First Bite: Three Ways to Brunch at the Grey Jay in Burlington

Honey Street government chef and co-owner Cara Chigazola Tobin is an enormous birder. In March, when she and normal supervisor and co-owner Allison Gibson introduced their plans to open a daytime restaurant, Chigazola Tobin defined its avian title, the Gray Jay.

“It is my favourite chicken,” she mentioned. “They’re actually curious and pleasant, [and that] spoke to the vibe of what we would like this place to be: It is brunch, nevertheless it’s a bit of totally different.”

All through the summer season and fall, Burlington brunch followers saved a birder’s cautious watch on 135 Pearl Road. They had been ready for the Gray Jay to carry the house again to life. From 1983 via 2006, it had been the house of the town’s solely LGBTQ+ bar, first referred to as Pearls, then 135 Pearl. Extra lately, the storefront housed Papa John’s, then Lion Turtle Tea.

On December 7, the Gray Jay’s doorways lastly flew open. The restaurant provides seated eating Wednesday via Sunday, 9 a.m. to three p.m., and takeout Wednesday via Friday throughout the identical hours.

Honey Street regulars will acknowledge points of the breakfast, brunch and lunch spot: jap Mediterranean flavors and substances, a useful glossary on the menu, wonderful service, an important signal, very cool bogs, and the very best kale salad on the town. The Gray Jay can be the devoted dwelling of pandemic-era takeout favorites from its sister restaurant, equivalent to rooster shawarma sandwiches and pastry chef Amanda Wildermuth’s decadent doughnuts.

“You stroll in right here, and you’ll inform that it is us,” Chigazola Tobin mentioned on a current afternoon on the Gray Jay. “However you possibly can inform it is not Honey Street. It is its personal factor.”

The truth is, the solely dish you will discover on each menus is that kale salad, with its crispy quinoa crunch, feta, pink onion, fennel, apple and tahini-yogurt French dressing.

The 2 eating places do share a number of employees members. Gibson works behind the scenes, and Chigazola Tobin designs the menus and travels up and down the Church Road Market to help the groups at each eating places. (Avery Buck, former sous chef at Burlington Beer and Stowe’s Doc Ponds, runs the Gray Jay kitchen day-to-day.) Wildermuth now manages the pastry program for the Gray Jay in addition to Honey Street, and Dana Parseliti helps oversee each front-of-house groups.

The 2 eating places’ décors and personalities are as distinct as their menus. Whereas Honey Street has a “pink and sparkly nighttime vibe,” Chigazola Tobin mentioned, “the Gray Jay is pure, earthy and energetic.” The 38-seat, daylight-filled house holds quite a few houseplants, lamps and materials in shades of inexperienced, in addition to hardwood flooring and tables that evoke the habitat of the namesake chicken.

Although renovation delays pushed again the launch of the Gray Jay, its final timing was poetic. It opened the identical week that longtime Burlington breakfast staple Penny Cluse Café closed for good.

In contrast with Penny Cluse’s menu — and most American breakfast menus — the Gray Jay’s is brief. That is by design, Chigazola Tobin mentioned. She modeled it after menus she encountered throughout her travels within the Center East: Breakfast is likely to be hummus in Lebanon or soup in Egypt.

“I used to be a bit of nervous to supply this smaller menu. It isn’t this big listing of selections that we’re used to as People,” she admitted.

The one-page meals menu is split into sweets, snacks and brunch sections. It options eggs and toast in decidedly Center Japanese kinds, together with Tunisian deviled eggs ($7); simit toast (a sesame-topped Turkish bread) with whipped feta, chopped salad and pickled egg ($12); and an egg-and-cheese breakfast sandwich (from $12) on a sesame bun with a inexperienced sizzling sauce referred to as zhoug and non-compulsory lamb sausage. Eggs additionally come poached within the two hottest dishes: a falafel Benedict ($16) and tomatoey shakshouka ($16).

Prospects order the breakfast gadgets all day lengthy, Chigazola Tobin mentioned, and a few go for lunchier lamb burgers ($16) and grilled rooster shawarma ($16) proper when the Gray Jay opens.

On my first go to in January, although I might include a plan, I used to be struck by indecision: It was midday, and the fried eggplant sabich (an Israeli-style sandwich, $15) on the desk subsequent to mine regarded nice. So did the lavish Turkish Breakfast ($32), a tower of plates loaded with dips, jam, citrus, pickles, olives, deviled eggs, focaccia-like mana’eesh and a simit. And the way may I neglect the doughnuts (from $5)?

“We imagined all types of eventualities,” Chigazola Tobin later instructed me. The menu could look quick in comparison with a diner’s multipage tome, “However it’s really extra choices, in a manner, as a result of there are simply so some ways you are able to do it.”

Possibly you are within the temper for a spiced Turkish espresso ($4, made with beans from Vivid Espresso Roasters) and a saffron-pistachio sticky bun ($6) — out and in in quarter-hour. Or maybe you need a snack or two? Or the whole snack menu?

Based mostly on observations throughout my single go to — and Chigazola Tobin’s recommendation — I got here up with 3 ways to navigate a daytime meal on the Gray Jay. Don’t be concerned, they’re all hits.

Wing It

I am not a morning individual, even with the promise of brunch. Sometimes — and fairly boldly, for a spot I knew can be busy — my husband and I rolled as much as the Gray Jay at midday on a Saturday. It was packed, and I used to be anticipating a protracted sufficient wait to run all my errands.

Cue my shock when the host quoted 20 to 25 minutes for a desk for 2. Wait, that is the wait? Changing errands with a Church Road stroll, we killed 20 minutes simply earlier than a textual content introduced that our desk was prepared. The Gray Jay was nonetheless packed and accordingly loud once we returned. It was brunch, in any case, and the tables had been turning and burning.

For a primary go to — and with simply two of us — my deliberate technique was to hit every class: a doughnut from the sweets part, crispy potatoes with sizzling pepper labne ($12) as a snack and basic brunch mains. I selected the eggs Benedict, which included the normal poached eggs, spinach and hollandaise however was served on a way more attention-grabbing falafel base with a contact of tahini. My husband went for the tahini French toast ($14), a chunky slice topped with halva and subtly flavored with orange blossom. The mound of potatoes was most likely greater than we wanted for a facet, however their crispy edges and fluffy insides had us ending them anyway.

The one draw back to our noon risk-taking was that we missed the doughnuts. Wildermuth’s candy treats had been a sizzling ticket at Honey Street’s takeout window in 2021, and it is no totally different right here: They had been bought out. The cardamom banana bread ($4) was a beautiful substitute.

We sat at a two-top desk alongside a green-accented banquette. The most effective seats in the home, Chigazola Tobin mentioned, are the low bar seats alongside the massive entrance home windows. Throughout the week, in case you’re fortunate, you may catch a glimpse of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders strolling from his parking spot within the again lot to his workplace.

The Gray Jay does not take reservations, so planners could need to present up on the early facet. However, with quick waits and a menu stuffed with issues I might fortunately eat, it really works for procrastinators and people of us preferring to sleep in, too.

Persist with the Nest

A technique to make sure that you get the doughnuts — in flavors equivalent to passion-fruit-and-olive-oil-filled, glazed blood orange-sumac, and apple butter old school — is to order a field on the Gray Jay’s web site. Simply as they did in the course of the pandemic days of Honey Street’s takeout window, clients can preorder on-line and decide up a field filled with doughnuts or different pastries on weekend mornings. (Ordering opens at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday; provides are restricted.)

Wednesday via Friday, the Gray Jay’s takeout is right for lunch. The entire menu is offered for on-line or in-person ordering, so you possibly can take a falafel salad or lamb burger again to the workplace.

“I by no means imagined takeout being an enormous breakfast scenario, aside from the pastries and breakfast sandwich,” Chigazola Tobin mentioned. “However lunch, that is good stuff to go.”

Within the Center East, wraps stuffed with falafel or shawarma are lunchtime on-the-go staples. “They’re messy,” she mentioned with amusing. “There’s a lot tahini that it is falling in all places. However it’s so good.”

Deliver the Flock

The final word Gray Jay expertise, although, requires reinforcements. Whereas I fortunately brunched with my husband, we watched in awe because the four-tops round us dove into their Turkish Breakfast towers, halloumi biscuits, maple-rose granola, kale salads, shakshouka, coffees, mimosas and Bloody Marys. That is the best way to do it, I assumed, turning solely barely envious.

Chigazola Tobin reassured me that two folks may deal with the Turkish breakfast, “in case you had been fairly hungry and that is all you bought.” However why sacrifice? When 4 folks share, many of the menu is achievable in a single meal. And what’s brunch if not a chance to meet up with buddies, fill each inch of a desk with meals, and sip a boozy beverage or two?