I have always had the need to shake things up every five years or so. It’s not necessarily boredom or discontent with my life. It’s just a desire for something new, something that I haven’t done before, somewhere that I haven’t experienced. I don’t even really think that something new will make my life better, just different, and perhaps more interesting. I am not a person who likes or needs things. New clothing, cars, electronics, or jewelry make me anxious about having possessions that I need to take care of and take with me when I want to move on. Richard has been an amazing partner in that he understands this need for something new and rarely takes it personally. He’s also ready and willing to jump with both feet into whatever I propose. This has made for a varied and interesting life. It has also meant that our lack of caution and understanding of the potential consequences of my enthusiasms can cause some difficulties. And, as we discovered, some life-changing circumstances.

We have been incredibly lucky in that most of our leaps have worked out very well. Our first business, the About Thyme Cafe, was successful enough that after five years, when I got itchy for something new, we were able to sell it, pay off all of our debt, and leave with a good reputation and excellent credit rating. This allowed us to start our next business, Ariel’s Restaurant. Ariel’s has been a joy. We found, by luck or sheer determination, the right space to grow our family, exercise our creativity, and make just enough money to keep it all going.

Typically, after five years running Ariel’s, I started looking around for a way to throw a Molotov cocktail into our lives. We had no desire to stop running Ariel’s. We loved our home, our community, our friends, and our restaurant guests. We were able to change things up frequently enough to keep it exciting for ourselves and our clientele. But I like big projects. My favorite part of restaurants is creating them. I love the process of finding a space and designing exactly the right personality for that particular space. I have a passion for menu and recipe creation and kitchen design. Richard is a wonderful sommelier and bar manager. He loves working with local producers and distributors to create interesting and food-friendly wine and cocktail menus. He finds great satisfaction in developing new front-of-house systems to facilitate the excellent service we have come to be known for. He can create a bar where people feel comfortable and cared for. This is to say that it’s not only me who gets all hot and bothered about jumping into something new; he was right there with me.

We approached this idea of a new project intelligently, at least at first. We knew that we would still be running Ariel’s, so the new place would have to be within a reasonable distance of Brookfield, but it would also have to be in a place with a good population base. Montpelier was the obvious choice. We also knew Montpelier well, and a lot of the people who lived and worked there knew us. Any restaurant we started there would benefit from the good reputations of About Thyme and Ariel’s. The next decision was the type of food and atmosphere we wanted to offer. Since Montpelier is the capital of Vermont, it has many offices and the population swells during the day, so lunch would have to be a part of the plan. We didn’t think Montpelier needed another fine dining restaurant. An accessible, family-friendly place with a lower price point seemed the best fit. The new place would have to seat many more people than the forty to fifty people per night that we were able to serve at Ariel’s and stay profitable.

Richard and I have driven through the eastern part of the US several times, visiting friends and family, and always ending up in New Orleans, a city we both loved. It came to us that a Southern-style barbecue restaurant with some Cajun and Creole specialties might fly in Central Vermont. At that time there was nothing similar in the area. Who doesn’t love smoky ribs, Texas-style brisket, and sandwiches piled high with pulled pork (other than vegetarians, and this being Vermont, we would have to address that issue)? We are big fans of barbecue, and we missed it when we were home in Vermont. We quietly started looking for exactly the right space to open a large, funky barbecue joint within easy distance of the Capitol building in Montpelier, and the homes, schools and businesses in the surrounding towns.

After six months or so of exploration, we stumbled upon a location that we both felt was perfect for what we wanted to do. It was a huge storage shed on the Winooski River, on the border of Montpelier and Berlin, the next town over. It was being used as storage for the furniture store in front of it, and was owned by the family that owned and ran the furniture store. There was a section of railroad track that ran between the furniture store and the shed, and we immediately fell for the romantic idea of being on “the other side of the tracks.” There was lots of parking available, but the problem was that there was no water, sewage system, or foundation. The building was uninsulated, windowless, and basically unusable as anything other than storage. But did that stop us? Oh no. We made a deal with the owner that in exchange for putting a ton of money into his building he would give us a ten-year lease with very low rent and an option to renew. We went to the bank armed with our good reputation, and we remortgaged our home and restaurant. We took an enormous risk, but were energized by our ideas and visions, and perhaps more than a bit blinded by the potential that we saw.

We worked with a wonderful architectural firm to convert the building into an airy barnlike restaurant, with huge windows on the river side. We created a ninety five-seat dining room, a twenty -seat private party room and a ten-seat bar. It took almost a full year, so much borrowed money, and a huge amount of stress. Ultimately we got the city to hook us up to their septic, had a well dug with enough water capacity for the state to approve it. We had a foundation and a polished concrete floor installed. The entire space was insulated, a state of the art heating system was installed and we put in air conditioning for the summer months. We decided to use some extra space to create a playroom for kids. It had a chalkboard wall and a comfy reading area with its own library. We created plenty of storage and a long, narrow kitchen. We installed two large electric smokers and got our friend Cameron to agree to supply chunks of apple and maple wood from his forestry business. The kitchen line also had two commercial fryers, a five foot gas grill, a six burner stove with a large griddle and two ovens, and a commercial convection oven in our baking area.

Our offices and more storage were in the back, up a narrow stairway. We installed a walk-in refrigerator, but since we wanted to use as much fresh local product as we could, we only had a small chest freezer in the kitchen. We went to every restaurant auction that was held in Vermont that year, picking up wonderful butcher block tables and leather-padded wooden chairs, plus some of the kitchen equipment, plates and glassware. The rest we ordered from restaurant supply businesses.

The most fun for me was creating and testing the menu. We wanted it to be a true Southern style barbecue but there are so many styles of barbecue in the South! We needed to decide between Texas, Eastern North Carolina, Western North Carolina, South Carolina, Memphis, and Kansas City styles for our base menu of spare ribs, baby back ribs, brisket, pulled pork and chicken. We had to come up with our signature barbecue sauces, hot and mild, which we also intended on bottling and selling retail from our restaurant. Then there were the sides, which some consider to be the whole point of a barbecue restaurant. Also the New Orleans dishes that we wanted to perfect. It took months of trial and error, but we finally came up with food that was authentic to the styles we chose, that we loved, and that we thought would be popular even in the barbecue wastelands of Vermont. As sides we chose mac n cheese, collard greens with bacon, vegetarian collard greens, baked beans, black-eyed peas, coleslaw, cornbread and biscuits. New Orleans would be represented by my chicken and sausage Gumbo, fried catfish and fried shrimp Po Boy sandwiches, with a rotating menu of Southern and Louisiana specials. We added a vegetarian quesadilla and several big, complicated salads of greens, legumes and seasonal vegetables with the maple Balsamic dressing that was a huge favorite at Ariel’s Restaurant to satisfy the vegetarians. We also added a burger, on homemade brioche buns, and freshly cut French fries.

Richard had a very difficult job. We wanted a full bar with a menu of creative and classic cocktails, local microbrews and other beers, and a wine list that would go with our food. A nice little barbecue wine is not the easiest recommendation, even for the best of sommeliers, which Richard was and still is. He spent months researching, tasting, and working with distributors to come up with our beer and wine list, and he did an amazing job. He was also in charge of coffee service and other non alcoholic beverages. Of course, we served both sweet and unsweetened iced tea- we had spent enough time doing research in the South to know we had no choice but to offer both.

During this year of constant work on our new project, we also had to keep our other projects purring along – those being Ariel’s Restaurant, our ten-year-old, Ariel, and our three-year-old, Noah. I look back on this period and I just don’t know how we did it. The kids spent a lot of time in the car, going between the two restaurants. Noah played and watched videos, Ariel read and did schoolwork at the dining room tables of both restaurants, and they got to be really good at blocking out the hustle and bustle all around them. They also became very adept at blocking out their parents’ stress levels, and I like to think that this strange part of their childhoods helped them adjust to all kinds of circumstances later in life.

It took us a while to decide on a name for our barbecue. We spent many days throwing out and shooting down suggestions with our friends, but eventually we came up with Finkerman’s Riverside BBQ.

Finkerman’s was a combination of Fink and Duberman, our last names. We thought that this hint of our Jewish backgrounds was a fun little Easter egg, a clue that this would be a very personal, maybe slightly off-center kind of barbecue. And of course it was, because it was ours! We almost named it “Finkerman’s Not Quite Kosher BBQ” but were dissuaded at the last minute by our more stable friends. The adorable pig logo on our sign, menu and the labels we put on our sauce bottles was a gift from our very good friend Danny, a fabulous commercial artist in Houston.

After almost a year of construction, menu development, hiring kitchen and front-of-house staff, stocking, training, menu printing and marketing we were almost ready to open. We closed Ariel’s for the season after New Year’s eve so we could concentrate completely on getting Finkerman’s open and running smoothly. We knew we had to re open Ariel’s in the Spring for financial reasons, and so as not to dissappoint our clientele. We planned to open in Finkerman’s in January, so we could ease into the busy season, but a very cold winter made it impossible get through the frozen earth to finish the foundation and septic work on time, so we ended up with an opening date in March.

There had been a good amount of interest by the press and the public in the goings on beside the railroad tracks. On our opening night we did over 200 dinners. We continued to do three hundred to four hundred meals between lunch and dinner, with some take out. It was a bit rough at first. Learning to use the two large industrial smokers was difficult and we lost some large batches of very expensive meat during the process. Having one hundred and twenty five seats meant that we had to have a large staff, both back and front of house. They had to be trained on the various styles of barbecue and the sauces offered. I acted as Executive Chef at first, and I was working on the hot line up to twelve hours every day we were open. Eventually everything started to fall into place. The food was coming out quickly, and people seemed to love what we were doing. Richard and I basked in the glow of good reviews, lots of positive reinforcement from our customers, and the feeling that we had a business that would grow and eventually stand on its own, hopefully providing us with a secure future for ourselves and our kids. What we didn’t realize about running a restaurant of this size and complexity would come to shape and determine our future for many years to come.

Part 2

After four months of working at Finkerman’s every day, we had to go back to Brookfield and open Ariel’s Restaurant. Our busy season at Ariel’s has always been Memorial Day through mid-October, which is the end of the foliage and tourist season. We wanted to reopen Ariel’s at the end of April, during Vermont Restaurant Week. Restaurant Week was a great way to advertise our reopening and would give us a few weeks to ease into the routine after taking a break to open Finkerman’s. This meant leaving the running of Finkerman’s to our staff. Most of them were very reliable, but I did have some fears about Richard and me not being there to oversee the food quality and service. When you have a large group of employees, they tend to run the gamut between very reliable and somewhat sketchy.