Vermont
Reinvented Deep City Brings Penny Cluse Café's Beloved Brunch Back to Burlington
The most beloved home fries in Burlington are back. The heaping mound of perfectly griddled potatoes topped with melted cheese, salsa, sour cream and green onions have a new name — and a new home. But they’re still a Bucket-o-Spuds.
The iconic Penny Cluse Café dish’s new name, House of Spudology, is a nod to that new home: Deep City, the restaurant attached to Foam Brewers. A year and a half after closing the landmark breakfast and lunch spot he co-owned with his wife, Holly Cluse, Charles Reeves is now the brewery’s food director, working closely with the team behind Foam and House of Fermentology. And while he initially told Seven Days that he wouldn’t be “opening up Penny Cluse” at the restaurant near the waterfront, he sort of did.
Deep City’s brunch — served Friday through Monday, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. — lacks some of the sandwiches and simpler breakfast options Penny Cluse served during its nearly quarter-century run, from 1998 to 2022. “But it’s all the hits,” Reeves said. “The aesthetic is the same, and some of the recipes are exactly the same.”
So was my order on Deep City’s opening weekend in mid-April: the aforementioned spuds ($9), which I accidentally ordered by their previous name; one large buttermilk pancake ($5) and a chile relleno with salsa ranchero ($5) to share; and huevos verdes ($16). My only new addition, appropriately beer-filled for the setting, was a michelada ($10), now made with Foam’s Tranquil Pils lager.
I usually skip a restaurant’s opening weekend to give the team time to settle in and work out the kinks. But I had confidence in the pairing of Reeves and Foam — especially with longtime Penny Cluse floor manager Anastasia Evans helming the front of house and Maura O’Sullivan, Penny’s kitchen manager, helping Reeves while she works to open her new Burlington restaurant, Majestic, this summer. When friends asked if we’d like to join them for an early Sunday meal, it was a no-brainer.
Like Penny Cluse, Deep City is walk-in only. We arrived with the high-chair crowd around 8:45 and were quickly seated. The dining room is smaller than Penny Cluse was — 50 seats versus 68 — but the lake-view patio will add space for 35 in May, once weather and staffing allow.
Foam’s sister restaurant first opened in March 2020, then closed in November 2023 due to lingering pandemic-era challenges and short-staffing in the kitchen. Deep City was a dinner spot, serving dressed-up pub food such as burgers, vegan poutine, and a ranch-and-romaine salad that sustained me through the early part of the pandemic.
Somehow, though, the space seems like it was always designed for brunch. Sunlight streams in through huge windows and bounces off the high ceilings, exposed brick and wooden beams. The kitchen — visible past a big bar — gets so much light that Reeves said it can be hard to judge the height of the flames on the stove.
“I’ll have to wear sunglasses,” he joked.
The energy of the space was bright during my early morning visit, too. Evans enthusiastically greeted longtime Penny Cluse customers, one after another. I waited in my fair share of lines on Cherry Street over the years but was far from a regular — especially compared to the fans who eulogized the restaurant in poetry, prose and art in these pages ahead of its closure in late 2022.
Looking at the familiar menu, I thought back to eating tofu scram with my late grandmother and hungover biscuits and gravy with my five college roommates. And then there was the time I learned the genius of ordering a pancake for the table from service-industry friends. (It’s more for snacking than budgetary purposes, but we were broke, so it ticked both boxes.) This time, I shared a table pancake with my 10-month-old son, who is just starting to learn how glorious such things can be. He was a big fan.
Based on the response in the restaurant that day and on social media, there seems to be an overwhelming sense of relief that Reeves did open up Penny Cluse. Tasting all that history again — and how it holds up, even in a new setting — I got a little choked up over my chile relleno.
The consistency, Reeves said, is largely due to how he thinks about food.
“I’m a documenter,” the chef explained. “If I change a recipe, I update my recipe card. I like to be methodical.”
He also predicted that the new Deep City would draw a crowd, which, so far, it has. “We had to open with a menu that was going to work,” he said. “This is not the time for me to be super experimental. This is the time for me to land the ship.”
As things get rolling and summer produce season approaches, Reeves thinks the menu will expand. Now that dishes such as the biscuits and gravy ($7 for the starter-size BAG and $16 for the version with eggs and home fries, still called the Penny Cluse) are back — along with gluten-free gingerbread pancakes, which Penny Cluse stopped making four or five years ago — “there’s no rational way I can remove them,” he said.
That means Reeves will continue to spend a good chunk of his time making the much-loved herb cream gravy — gallons per day.
I’d skipped the biscuits on my first visit and decided that was reason enough to go back. When I texted a friend asking if she’d be up for Friday breakfast at Deep City for “the return of Penny Cluse,” I didn’t immediately realize my mistake. She showed up 15 minutes late, having first gone to Cherry Street. A farm-to-table dinner restaurant called Frankie’s launched in mid-April in the former Penny Cluse space, but thankfully it wasn’t open for brunch.
When she arrived, I ordered the BAG and another batch of the spuds. The latter dish, Reeves said, is the latest in a long line of potato piles that mark his career. In San Francisco, he worked at Boogaloos, where the dish was called Temple of Spuds, inspired by Spuds-o-Rama at another city brunch spot, Spaghetti Western. He’s changed the seasoning mix over the years, but in its recent evolution from a “bucket” to a “house,” Reeves said, it’s stayed the same.
“Home fries have gone to a dark place culturally,” he continued, lambasting the now-common over-fried square version. When he started at Deep City, Reeves eighty-sixed the fryers. The spuds are cooked on the griddle, browned with onions and finished with herb butter, “as they should be,” he said.
Some of the name changes come from the fact that, while he’s in charge, this isn’t Reeves’ restaurant. He was 56 when he and Cluse decided to close their restaurant to spend more time with family, after working in the kitchen 50 hours per week and running the business another 15 hours on top of that. Here, even though his role as food director encompasses more than Deep City’s brunch, there’s somebody else to print menus and do payroll.
“They’re set up, they’re smart and they’re savvy,” Reeves said of his new employers. “Foam has a great thing going on.”
The brewery celebrated its eighth anniversary over the weekend with a big bash. Early last Friday morning, Foam cofounder and creative director Jon Farmer called me before heading into Deep City for a light breakfast of biscuits and gravy — his first sit-down meal at the restaurant since it reopened.
“We all missed Penny Cluse massively,” Farmer said, naming the huevos rancheros and verdes as among his favorite dishes. “To have these options back is pretty incredible.”
Deep City had offered brunch occasionally over the years, he said, “but we were spread too thin with dinner, and I always thought it would be a dinner restaurant first.”
When Reeves and Foam cofounder Dani Casey pitched the rest of the team on the current brunch concept, Farmer continued, “it clicked for everybody that this could be the best use of the space.”
Only serving brunch leaves the restaurant open for nighttime events and overflow for live music and comedy shows at the brewery — a win-win.
Spirits are high at 112 Lake Street, Farmer said. Reeves is also revamping the menu on the taproom side, and the team is considering opening the Foam taproom before noon on weekends to let customers enjoy coffee or beer if there’s a wait for brunch.
Working with Reeves and his tight-knit team has been “a dream,” Farmer said. “I mean, he’s hilarious and professional at the same time.”
The return of Penny Cluse has been a dream for Reeves, too.
“The end of Penny Cluse was emotional. People were coming in, giving hugs and being like, ‘Oh, my God. I can’t believe it,’” Reeves recalled. “This is the whole thing in reverse: People are coming in, giving hugs and being like, ‘Oh, my God. I can’t believe it.’”
Two empty seats
The leaders of both the Vermont House and Senate will not be running for reelection. So who will fill their shoes?
Senate Majority Leader Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden Southeast, said she’s running for Senate president pro tempore.
Ram Hinsdale has served in the legislature for 14 years and is the first woman of color to serve in the Senate.
“I have seen so many types of leadership, so many tools in the toolbox that you can use to move people in the same direction,” she said.
While spending more than a decade in the Legislature, Ram Hinsdale said she’s lived through many crises and charted the state’s path through them. She was a lawmaker during the Great Recession, the Covid-19 pandemic and two years of record breaking floods.
With multiple long-serving legislators retiring this year, Ram Hinsdale said she thinks she will bring needed institutional knowledge and experience, along with a willingness to rally new people.
Along with Ram Hinsdale, lawmakers have eyed Sen. Andrew Perchlik, D/P-Washington, who currently chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, as a future pro tem.
Perchlik said Friday that he’s considering running for the position, though he didn’t want to definitively say until after the primary election in August.
“I’ve been approached by many senators asking me to do it,” Perchlik said. And he said he thinks it makes sense, given his past leadership roles as the whip for the majority party in the Senate and his former role as chair of the Senate Transportation Committee.
Perchlik has chaired the appropriations committee for the last two years, receiving bills from every committee and managing the state’s funds. That role has allowed him to work with lawmakers across the chamber and different parts of the executive branch, he said.
“You get a really broad picture of the entire government,” Perchlik said.
Just a day after House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, surprisingly announced that she won’t seek reelection, a handful of likely Democrats to succeed her said they were mum on their plans to run for speaker.
House Majority Leader Rep. Lori Houghton, D-Essex Junction, said it’s too soon to say if she will run, though she didn’t rule out the possibility.
“She just announced yesterday,” Houghton said, adding that she’s trying to focus on finishing out the session.
Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, D-Brattleboro, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, similarly said she’s considering running, but right now she’s focused on finishing legislative work, too.
Rep. Charlie Kimbell, D-Woodstock, said, “I haven’t made up my mind about it.” Kimbell previously ran for speaker in 2020 before dropping out of the race to endorse Krowinski. He also ran for lieutenant governor in 2022 before losing in the primary.
Rep. Laura Sibilia, I-Dover, who challenged Krowinski for speaker at the beginning of 2025, said, “I have not ruled it out.”
In the know
At the eleventh hour, lawmakers let the law enforcement masking bill supported by immigrant rights activists, S.208, die.
“I’m very disappointed with what has happened to S.208,” said Sen. Nader Hashim, D-Windham, the bill’s lead sponsor, on the Senate floor Friday.
The decision comes after a committee of lawmakers from the House and Senate agreed on a version of the bill that would have largely banned all law enforcement operating in the state — including federal agents — from wearing masks or failing to visibly identify themselves.
Committee members decided to make that provision of the bill go into effect March 15, 2027, rather than upon passage, reasoning it would give the state time to see how similar laws in other states play out in the courts.
The bill the committee approved would have given the Vermont attorney general’s office the responsibility to enforce it, bringing a civil lawsuit if officers violated the law.
Upon passage, the bill also would have required a Vermont law enforcement board to create a statewide policy on masking and identification for local and state police.
All members of the conference committee signed on to support the newest version of the bill except the committee’s lone Republican appointee, Sen. Chris Mattos, R-Chittenden North. During a committee meeting Thursday, Mattos said he was unsure he could support the bill because the committee hadn’t heard from the attorney general’s office about whether it was on board to enforce the policy.
After the conference committee approved the bill, it sat on the House’s calendar Friday but was not taken up on the House floor.
For the bill to pass before adjournment, lawmakers would have needed three-quarters of the House to suspend legislative rules, which would allow lawmakers to speed up the legislative process. That would have required Republican support.
Lawmakers on the Senate floor decided to adjourn around 5:50 p.m., giving up on the idea of receiving the bill from the House.
“It was barely a year ago that I watched Mohsen Mahdawi be taken by masked men in unmarked vehicles,” said Sen. Becca White, D-Windsor, expressing her frustration that the bill didn’t pass.
— Charlotte Oliver
Lawmakers on the House floor Friday made a failed attempt to override the governor’s veto of a bill, H.727, that would have set strict guardrails for any future huge data centers in Vermont.
The bill contained provisions that would prevent any large data centers in Vermont from increasing electricity costs for average ratepayers. The bill also contained provisions that would restrict how data centers discharge chemicals and use water to stay cool in an attempt to limit environmental impacts.
Gov. Phil Scott vetoed the bill Thursday. In his letter to lawmakers, Scott said he believes Vermont’s existing regulations would prevent harmful impacts from data centers.
Lawmakers voted 83-52 in favor of overriding the veto, but they needed 90 votes to do so.
— Charlotte Oliver
On the move
Vermont’s House and Senate budget writers reached a deal Thursday night on a state spending package for the upcoming fiscal year, which starts in July.
Agreement on the budget bill, H.951, came with likely just a day left in this year’s legislative session. Overall, the joint House and Senate conference committee’s version of the budget totals $9.38 billion, close to the amount of spending Gov. Phil Scott proposed at the start of the session in January.
The bill was expected to get a final sign-off on the House floor Friday after weeks of both public and closed-door negotiations. The conference committee signed off on the bill around 11 p.m. Thursday.
Among the last pieces of the nearly 150-page legislation to get resolved in the committee was a controversial plan to take money out of a state-run college scholarship fund to help pay for a long-stalled athletic complex at the University of Vermont instead. The fund, called the Higher Education Endowment Trust Fund, saw a historic infusion of cash last year from Vermont’s tax on the estates of high-wealth individuals.
Read the full story here.
— Shaun Robinson
Say cheese
“A crime has been committed, and we do need justice by the end of the day.”
Rep. Conor Casey, D-Montpelier, told his colleagues on the floor Friday morning that he was set on getting to the bottom of a putrid predicament that has been vexing him and other members of the House Corrections and Institutions Committee for weeks.
As he told it: Casey walked into the committee room a couple of months ago to “a rancid smell.” After weeks of searching high and low, he realized that the desks making up the committee’s table had small drawers underneath that he had never noticed before. He opened his drawer, only to find “a moldy, disgusting, offensive glob of cheese,” with a note that read, “say cheese.”
Casey is well known around the Statehouse for pulling pranks on his colleagues, so the cheese may have been an effort to get back at him before he steps down from the House. He then pulled open the drawer of his seat-neighbor, Barre Town Republican Rep. Gina Galfetti, to find yet another glob of cheese.
“It was a bipartisan cheesing, Madam Speaker,” he exclaimed Friday.
If the person who lodged the offending dairy did not come forward by the end of the day, Casey said, he would subject his colleagues to a full recitation of James Joyce’s mammoth novel, “Ulysses,” on the floor. Coming from the man who recited part of a play he wrote during a floor session last year, that seemed far from an empty threat.
As of this newsletter’s deadline, at least, the mystery remained unsolved.
“The craven still hides in the shadows,” Casey wrote in a text. “But rest assured they will be brought to justice. The session may end, but my lust for vengeance will endure…”
— Shaun Robinson
Nearly 1,000 Vermont students will bring live jazz to downtown Burlington this June as part of the 2026 Discover Jazz Festival, with dozens of school ensembles scheduled to perform free concerts on Church Street.
According to a community announcement, 44 ensembles from 36 schools, representing 993 students from across Vermont, will take part in the festival’s 43rd year.
The student concerts are organized by The Flynn, which produces the Burlington Discover Jazz Festival and oversees its education and community programs. All student performances are free and open to the public.
Student performances highlight statewide participation
Participating schools span Vermont, including Chittenden, Franklin and Grand Isle counties, central Vermont, Addison County, Lamoille Valley, the Northeast Kingdom and southern Vermont, along with visiting ensembles from New York, according to the announcement.
Chittenden County schools listed include Burlington High School, Champlain Valley Union High School, Charlotte Central School, Colchester High School and Middle School, Edmunds Elementary and Middle schools, Essex High School and Middle School, South Burlington High School, Winooski Middle High School and Vermont Commons School, among others.
The student performances will take place during the Burlington Discover Jazz Festival, which runs June 3–7 and features free outdoor concerts alongside ticketed performances by internationally recognized artists curated by MacArthur fellow Jason Moran.
Featured collaboration includes Vermont Youth Orchestra musicians
A featured performance during the festival, “My Heart Sings: Jason Moran Plays Duke Ellington”, will include musicians from the Vermont Youth Orchestra Association jazz ensemble, according to the announcement.
The concert will also feature guest vocalist Rachel Ambaye, a South Burlington native studying with Moran at Berklee College of Music. Ambaye will join the student ensemble for a collaboration tied to one of the festival’s signature performances.
Flynn Executive Director Jay Wahl said in the announcement that bringing student musicians into the center of the festival highlights jazz as a living tradition shared across generations.
This story was created by Dave DeMille, ddemille@gannett.com, with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Journalists were involved in every step of the information gathering, review, editing and publishing process. Learn more at cm.usatoday.com/ethical-conduct.
MONTPELIER, Vt. (WCAX) – Republican Gov. Phil Scott filed Thursday to seek a sixth term in office while the heads of both legislative chambers announced they will not run for reelection.
Thursday marked the deadline for candidates to get on the ballot for the August primary elections. For months, it has been unclear if Scott would run again.
“I don’t want to see anything move backwards; we need to keep pushing ahead,” Scott said.
Scott filed the necessary 500 signatures on Thursday. If he serves a sixth term, he would be the longest-serving consecutive governor in state history.
“It’s not easy work, it weighs on you, but at the end of the day, I feel the responsibility to stick this out,” Scott said.
The governor has won by larger margins each cycle. Potential Democratic challengers have waited to see whether Scott might step aside, providing a chance not to run against a popular incumbent.
Those who political observers speculated might be interested in the governor’s race included Democratic Attorney General Charity Clark and Treasurer Mike Pieciak. Both instead decided to seek reelection.
Pieciak told reporters he has experienced several personal tragedies this year and wants to continue with his office’s work. “It’s really been a year of reflection, and I think I’m excited about continuing this job that I enjoy,” Pieciak said.
Scott will face an opponent in November. Democrats Aly Richards and Amanda Janoo will face off in the August primary.
Three other Democrats, Molly Gray, Ryan McLaren, and Esther Charlestin, will face off for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor and the chance to challenge incumbent Republican John Rodgers in November.
House Speaker Jill Krowinski received a standing ovation from House lawmakers as she announced she will not seek reelection, joining Senate President Phil Baruth.
“The next group of leaders will do a great job continuing on with this work. I wouldn’t be leaving if I didn’t think that we had the right people in places to do this work,” Krowinski said.
That means there will be fresh leadership in the House and Senate next legislative session.
And there is competition in the race for Congress. Republicans Gerald Malloy and Mark Coester will face off in the GOP primary to determine who will face Congresswoman Becca Balint in November.
“To deliver results for Vermont. They are tired of the constant complaining and angry rhetoric,” Malloy said.
There are at least three dozen state House and Senate races that will see fresh faces as another large contingent of lawmakers steps back.
Copyright 2026 WCAX. All rights reserved.
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