For much of my life, my experience with dining in St. Albans centered on my grandmother’s weekly spaghetti nights. She welcomed anyone who’d make the drive to Bank Street: nearby family, my crew of college friends, visitors from far-flung places. You just had to come hungry.
Café Monette, the French-ish restaurant that opened on August 13 a couple of blocks away on North Main Street, gave me the same feeling — everybody was there. Franklin County locals stopped to chat at each other’s tables. I recognized a chef from Burlington at the bar. A man came to the door, spoke entirely in French and left with a baguette.
I won’t say I’m surprised that northern Vermont’s latest must-try restaurant is in St. Albans. As housing has become unaffordable in Chittenden County, I’ve watched friends and coworkers move 30 minutes north to the city of 7,000.
Pour me a glass of natural wine and serve me that onion tarte tatin. I’m there.
I’m also not surprised that Café Monette’s talented trio of chef-partners has diners jazzed about onion tarte tatin, poulet à la moutarde and mille-feuille. La cuisine française is having a moment (again). In big cities, what’s old is nouveau: Bistros are hot, the steak has frites, and white tablecloths are back. New York restaurants are an “ocean of Le and La and L’, Chez Whoever and Maison So-and-So, This or That d’Or,” Helen Rosner wrote in a recent New Yorker column.
But a cool French restaurant in St. Albans? Pour me a glass of natural wine and serve me that onion tarte tatin. I’m there.
Café Monette’s magic ingredient is its team: Its namesake, Adam Monette, 39, is a longtime local Northwest Career & Technical Center culinary arts instructor who has partnered with two of his former students, Tyler Comeau and Henry Long, both 27. Rather than finding too many cooks in the kitchen, they’ve each chosen a part of the restaurant to make their own — with excellent results. They all prep together; Monette bakes during the day, then he and Comeau are on the line at night, with Long focused on the front of house.
I joined the crowd for a 5 p.m. reservation last month, taking my seat at the “kitchen table,” a small high-top directly under a large window that peers into the heart of the action. On the other side, Monette and Comeau each glanced up from the line with a quick smile. They open at 4, and several diners were already mid-meal.
The customer behind me didn’t have a reservation. (They’re highly recommended, though there’s a bit more space for walk-ins now that the team has settled in, Long said.) But the new arrival wasn’t planning to stay. After that quick back-and-forth in French, host Norman McLure, Monette’s father-in-law, darted into the kitchen and returned to present the man with a baguette wrapped in butcher paper, tied with red-and-white twine. “Bread for the road,” he explained, sensing my confusion.
My dining companions wouldn’t have needed his translation. I was joined by my aunt Paula and cousin-in-law Kristi, a retired and current French teacher, respectively, at Bellows Free Academy in St. Albans.
Both locals, they’d kept me up-to-date on Café Monette’s construction progress over the past year. The space started as an empty shell, and nearly all of the build-out was DIY. Now it has an elegant herringbone wood floor, emerald-green walls and sparkling white subway tiles behind the bar. The room is très chic, if a little loud when it’s full, thanks to the cavernous ceiling.
“I usually order the wrong thing, but here I don’t think that’s possible,” Kristi said as she studied the menu.
Monette became a local celebrity after his winning run on Food Network’s “Holiday Baking Championship” in 2021. As we watched him work through the window, Kristi and Paula recalled several of his cooking classes they’d taken at the Northwest Career & Technical Center over the years, including a bread baking series; a “Butters of Europe” evening with Monette’s mentor, chef Jean-Louis Gerin; and a baking fundamentals course, where they tackled notoriously fussy macarons. Once, Monette taught their BFA French students to cook boeuf Bourguignon and Robuchon potatoes, with île flottante — meringue floating in custard — for dessert.
“I hope he’ll serve boeuf Bourguignon and those potatoes this winter,” Kristi said. “It was the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”
The Bourguignon has since made a test appearance at Café Monette, now that the weather suits a heavier braise. It will likely replace the restaurant’s very popular steak — first served au poivre, more recently with sauce Bordelaise ($42).
“Every week we take the bestseller, line it up and shoot it straight in the eye,” Long said. “Because why not?”
“We have an endless amount of ideas,” Comeau added.
In September, when it was warm enough that the restaurant’s enormous garage doors were wide open, my table started with pork croquettes ($14), an heirloom tomato salad ($16) and the onion tarte tatin ($14). We received three fried-to-a-crunch croquettes and each swiped one through the herby vinaigrette before shuffling it onto our own plate alongside scoops of the appropriately summery tomatoes.
Both of those dishes have since left the menu in favor of something more seasonal, but the tart has stuck around despite the chefs’ kill-your-darlings approach. With an oval quenelle of Boursin cheese held up gracefully by silky caramelized onions over a flaky bed of puff pastry, it’s even more appropriate when you want food to stick to your bones in the cold.
After our first course, McLure stopped by to ask how things tasted.
“C’est délicieux,” my aunt exclaimed. (I understood that one and agreed.)
For my main course, I chose the housemade sausage with peppers, onions and white beans ($25). Back in May, I had sampled a promising recipe test while interviewing Monette, Comeau and Long about their teacher-student relationship and approach to mentorship. I was happy to try the snappy sausage’s final form — and even happier to learn that Brennan Shuttle, another former student from the same high school class, has joined the team as a line cook after working in high-profile kitchens in Rhode Island.
Paula opted for poulet à la moutarde ($36), a hefty half chicken served with oyster mushrooms in a rich mustard cream sauce. The mushrooms, from St. Albans-founded FUNJ Shrooming, are key to the dish, Long explained. But that business has since moved to South Burlington.
“Being up here, there’s a lot of stuff we can’t get delivered,” Comeau said. “The amount of driving Henry and I do a week to pick up milk, mushrooms, produce, Hill Farmstead [Brewery kegs] … At other restaurants, it just shows up.”
The driving is worth it, they said, for the quality ingredients they’re after.
Café Monette’s local sourcing shone most brightly in what we deemed the dish of the night: potato gnocchi “in the style of New England corn chowder” ($28). Not as classically French as the other two entrées, the fluffy gnocchi bathed in corn stock, crème fraîche, lardons and golden kernels showed the chefs’ playful side while practically screaming about how sweet Pomykala Farm’s summer corn can be.
“Everybody knows corn chowder, so it wasn’t a stretch,” Monette said. “The corn was in season, and we just leaned into it.”
I stole more than my share of bites off Kristi’s plate of the gnocchi as I finished my glass of Seehof weissburgunder ($13), a bright, zingy German white wine. Like the gnocchi corn chowder, Café Monette’s wine is fun. Long, who does most of the purchasing and really knows his natural wine, said he started out with a more conventional list.
“The wine people are coming out of the woodwork, asking for more interesting stuff. We’re thankful, surprised, shocked,” he said with a laugh.
Pinot noir is still king, Long said, as is sauvignon blanc. But he’s selling Slovenian field blends alongside stunning Bourgogne blanc chardonnay from Grimm Wines, Vermonter Jessica Grimm’s French wine project. The latter is tough to find by the glass but is currently offered at Café Monette for $15 a pour.
My ears perked up when McLure wandered by again as we started dessert.
“No coffee?” he asked. “Brandy?”
The restaurant sticks to beer, wine and cider with no plans for a full bar, so the brandy was just a joke. But with the wine and a draft list that’s entirely from Greensboro’s Hill Farmstead, spirits are easy to forget.
One element I’ll remember is Café Monette’s hospitality. The tables are bare, but the service was filled with white-tablecloth touches: My napkin was folded when I returned from the bathroom, and our chicken leftovers were held in the back while we ate dessert, then returned nicely boxed as we paid the check. Little things, but details I rarely encounter in Vermont’s more casual dining scene.
For Monette’s Food Network fans, dessert is a highlight. We particularly enjoyed a peach mille-feuille ($13), with layers of local fruit and vanilla pastry cream sandwiched between puff pastry that shattered with each tap of the spoon.
A new dessert, cheekily called “French toast” ($15) — with maple pot de crème and a warm, custardy canelé — will have to tide over those anxious for Café Monette’s brunch. While the trio had initially planned a weekend morning service, they’re holding off until at least next year, instead focusing on dinner.
Monette bakes 20 loaves of bread each day as it is, serving it with mussels as well as fried Camembert and the country plate of housemade charcuterie. A few baguettes sneak straight out the door, as I’d witnessed earlier.
Mustering my best terrible French, I ordered a crusty loaf of my own ($6). “Une baguette for the road, s’il vous plaît,” I said.
It arrived, wrapped like a present, with excellent advice from Comeau, given how full I was after a glorious meal: Put it in the freezer when you get home and straight into a hot oven when you’re ready to eat it.
Café Monette, 97 N. Main St., St. Albans, cafemonettevt.com
The original print version of this article was headlined “A Monette Moment | A new dining hot spot buzzes in St. Albans, with French flair”
