The Barnard Inn Restaurant

Dining on chefs’ dreams in Vermont

January 18, 2006|Dining, Alison Arnett, Globe Staff

Leaving the city for the peace and contentment of country life sounds like a dream. To Will Dodson and Ruth Schimmelpfennig, it’s a dream they made a reality.

The two young chefs, who met at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., enjoyed a level of accomplishment that many in the business would envy — not one, but two successful places in the restaurant mecca of San Francisco. But they found themselves spending all their free time escaping the city, exploring wine country and other more rural areas. When they decided they wanted to change focus, they could find nothing available north of the Bay Area. A teasing note from Schimmelpfennig’s father about a more affordable property in the hamlet of Barnard, Vt., about 8 miles north of Woodstock, led to an exploratory trip. Vermont’s April weather didn’t cooperate, says Dodson, but despite hail, thunderstorms, and power outages, they immediately fell in love with the 1796 brick building, which houses the main part of the Barnard Inn Restaurant’s dining rooms.

Dodson and Schimmelpfennig, who live above the restaurant with their four children, opened in 2000, and later added a tavern to the business. Not far from both Killington and Woodstock, the restaurant and tavern attract skiers, second-home owners, and tourists, Dodson says. But a lot of locals also frequent the restaurant, giving it a much different feeling than many ‘‘resort-only’’ places.

The Barnard Inn charms immediately, its warm lights and equally friendly greeting enticing us in out of the chilly night. There’s a low fire in the fireplace and a 50th wedding anniversary party in one of the dining rooms. The wine list is expansive, offering a fairly good range of prices. And the wait staff, which seems to be stretched a little thin this evening, is nonetheless eager to please.

Surprises can be good or bad in restaurant dining. When you read ‘‘creamy’’ lobster soup, you invariably get a mental picture of what you think you’ll get. But instead of a pale chowder, this is a deep, dark soup. Yes, Dodson says later in a telephone interview, there is a little cream in the soup, but the concentration and body comes from distilling lobster bodies and caramelizing vegetables to release their essences. The flavor that comes through is layered and complex, its intensity and sweetness finished off with finely minced shrimp and shaved black truffles. This is a winter soup, made for dark nights.