At Cafe NOA, Paris-trained chef aims for simple, and local, with new Montpelier cafe
MONTPELIER – He trained in France and worked in high-end restaurants from New York to California. Now the owner of a new café in Vermont’s capital city is aiming to keep things simple while elevating soup and sandwiches a notch above the norm.
What is the place?
Joe Buley opened Café NOA on a crooked little lane off Barre Street in Montpelier on Feb. 25, in the middle of a sizable snowstorm.
“People skied in,” he said.
Café NOA is located near Joe’s Kitchen at Screamin’ Ridge Farm, where for years Buley has been producing soup sold in local stores and farmers markets. The café has some of that soup on its menu – the roster on March 8 featured chicken tortilla, minestrone and cheddar ale – as well as coffee, tea and a variety of soft drinks.
The café’s raison d’etre, however, might be its sandwiches, served both at breakfast and lunchtime. Egg sandwiches come with optional toppings including avocado, bacon, pulled pork and kimchi.
Sandwiches more likely to be ordered for lunch include grilled cheese, roast or smoked turkey, a pastrami Reuben and Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches with either pork belly or barbecue tempeh. (The latter, Buley said, is the café’s most-popular sandwich so far.) Sandwiches may be served on Café NOA’s homemade English muffins or bread from Red Hen Baking in Middlesex, one of Buley’s first soup customers. Diners seeking gluten-free options might eat a sandwich that’s wrapped in a corn tortilla.
The sunny café located in a renovated granite shed seats 30 or so customers inside, and Buley said that capacity will swell past 40 when the weather makes dining on the outdoor patio along Montpelier’s bike path more appealing. That gives the café a leg-up on more-centrally-located eateries in the capital city, most of which have alfresco seating on sidewalks along busy downtown streets.
“There’s nothing like it in town,” Buley said of his setting.
What’s the story behind it?
Buley was born in San Antonio, but his parents came from Vermont. He remembers visiting his French-Canadian grandmother’s house in East Randolph, where the scent of soup was ubiquitous.
Buley pursued his own interest in food not in Texas or New England, but far afield. He attended cooking school in Paris, then returned to the U.S. to spend three decades crafting dishes in fine-dining establishments in places such as New York City, San Francisco and Austin.
Like the wafting aroma of soup, Vermont drew Buley back to the state of his heritage. He moved to Vermont in 1999 to teach at the now-closed New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier, and soon began making soup for commercial sale. The building he makes his soup in had adjacent vacant space, which tempted him to get back into the restaurant world, albeit on a more-modest scale than the high-end places he ran in the past.
“It’s kind of that itch. It’s what I like to do,” Buley said. “I was like, ‘Well, let’s put a café in here.’”
The simplicity of Café NOA appeals to Buley compared to the high-end work he had been doing. “This is more casual, more manageable, and I get to do it on my terms,” he said. “I’m done with the pretention. I’m finished with entitled customers.”
He’s decidedly not finished with an emphasis on food from close to home. Buley said more than half of Café NOA’s ingredients are produced in Vermont, and he wants to increase that percentage.
“We’re heavily focused on local,” he said.
Hours and location
Café NOA, 8 Putnam St., Montpelier. 6:30 a.m.-2 p.m. Monday-Friday, 7:30 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. https://screaminridgefarm.com/cafe-noa
Contact Brent Hallenbeck at bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com. Follow Brent on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BrentHallenbeck.
This article originally appeared on Burlington Free Press: Vermont cafe keeps it simple, and local, with soup-and-sandwich menu
