A Little Bit About a Lot of Things

Essex is about 10 minutes from Burlington. The Essex hotel is part of the culinary institute, students make all the food that is served in the restaurant. The hotel is charming. Butler’s tavern is the casual lunch area, the formal area I assume is only for dinner.

I had heard mixed reviews about this place. My boss had been and loved it, the reviews on the web said that the food was ok but the service wasn’t that good. We decided to try it anyway. It wasn’t crowded at all, so we were able to score a booth in the back. The service was kind of slow, but maybe that’s just because I’m a Bostonian, we like things done pretty darn quickly. My other observation about this is, the waiters are students, they are there to learn how to cook, not to be waiters. We had nothing else to do  so we had a nice leisurely lunch.

We started with the vegetable dumplings ($5.95). They had a light delicious wrapper with great tasting veggies inside and were sprinkled with black sesame seeds. The first thing that came to my mind was California. They just had this nice light, fresh taste to them.

We then chose the chili con carne ($9.95) and the Highland burger with cheddar cheese ($11.95). I was thinking about getting the turkey club sandwich (Misty Knoll Turkey sandwich) but when the table next to us had their delivered I’m glad I didn’t. The sandwich was HUGE!! The chili was good and thick, real stick to your ribs food. It was spicey and meaty. The chili came with two large pieces of delicious corn bread on top. Yum! There was so much food and it was so filling that we brought half of it home for lunch the next day. The burger was wonderful. Grilled to perfection, meaty and juicy. The fries were also good, hand cut and perfectly salted. For dessert we went with the cinnamon sugar beignets ($5.95). For those of you that have been reading, I commented in a previous post about the fried dough concoctions from Il Casale. The ones at Butler’s were much better! They were warm and sugary, just like a perfect jelly doughnut should be-minus the jelly. They came three to the plate, each on top of a different sauce: vanilla bean, caramel and dark chocolate. They were light and sinfully delicious!

The Essex website doesn’t give you much information on the restaurant, see the link below. We made reservations through opentable and was able to see the different menu options.

Butler’s Restaurant and Tavern

Tags: closed, restaurant, vermont