At Fancy's in Burlington, Chef Paul Trombly Delights in Vegetables

Thanks to Paul Trombly, it’s easier than ever to eat your vegetables. The 44-year-old Burlington chef opened his first solo brick-and-mortar venture on April 24 in the cozy Oak Street restaurant space he shares with lunchtime counterpart Poppy café and market. At Fancy’s, the former Honey Road chef and Mister Foods Fancy food truck owner puts vegetables at the center of most of his plates, spotlighting ingredients that often play second fiddle.

Guided by Trombly’s deft creativity, a small team elevates the freshest seasonal and local produce with global techniques and flavors gleaned from the chef’s two-decade-plus culinary career. While Fancy’s is not exclusively vegetarian, as Mister Foods Fancy was, plants dominate the menu, which frequently shifts in response to local farmers’ harvests.

“A lot of people say they’re seasonally inspired, but for Paul, it’s literal,” said North Ferrisburgh farmer Hilary Gifford of Farmer Hil’s, who has sold vegetables to Trombly since the chef worked at Honey Road. “He really celebrates vegetables. He gives them his full attention.”

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• Daria Bishop
• Paul Trombly holding a chocolate cake and a toasted coconut creemee with candied sesame seeds

Last week, the finely diced stalks and blanched greens of Farmer Hil’s celtuce, a thick-stemmed Asian lettuce, starred in a salad dressed with toasted sesame oil, mirin and a touch of preserved lemon, paired with chewy, roasted Korean rice cakes coated in gochujang chile paste ($14).

For another new dish, Trombly rubbed Gifford’s sprouting cauliflower with Turkish red pepper paste before roasting it and stacking it in a seven-layer tostada ($16) with locally made corn tortillas, refried lentils, creamy pumpkin seed sauce, pickled apricot salsa and olive-herb chermoula sauce.

Both dishes were vegan and gluten-free. Much of Fancy’s menu is vegan, and other items can be lightly tweaked to be so. There are a couple of well-executed meat and fish offerings, but most omnivores will find themselves satiated by Trombly’s varied, palate-stimulating vegetables, as two recent meals demonstrated.

For my inaugural Fancy’s experience, in early May, I perched on a stool at the small bar with my husband and son. Between refreshing sips of a pear-and-cardamom brandy and tea cocktail ($13), I enthusiastically dragged my teeth down charred pea pods ($8), as Trombly had instructed.

The pods were sprinkled liberally with housemade everything spice, which seasoned each luminously green orb as it popped into my mouth. Falafel-encased olives ($12), one of the few menu staples, looked like small brown eggs nestled beside an herb-rich tahini sauce. A twist on Italy’s fried, sausage-wrapped olives, they cracked open to reveal briny centers cradling thick whipped feta.

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• Daria Bishop
• The stuffed focaccia sandwich

A memorable bowl of carrot “mochi” ($15) — served with a mass of tiny black lentils and wisps of fresh herbs — presented earthy, intensely carroty dumplings that were similar to gnocchi but delightfully bouncy due to the use of glutinous rice flour. Sadly, though carrots remain in season, summer humidity renders the moisture-sensitive gnocchi too difficult to make, Trombly told me later.

I didn’t know when we received the crispy rice pancakes ($12) that the trio of golden-brown, chewy, lightly tangy rounds was made with a fermented batter of ground rice and lentils modeled on uttapam from South India. I did know that they were deliciously complemented by vegetable condiments, including a spicy Middle Eastern-inspired pea-and-herb dip, jammy Indian beet chutney, and fresh mango slaw with a warm hit of chile flakes.

Along with the duck breast special ($28), perfectly cooked and presented on a bright bed of beets and strewn with herbs and cherries, we ordered the intriguing pastrami yuba sandwich ($17). Thin, folded sheaves of tofu skin stood in beautifully for the meat, right at home with the pickles, sauerkraut, soft Muenster cheese and abundant lashings of mustard.

The 20-seat restaurant hummed with energy as it filled up on a Friday evening. Friends caught up, and parents bounced babies between bites. My son ordered a glass of rosé ($10), which came in a juice glass. “It makes me feel like I’m at home,” he said.

Trombly pointed out that, although Fancy’s logo features a stemmed wineglass and root vegetables nestled in a pair of slippers, the restaurant does not own a single proper wineglass. Sharp-eyed locals might recognize the green-rimmed plates as hand-me-downs from now-closed Penny Cluse Café.

The restaurant feels far homier than fancy, which is part of the inside joke. When living in an activist collective in his early twenties, Trombly cooked free community meals, he explained. Friends teased him for carefully plating and garnishing everything he served, dubbing him “Mr. Fancy Chef Man.”

Trombly’s food could easily be served in a fancier environment, but he wants everyone to feel welcome. On that early May evening, a local farmer I know well sat down at the bar while two thirtysomething friends of mine nabbed seats by the window. All live within walking distance.

My friends said they were very happy to have another good neighborhood restaurant. One, a vegan, said she felt gratified to be able to order almost anything from the menu without special instructions. The other avoids gluten and welcomed the many naturally gluten-free choices. Plus, she added, the frequently changing menu “will keep my curious palate coming back.”

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• Melissa Pasanen
• The smashed cucumber salad

A couple of weeks later, my own curious palate returned for an excellently tangy turmeric lemonade with spiced hibiscus syrup ($10) from the compelling list of mocktails. Poppy owner Abby Portman had strongly endorsed the smashed cucumber salad ($13), and it exceeded my expectations. Each bite exploded on my tongue, zippy with lime and soy; crunchy with puffed, curry-dusted rice and candied cashews; and sweet-spicy with mango and house-pickled hot peppers.

Spring’s first tender asparagus ($15) were dressed elegantly with a creamy, chamomile-infused almond sauce; velvety pansies; and rosy, unsweetened rhubarb; they came with a whimsical popcorn garnish. In a riff on saag paneer ($15), Trombly used squeaky cubes of Cypriot halloumi cheese (“a little naughtier,” he said, than the usual mild, soft Indian paneer), and kale joined spinach in the silky, dark green coconut- and cashew-milk gravy. A localized, seasonal rhubarb version of the fermented mango condiment called amba brought golden tartness to each bite.

From the concise all-vegan dessert menu of cake and creemees (made with an oat milk base), I enjoyed the savory whisper in a not-too-sweet miso caramel creemee ($6).

Mix and match is part of the fun at Fancy’s. “I don’t really stick to one cuisine,” the chef said. “Food in America has taken from a lot of cultures.”

That unexpected popcorn garnish for the asparagus, for example, has been tucked in Trombly’s brain since his four years cooking at Oleana, a Turkish restaurant in Cambridge, Mass., before he moved to Vermont in 2017. Oleana is also where Trombly met chef Cara Chigazola Tobin, who gets credit for drawing him to Burlington to help launch Honey Road.

Oleana and Honey Road are among the many restaurants from which Trombly has squirreled away ideas and inspiration since the age of 14, when the Detroit native started cooking.

Influenced by punk-rock culture, Trombly had decided to become vegan, flummoxing his mom’s efforts to feed her son. “Veganism wasn’t really a thing” back in the mid-1990s, Trombly said. To supplement cheese-less Taco Bell tostadas and Little Caesars pizzas, he said, “I just started reading cookbooks.”

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At 15, he began busing tables at a vegetarian restaurant. The teen also discovered he could eat well in Detroit’s abundant Lebanese restaurants and learned about Indian food through the Hare Krishna, who offered free Sunday meals at their temple.

Even as Trombly tried out different careers as a young man — from running a nonprofit that taught kids to repair bikes to completing a three-year program in violin making and repair — he felt a continued pull to food.

“I always came back to cooking,” he said, reflecting that he enjoys flexing his creativity and making something he can share with people.

In his early twenties, Trombly spent a month cooking in Tamil Nadu in South India, where he learned to make the uttapam on which Fancy’s rice pancakes are based. Later, he traveled to London for short stints at a trio of well-regarded restaurants: Yotam Ottolenghi’s NOPI; Oklava, a now-shuttered Cypriot and Turkish restaurant; and Morito, a tapas spot.

Trombly is no longer vegan but still eats mostly vegetarian. He described Fancy’s menu as “what I like cooking the most [and] a reflection of what I like to eat.” Meat is easy, Trombly said, while “it’s kind of fun to play with vegetables more.”

The chef has dreamed of opening his own restaurant since he was 16, he said, but the financial hurdles were “daunting.” He called the two years he ran his food truck a “stepping stone.”

After seriously considering a few locations in or closer to downtown Burlington, Trombly decided that sharing the Oak Street space felt most manageable. He lives nearby with his partner and young daughter. “I’ve always wanted a neighborhood spot,” he said.

Now that dinner service is established, Trombly will add Saturday lunch starting on June 22 with a short menu of Mister Foods Fancy classics, such as the popular crispy potato wedges, falafel burgers and halloumi burgers. The following week, Fancy’s will launch a predinner snack menu deal Thursdays through Saturdays. Trombly said he is happy that neighbors have started popping by for evening creemees.

We should all be lucky enough to have Mr. Fancy Chef Man set up shop in our neighborhood.