REVIEW

What are you looking for from your visit to Vermont? A beautiful, small, old town? Dorset was founded in 1761; today it’s postcard-ready. A cozy old inn? The Dorset Inn first opened in 1796. Good New England food? The current menu at the restaurant in The Dorset Inn features chicken pot pie, turkey croquettes, locally smoked meats and cheeses from local farms, and cheesecake made by nuns a few miles to the east of Dorset. You can enjoy all this beside a roaring fire in an 18th-century dining room.

Roasted garlic is a holdover from the Sissy days. It features local cheeses and crusty bread.

We’ve been dinner customers of the inn for many years, back to the days when Sissy Hicks owned the joint and was the restaurant’s chef. Sissy sold the inn in 2008 (you can now find her at Sissy’s Kitchen in Middletown Springs) but many of her menu items remain. While we have to admit that the quality of the cooking has taken a hit since Sissy’s departure, it’s still mostly satisfying, if a little too restrained in that country inn sort of way.

Roast Christmas goose with chestnut dressing, mashed potatoes, cranberry relish, and pan gravy – as comfortable as a cozy pair of slippers on Christmas morning.

The restaurant is one of the few in the area open for all the major holidays. Our most recent meal at The Dorset was a Christmas Day special menu feast, and we couldn’t have hoped for a more perfect setting, what with all the decked-out Christmas trees and fireplaces in just about every dining room. The food was pleasant if a little tame and under-seasoned, yet somehow seemed mostly appropriate for Christmas Dinner. The menu featured some holiday classics, such as roast goose, bourbon-glazed local ham, and bûche de Noël. Nice food. Know what we’re saying?

Apple Wood Smoked Venison Terrine with juniper apple maple chutney was one of the highlights from the Christmas menu.

If you need big city, cutting-edge cuisine, perhaps you’d better look elsewhere, but we feel the total package at The Dorset Inn is fun, and real, and nice and cozy. We’ll be back!

The menu called this Bourbon Glazed Wallingford Locker Ham. Wallingford Locker is about 20 miles north of the inn. The ham was served with maple mustard sauce and roasted fingerling potatoes.

Bûche de Noël works best when you can see the whole yule log before it’s cut. Nonetheless, it was fun and festive.

LAF TRAK: 

FOOD: 

BEST THING TO EAT: Turkey croquettes

These turkey croquettes are from the Sissy days but they are still on the menu. Back then we thought they were the best croquettes we ever had. We think they’d be worth a try now.