Years before chef Elliot Sion opened the Wise Fool in Burlington’s Old North End, he knew what he wanted to call his restaurant. The Middle Eastern folk character known as the wise fool has figured in Sion’s life since he was small.
“When me or my siblings did anything dumb, our parents would accuse us of being like Goha,” Sion recalled recently, using an Arabic name for the cheerful, bumbling man. The wise fool is always digging himself out of some kind of fix, Sion explained — never with smart or efficient tactics.
If his parents meant to invoke Goha as a cautionary tale, their 37-year-old son freely admits that he has taken the wise fool’s approach to heart in a more positive way. “My life has just been a series of questionable decisions, and somehow I’m still here doing this,” Sion said with a smile.
He was perched on a window-counter stool in the Wise Fool’s month-old dining room next to his wife and co-owner, Becca Christie. (Getting married earlier this year, Sion noted, was not among his questionable decisions.)
“The Wise Fool is as much influenced by the halal carts in New York as it is by a vendor in Beirut.”
Elliott Sion
The Wise Fool opened on the corner of North Street and North Winooski Avenue for sit-down dining in mid-October after eight months of offering takeout only. As Sion and Christie chatted, the restaurant team bustled, preparing for the evening’s service. One cook rolled dough for flaky, griddled rounds of laffa bread while another whizzed up one of many sauces to lavish over platters of rice made with freshly simmered stock topped with finely chopped salad, housemade pickles, herb-packed falafel and spit-roasted, griddle-crisped chicken shawarma.
“Everything we serve here, we make ourselves, except for the ketchup,” Sion said. “I don’t make my life easy. Everything’s a three-step process or more.”
Sion describes his menu as Middle Eastern street food that pays homage to the global diaspora to which his Jewish-Egyptian-Syrian family belongs.
“The Wise Fool is as much influenced by the halal carts in New York as it is by a vendor in Beirut,” he said.
The chef’s insistence on labor-intensive, from-scratch cooking also shows the influence of his almost two decades spent in professional, often high-end kitchens. Those years included one studying at the Culinary Institute of America, where the New York City native enrolled after dropping out of the University of Vermont.
While in college, Sion began working in Burlington-area kitchens simply to earn money but soon realized he thrived in restaurants. “I love food. I just love flavor. I grew up in a very food-centric family,” he said. “I figured I should learn how to cook, if I love to eat.”
As culinary students sometimes do, Sion opted to skip completing his degree in favor of staying on at his first internship, with chef Ana Sortun’s flagship Oleana in Cambridge, Mass.
Working in Massachusetts, the young cook met chef Cara Chigazola Tobin, who also worked for Sortun’s restaurant group. When she asked if he was interested in joining her team to launch Honey Road in 2017, Sion jumped at the chance to return to Burlington. He rose to chef de cuisine before leaving in 2024 to work briefly at the Tillerman in Bristol until deciding to finally strike out on his own.
Christie grew up in Chittenden County and started working in hospitality at 15, scooping ice cream at the Ben & Jerry’s on Church Street in Burlington. She was general manager of Burlington’s New Moon Café for six years and, unlike her husband, successfully completed a degree — in business.
On their first Tinder date, in 2018, the pair drank beer and ate fries “with a side of mayo,” Christie said. That kind of casual restaurant outing is what the couple is shooting for with the Wise Fool.
Over the years, Sion had become frustrated with the exclusivity of pricier restaurants. “This is my quiet rebellion,” he said. The Wise Fool aims to be a neighborhood spot that is accessible to everyone, while also keeping quality high. “Affordable doesn’t mean cheap,” Sion cautioned.
“I want to be a place where you can come with some friends, get a bottle of wine, get a bunch of snacks, or get a big plate of food to share and just have a good night without losing all your money,” he said.
In February, the couple opened the Wise Fool for takeout and quickly grew a following for their reasonably priced, scratch-made menu, led by their chicken shawarma or falafel ($15) dressed with fresh veggies, sweet pickles and sauces. This all comes either rolled in house-baked laffa or served over plain or “fancy” chicken stock-seasoned rice, also called yellow rice. The late-night Donkey Meal adds fries and a nonalcoholic drink for $20.
When I picked up my first order in March, another customer gushed, unprompted, “This place is such a vibe.”
It only took one takeout meal for me to taste what she meant: The shawarma wrap and falafel over rice delivered a wholly satisfying hearty riot of spice and pucker, chew and crunch. Subsequent orders included the fattoush salad ($9) with a zingy pomegranate-sumac dressing and crisp pita chips; and sous-chef Frank Willis’ butter-poached fingerling potato and whipped feta special ($6), punchy with pickled Fresno peppers, herbs and za’atar spice. I have since become a broken record begging for their return.
Sion and Christie used the takeout income to gradually renovate the restaurant’s interior. Their casual, no-frills eatery officially seats about 25 with standing room for a few more. Seats around the L-shaped bar are full service, but the rest of the room is counter service. The menu’s core has not changed, with a few past takeout specials, such as the beef kofta and wings, now made permanent — though not those fingerlings, yet.
Based on the brown bags lined up during a pair of recent visits, the Wise Fool is still doing brisk takeout business, but I recommend eating in for two main reasons. First, it’s hard to beat the drool-worthy crunch of certain dishes when hot and freshly plated — especially the falafel, wings and fries. Second, I believe Wise Fool offers the cheapest pours of eminently drinkable house wines in a Burlington restaurant: $6 for a sangiovese or a grüner veltliner. If you prefer beer or liquor, the house beer is Peroni (10 ounces for $4, 16 ounces for $6) and the non-fussy but classy cocktail list includes an intriguing Northender ($13) made with gin, black lime and mint.
For my inaugural sit-down meal, a friend and I ordered one of the new family meals ($32 for two with two proteins, or $64 for four with all three proteins). The meals start with a small pot of silky house hummus and a soft round of laffa followed by a tray loaded with rice, veggies and your choices of shawarma, kofta or falafel all abundantly sauced with the holy trinity of creamy garlic, hot sauce and tahini.
The first two “are an ode to New York, and the tahini is an ode to the Middle East,” Sion said. The hot sauce also honors Vermont. In late October and early November, Sion bought about 150 pounds of Fresno chiles and red jalapeños from Grand Isle’s Pomykala Farm, which were brined for a week before becoming pepper sauce.
My dining companion and I also shared a very good “NYC diner-style Greek salad” special ($9) with Pomykala tomatoes, creamy Bulgarian feta, olives and pickled peppers. That same sheep’s milk feta starred in the cheese version of fatayer ($6) we sampled. The small Lebanese pastries are made with the laffa dough folded around a mixture of feta, herbs and fried onions (my fave) or the same seasoned local ground beef used in the kofta.
Even if we hadn’t ordered these extras, I would have taken home at least one generous portion of leftover rice and protein after we ate our fill. We had to make ourselves stop to leave room for a few bites each of maple konafa ($6), a wonderfully savory-sweet, syrup-soaked pastry made with shredded phyllo dough wrapped around a soft cheese filling.
On a return visit, I tried the mejadrah ($7), a filling combo of rice and lentils garnished with potato chip-crisp fried onions. Sion said the dish is a comfort-food touchstone of his childhood. That and half a dozen of the restaurant’s signature, and excellent, wings ($8) made an ample and very reasonably priced meal for one.
The wings are brined overnight, marinated in the shawarma spice blend for another night and then roasted. When an order comes in, the chicken heads into the fryer before being dusted with another spice mix that also finishes Wise Fool fries.
Originally, Sion said, he was throwing the wings from the whole local chickens he buys for shawarma into his stockpot. Then he realized they’d make a great menu addition.
To deploy the wings in this way is definitely wise. To bother with so many steps to make them this good — and charge so little — one could call foolish. But as I dipped each crisp-skinned, deeply seasoned wing into the Wise Fool’s peppery green-herb zhoug sauce, both decisions struck me as very wise.
The Wise Fool, 260 North St., Burlington, wisefoolvt.com
The original print version of this article was headlined “Word to the Wise | The Wise Fool brings street food from the Middle Eastern diaspora to Burlington”
