RESTAURANT NEWS | NORTHEAST
Adam Monette Is Making St. Albans a Vermont Dining Destination
CAFÉ MONETTE | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Eric Barton | 7:39 a.m. ET, June 8, 2026
Apple cream puff
AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
Adam Monette spent years teaching other people how to cook. Now two of his former students are helping him run one of Vermont’s most talked-about new restaurants.
Monette opened Café Monette in St. Albans with Tyler Comeau and Henry Long, both of whom studied under him at the Northwest Career & Technical Center. Monette and Comeau cook; Long runs the dining room and wine program. The partnership has already carried the French-inspired restaurant onto the James Beard Foundation’s 2026 semifinalist list for Best New Restaurant.
French-cut pork chop
Monette came into the project with a following. The longtime culinary instructor won Food Network’s Holiday Baking Championship in 2021, and pastries and breads still give Café Monette much of its character. He produces about 20 loaves a day, sending baguettes to the tables with mussels, fried Camembert, and house-made charcuterie, while a few leave wrapped in butcher paper for the road.
The menu changes often enough that popular dishes are not necessarily guaranteed. Onion tarte tatin has remained, built on puff pastry with caramelized onions and Boursin. Other menus have brought poulet à la moutarde with oyster mushrooms, potato gnocchi modeled after New England corn chowder, house-made sausage with white beans, and steaks finished with French sauces.
Toulouse-style sausage
Dessert gives Monette another chance to show off: mille-feuille layered with local fruit and vanilla pastry cream, or “French toast” made with maple pot de crème and a warm canelé. Long’s wine list moves from familiar pinot noir and sauvignon blanc into Slovenian field blends and small French producers.
Crêpes Suzette
Mille-feuille
Café Monette seats diners in a former empty shell the partners largely built out themselves. What they have filled it with is more revealing: former teacher and students working side by side, French technique meeting Vermont farms, and a small northern city suddenly part of the national restaurant conversation.
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