'It's like home': Church Street mainstay Sweetwaters heads into final days

Sweetwaters wasn’t open for business Tuesday, but owner David Melincoff sat inside the restaurant having a conversation within sight of the door onto Church Street.

A woman passing by on the street stepped into the restaurant and asked Melincoff when Sweetwaters’ last day of business would be. Monday – Labor Day – he told her. She was not the last person to ask that question Tuesday, and was certainly not the first since the restaurant that anchors the Church Street Marketplace announced in late July that it is closing after more than 40 years in business.

“The last couple of weeks I feel like it’s Elton John’s last tour,” Melincoff joked.

Sweetwaters has occupied prime territory on the pedestrianized Marketplace since opening in 1981. Its expansive patio beckons tourists and locals alike in nice weather as THE place to sit and watch people come and go at the corner of Church and College streets. The restaurant has become a favorite hangout for locals drawn by the welcoming atmosphere indoors, and it’s famous for its generosity by donating meals and collecting coats for those in need each Thanksgiving.

Melincoff said founder Tony Perry saw Sweetwaters as a place that served regular food for regular people. Sweetwaters has never been considered at the vanguard of Vermont’s food scene, but in its four decades the restaurant became a place where things happened – where future spouses had their first dates, where marriage proposals were made and accepted, where bartenders shared laughs and gave counsel to their patrons.

“We fell in love with the people there. It reminds me very much of (the TV sitcom) ‘Cheers,’ the place where everybody knows your name,” said Lloyd Goodrow, who visits Sweetwaters regularly with his son, Daniel. “The staff is extraordinary. We get treated like the only people in the room.”

Pascolo Ristorante moving in

Sweetwaters will be replaced by Pascolo Ristorante, which is located further north on Church Street and is expected to move into the Sweetwaters space in late fall. Pascolo will be the first occupant at 120 Church St. not named Sweetwaters since Tony Perry of the Perry Restaurant Group opened the restaurant in a former bank building in 1981.

Perry owned four other restaurants in Vermont – Perry’s Fish House in South Burlington and Sirloin Saloon steakhouses in South Burlington, Rutland and Manchester. Melincoff said Perry wanted a less-high-end place than a steakhouse, so Sweetwaters was born.

“He wanted it to be approachable for people of all walks of life,” according to Melincoff, who said Perry envisioned bank executives and farmers dining as equals. “I like that, trying to be all things to all people.”

Sweetwaters has achieved that spirit, said Jen Mikell of Williston. She began coming to the restaurant as a University of Vermont student in the 1980s and has been a consistent customer for the past decade.

“It’s like home,” she said, noting that Melincoff sets the tone by engaging constantly with his staff to make sure everything is working as well as possible.

Mikell said she enjoys sitting at the bar eating tuna, French onion soup or Caesar salad while watching the weather or pedestrian life outside Sweetwaters’ windows.

“It’s just airy and makes you feel you’re on Church Street and absorbing everything on Church Street,” she said.

Melincoff, a native of Philadelphia, came to the Perry Restaurant Group in 1987 as director of operations. He had worked in the restaurant industry in California and was asked by Perry to help the restaurant group expand into other states, which it did by adding Dakota steakhouses in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York.

Sweetwaters had an energy when Melincoff arrived in the late 1980s as the pedestrian mall it occupies was hitting its stride. “That was exciting, to be on Church Street,” Melincoff said, “with the Marketplace at that time being the jewel of the state in some way.”

Gail Murphy remembers those days. She and her partner, Warren Glore, were more likely to go to Burlington bar/restaurants such as the Chickenbone Café or Nectar’s, so she was surprised when in the early 1980s Glore asked her to accompany him to the somewhat fancier Sweetwaters.

They dressed up and sat at a table in the back in the near-dark on the first floor. It took a while, Murphy said, before Glore brought out a ring box and popped the big question.

“We had been living together for quite some time, so it was really a surprise that he put that all together,” Murphy said. They married about six months later at their house in Shelburne.

They haven’t been to Sweetwaters much since then, but the restaurant will always hold a significant place in the lives of the couple who have been married for nearly 40 years.

“The food wasn’t that great, but it was special at that time as a kind of a destination for special things,” Murphy said. “It was just a really sweet night.”

The gratitude of Thanksgiving

It was in 1991, Melincoff said, that a general manager at Sweetwaters wanted to help the homeless. The restaurant began serving free meals for the homeless each Thanksgiving. A few years later, Melincoff said, he expanded the concept into a Thanksgiving community dinner that would also serve college students who couldn’t be home for the holiday or local residents who had no family to visit.

“Need can be defined in a lot of ways,” Melincoff said. Sweetwaters expanded the free-meal event by adding a winter-coat giveaway.

Sue Reardon began going to Sweetwaters after moving to Burlington with her 9-year-old son in 2006. “It’s very nice and it’s formal but it’s also very welcoming to children,” she said.

Reardon and her son became volunteers for the Thanksgiving dinner in 2013. “We’ve always tried to do things to give back to the community,” said Reardon, who recently retired after working in education for 36 years. “It is like a family. We will see the same volunteers year after year.”

The volunteers would also see the same diners each Thanksgiving, according to Reardon. Guests would recall conversations with the volunteers about sports or some other topic from the year before. “It’s nice for them to have that connection when maybe they can’t be there with the rest of their family,” Reardon said.

Sweetwaters, with help from business and individual donors, wound up dispensing up to 1,800 sit-down and delivery meals and 1,000 winter coats each year. Melincoff said many people told him, “The only time I’ve ever eaten in a restaurant and been served was at Sweetwaters.”

He teared up Tuesday recalling a Thanksgiving Day encounter involving a man trying on coats upstairs at Sweetwaters. The man selected an especially brightly colored coat and asked Melincoff if he could have it. Melincoff told him he could keep it, and the man hugged him. He told Melincoff he hadn’t had a winter coat for three years.

That man gave Melincoff a gift as well.

“It teaches you how to be grateful,” he said.

Thriving during the pandemic

Melincoff bought Sweetwaters in 2001 after Perry retired. The restaurant that seats nearly 200 patrons inside and 100 outside has thrived ever since, including during the COVID-19 pandemic that struck in March 2020.

Melincoff, 65, had been contemplating selling the restaurant and retiring before the pandemic but realized there was no way he could try selling Sweetwaters as the virus raged in its early days. Running the restaurant during the pandemic reenergized him.

Instead of steering a steady ship, Melincoff said, he got to be entrepreneurial and creative again. Most diners wanted to eat in better ventilation outdoors in the summer of 2020, so Sweetwaters gradually expanded its patio by adding another 40 tables across Church Street in front of the Michael Kehoe clothing store and Von Bargen’s jewelry store.

Goodrow said that’s when he and his son discovered Sweetwaters, as it was one of few restaurants open at the time. Goodrow’s wife had died recently and he doesn’t cook, so Sweetwaters grew into something of a home for him and Daniel, both of whom volunteered to help at the restaurant’s Thanksgiving dinners.

“It’s become a destination for me,” said Goodrow, a former spokesperson for the Vermont National Guard who works in downtown Burlington for the Vermont Department of Labor.

The former bank building Sweetwaters occupies has high ceilings that Melincoff said made many diners feel comfortable enough to eat indoors in colder months, so the restaurant did great business in the winter of 2020-21. The staff at Sweetwaters, which Melincoff said brainstormed with him to make indoor dining as safe as possible, was able to stay employed at a time many restaurant workers could not, and made up to $40 an hour.

By last fall, Melincoff said he felt that Sweetwaters was stabilizing after the tumult of the pandemic. He could feel the work starting to become mundane. He remembered his father cautioning him to love what you do, and if you don’t love it you can’t do it.

That’s when he knew it was time to revisit the idea of selling the restaurant.

Saying goodbye

Melincoff talked last fall with Jed Davis, owner of the Farmhouse Group that oversees several restaurants in and around Burlington, including Pascolo Ristorante. They announced the sale to the Farmhouse Group in late July, with stipulations including that Davis retains as much Sweetwaters staff as possible and continues the Thanksgiving Day tradition of generosity in some capacity.

Melincoff won’t miss some things about the business. Equipment only breaks down on weekends, he noted wryly. He told his wife of 40 years, Terri, that he won’t need his cell phone once Sweetwaters closes after business Sept. 5.

Melincoff said Sweetwaters’ staff consisted of many college students who would start as sophomores and stay for their junior and senior years before moving on.

“There’s always a constant rotation,” Melincoff said, “and after a while there’s only so many times you can say, ‘Goodbye.’”

Melincoff drew a great deal of energy from his young staff, he said, and he knows he’ll miss that. He spent 55 to 60 hours a week at Sweetwaters in recent years, often working nonstop for 10 hours at a time.

The customer response was intense when Sweetwaters announced its closure a month ago.

“It was shock. My phone blew up for three days,” Melincoff said. People told him how they met their future spouse there, how they’ve been coming to Sweetwaters for 30 or 40 years, how a bartender or host helped them find something they left behind or when they needed someone to talk to. Intellectually, Melincoff said, he knew Sweetwaters was a community gathering place, but he only felt it emotionally once people started sharing their stories.

“It was so heartwarming, some of the things people said,” according to Melincoff. He said he cried about a dozen times hearing people’s stories the day word came out about Sweetwaters closure.

Melincoff attended his daughter’s wedding in Moretown last weekend and suddenly realized after the celebration what big event in life faced him next.

“It really hit me – ‘Wow, we’re closing,” he said.

“It’s a potpourri of feelings” as Sweetwaters nears the end, Melincoff said. “There can be three truths at the same time.” He knows he’ll be sad, and that he’ll find retirement simultaneously exciting and scary.

“How will I find purpose in the next phase of life?” he wonders. “What does the universe have in store for me?” For the short term, he has a pretty good idea what the universe has in store – pursuing his hobbies of fishing, mountain biking and snowboarding.

Patrons brace for the end

Reardon, a regular at Sweetwaters for 16 years, has visited the restaurant several times since the announcement that it will close.

“Each time it’s bittersweet,” she said. “I get tears in my eyes and so does David. We’ll probably go back one more time.”

Goodrow, who with his son only really discovered Sweetwaters a couple of years ago, plans to go for lunch Saturday. He also has reservations for 6 p.m. Monday, as Sweetwaters plays out its final hours.

“They’ll be out of a lot of stuff,” Goodrow said, “but it’s about being there and being with them.”

Mikell, who began coming to Sweetwaters as a UVM student, had dinner at the restaurant last Saturday and felt instantly nostalgic. “It’s such an iconic institution,” she said. “The transition is going to be hard for me.”

She’s glad an established restaurant will move into the space. “I’m just really, really grateful that there’s some strong, beautiful restaurants on Church Street,” she said. “And Sweetwaters has been a big, big part of that.”

Mikell said Wednesday that she expects to go to Sweetwaters on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and will assume her usual seat at the bar on the restaurant’s last day Monday.

“I have to. It’s like the end of a marathon. I have to see it to the end,” she said. “And I will be sad Tuesday morning.”

Contact Brent Hallenbeck at bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com. Follow Brent on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BrentHallenbeck.

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This article originally appeared on Burlington Free Press: Burlington restaurant Sweetwaters ending 40-year run on Church Street