skiers traverse this part of eastern Franklin County as they head to Jay Peak Resort, but 95 percent of sales are to locals. The store offers specialty foods, cards, jewelry, wooden toys, and personal care and gift items, mostly Vermont made. Plants potted in teapots and other vintage containers — from Zoe's side business, the Plant Attic — are tucked among the merchandise. Customers will also find a couch, booths, comfy chairs, a woodstove and free, high-speed internet access — multiple invitations to settle in. Meet friends. Pop open a laptop and work for a couple of hours. Sip coffee, savor a scone and stay as long as you like.
"We don't have a time limit," Zoe said.
She and Heidi do appear to have boundless energy. They are in the community hub business and, in June, will open what they hope will become another gathering spot, five miles away in Enosburg Falls. Bumblebee Bistro, in the former Parkside Grill on Main Street, will offer from-scratch, locally sourced comfort food with a modern twist, for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Making it all happen required a transcontinental leap of faith.
Seven years ago, Heidi and her husband, Andrew Hoerner, California natives and high school sweethearts, were raising their family in Nevada City, 60 miles northeast of Sacramento. Andrew worked in tech marketing, as he still does, and Heidi was in the midst of her 20-year career as an antiques appraiser. She flew around the country providing whole-house appraisals, advising owners on what to keep as a family heirloom, what should go to Sotheby's and what to donate to Goodwill.
A January 2017 job brought her to Vermont. Sebastian Araujo, curator at Montgomery Center for the Arts, who had met Heidi through the online marketplace Etsy, invited her to Montgomery Center to see his new home. Knowing that she loved historic buildings — she had restored Victorian homes in California — he showed her the old H.A. Pond Store in East Berkshire. Opened in 1872 but shuttered since the late 1980s, the two-story clapboard building sat like a time capsule, packed with merchandise and a tiny, intact 1900s doctor's office all "covered with about 19 million layers of dust," Heidi said.
"It was filthy and falling apart, and it was so beautiful," she recalled. While she and Andrew wanted to escape Western wildfires and she had long felt an unexplained pull to Vermont, they did not have a plan. "This one just came out and said, You have to do this. You have to rescue this building."
Six months later, back in California, she got a call: The store was for sale, along with five adjacent buildings on 13 acres. Heidi and Andrew flew to Vermont, "did a Vermont handshake deal," went back to California and started packing.
The family of six, with Heidi's aunt and uncle in tow, moved to Franklin County, where Heidi unexpectedly discovered she has deep roots. While helping her aunt unpack, she found a handwritten book dated 1934 called The Willard Family Notes. Willard was her great-grandmother's maiden name. When Heidi flipped open the book, the first thing she read was a notation about a cousin who fell through the ice at nearby Lake Carmi and died.
"I was like, Wait a minute," Heidi recalled. "And then I read, 'Such and such of Bakersfield married such and such of St. Albans.' And, 'Such and such of Montgomery took oil and supplies to the family home in Cowansville,' right across the border here.
"It was just a who's who guide to this area, and I realized they shopped in this store. You couldn't have gone past this and not shopped in this store," she added. "All of a sudden, I went, Oh, that's why I've had the itch to come to Vermont."
But where Heidi and Zoe saw great potential, others saw a run-down building in a blip of an unincorporated village with roughly 200 residents and one other business. ("It's us and the Jolley," Heidi said.)
Bankers, contractors, subcontractors and even passersby couldn't understand their plan. "It was like, 'East Berkshire. Are you sure? East Berkshire?'" Heidi said. But wavy brown hair and flashing brown eyes are not all that Heidi and Zoe have in common. They share a can-do, why-wait attitude.
"When we started construction, that knob-and-tube electrical on the ceiling was the newest thing in here," Zoe said.
"It's from 1905," Heidi added. "And it still worked. And it ran all of the construction for the building." They spent 18 months renovating: preserving the tongue-and-groove ceiling, the wood floor, the massive shelves adorned with decorative molding, and the 24-foot-long, curved counter with an inlaid hemlock top. They tore out drywall and exposed hefty wooden beams. When they realized the store was too high to accommodate a ramp at the front door to comply with accessibility rules, they added a ramp on the old feed store next door, then connected the two buildings.
Barn Owl Bistro & Goods, which occupies both structures, opened on November 19, 2021.
Sixty glass candy jars line high shelves behind the counter. Just beyond them, an ice cream shop occupies the alcove that had housed the doctor's office. The LeVells can brew coffee and scoop ice cream, but they could not get the necessary permits to prepare food on-site — negating the bistro part of the store's name — so they rely on Enosburg Falls' Gail Ovitt of Pastry VT, who delivers seven days a week. Her croissants, scones and muffins often arrive warm.
Ovitt's pastry career includes nine years at the five-star Dailey's Restaurant Bar in downtown Atlanta, followed by stints at Tyler Place Family Resort in Highgate Springs, Jay Peak and Stowe's Trapp Family Lodge.
Her round cheesecakes, four inches in diameter, are tantalizing little works of art nearly as tall as they are wide. Salted caramel, strawberry swirl, funfetti, lemon and coconut cream ($6.50 apiece) come topped with fat whipped cream rosettes, sprinkles, dollops of chocolate, a strawberry or blueberry coulis — and often combinations of the above.
Ovitt's lemon bars share a case with just-sticky-enough magic bars, strawberry-rhubarb oat bars, triple berry bars ($4.25 each) and the very popular double maple whoopie pies ($5.25) — if they're not sold out.
Ovitt will bake cakes, cheesecakes, muffins, scones and biscuits for Bumblebee, the new venture in Enosburg Falls. Chef Curtis Garrow will prepare breakfast and lunch, and Adam Barry will lead the kitchen at dinner.
All meat and dairy — and as many vegetables as possible — will come from Franklin County, Heidi said, and menu items are being created with affordability in mind. Offerings will shift with the seasons and appeal to the variety of local tastes. "Montgomery is a little more world-travelerish, for lack of a better term," Heidi said. "Montgomery is more like, 'Can I have extra avocado on my salmon salad?' whereas Enosburg is like, 'Can I have more gravy on my biscuit?'"
Bumblebee will serve "fresh biscuits and a really kick-ass gravy" and "wonderful big salads with lots of ingredients," Heidi said. "Salad should be delicious, not endured."
Garrow, currently chef at Vespa's Pizza Pasta & Deli in Essex Junction, grew up a block away from Bumblebee, graduated from New England Culinary Institute, and worked at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown and as kitchen manager for the Skinny Pancake on the Burlington waterfront.
"It's really huge for me to be coming home, essentially, to take this position," Garrow, 34, said.
He plans to cook lobster roll eggs Benedict, braised beef and root vegetable hash, and a variety of pancakes for breakfast and weekend brunch. He'll serve soups, sandwiches and smash burgers for lunch.
Barry, 33, has climbed the restaurant ladder, working in Jeffersonville at the restaurant now called Family Table and at Village Tavern, at Whip Bar & Grill in Stowe, and at Smugglers' Notch's Morse Mountain Grille, where he's now morning kitchen manager.
His Bumblebee menu ideas include citrus salad, wild mushroom risotto and a chipotle mussels appetizer, which has been a crowd-pleaser when he's made it in the past. "Every time it goes out into the dining room, everyone just turns and looks and says, 'Yep, I'll have that,'" Garrow said.
He and Barry share a commitment to "quality, consistency, local fresh ingredients and modern twists on classic favorites," he said.
"I'm really, really excited about the Bumblebee," Garrow said. "I think it's going to bring something back to Enosburg that's been missing for a long time."
The original print version of this article was headlined "Meant to Bee | A mother-daughter duo is set to launch Bumblebee Bistro in Enosburg Falls"
Tags: Food + Drink Features, Enosburg Falls, East Berkshire, bistro, ice cream, Mother's Day, Barn Owl Bistro & Goods, Bumblebee Bistro
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