'Kind of obsessed': Pauline's Cafe mixes French influences, local ingredients for 46 years
This look at Pauline’s Café is the latest in a series of profiles by the Burlington Free Press on long-standing restaurants in Chittenden County. How do restaurants that date to the 20th century remain relevant, while continuing to do the things that have given them such staying power?
SOUTH BURLINGTON ― David Hoene knew very little about Pauline’s Café when he became the restaurant’s chef in 2001.
He liked the name, which is derived from the restaurant’s founder, Pauline Hershenson. Hoene began his career in cooking in Seattle in the 1970s and said he was especially influenced by women he worked for in the Pacific Northwest. He also liked the longevity; Pauline’s Café had been open since 1977, so its dedicated customer base was fully entrenched by the time Hoene came 24 years later.
More than two decades after he began at Pauline’s, Hoene continues as the chef/owner at the homey spot that provides a peaceful haven for diners on the busy commercial strip on Shelburne Road. A little bit of French influence, a lot of local ingredients, and a commitment to consistency while adapting to changing customer needs have kept Pauline’s in the game for 46 years.
Hoene is eyeing the end of his time running Pauline’s in the near future. For now, though, it’s still bringing him the pleasure that has kept him in the restaurant business for half a century.
“I like to see people enjoy the product I put out,” Hoene said.
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Moving from Seattle to Boston
Hoene grew up in a large family in Boise, Idaho, that raised its own beef and chickens. He spent his youth hunting and fishing, and cooking what he harvested.
He became an itinerant fruit picker in the Northwest, living out of a teepee as he moved from region to region. He said he continued that lifestyle of “roaming around the West” for years while also taking on restaurant jobs, starting at a “hippie café” in Missoula, Montana.
Hoene moved to Seattle, where his career in kitchens really took off. He arrived with an aptitude for cooking wild game, and in the Pacific Northwest honed his skills with fish. He remembers that fishing crews would arrive on Fridays with huge grates of whole salmon and that staffers would negotiate at the restaurant’s back door with the fishing crew over the price of the fish before, in many cases, serving it to those crews and other restaurant customers that night.
Hoene’s travels brought him from the Northwest to the Northeast in the early 1980s. His wife, originally from Westchester County, New York, wanted to return to the East Coast. They settled in Massachusetts. First, Hoene worked at a Swiss/French restaurant in the Berkshires, then in Boston at Rebecca’s, a restaurant/deli/catering business on Charles Street.
“I didn’t think we’d be staying in New England that long,” Hoene said while sitting in his Vermont restaurant, 40 years after the fact.
He wound up running a catering company but burned out on city life in Boston. A hunter and skier, he pined for a mountain setting. He and his wife opted for Vermont, buying a house in Lincoln in 1995.
How chef/owner David Hoene settled in Vermont
Hoene commuted to Boston for a year after moving to Vermont. “At that time, the wages in Vermont were astonishingly low” in the restaurant business, Hoene said.
He did eventually land a Vermont restaurant job, close to home at Mary’s at Baldwin Creek in Bristol. He became the number-two cook in the kitchen, earning enough respect there that Pauline’s owner at the time, Robert Fuller, who also owned Leunig’s Bistro in Burlington, recruited him to come to his restaurant in South Burlington as head chef.
A French-leaning, moderately upscale restaurant like Pauline’s didn’t necessarily fit Hoene’s natural fish-and-wild-game skill set.
“There was some learning curve to being here,” he said. “But I had control of the menu fairly early on.” He said he benefited from ample help in the kitchen; Pauline’s was a busy place in the early 2000s, as Vermont’s farm-to-table restaurant scene had yet to grow exponentially.
Back then, Hoene said, it was not unusual for customers to have four-hour dinners with wine. The trend has since veered toward smaller plates and a less-formal, less-time-consuming experience.
One of the changes he enacted soon after becoming chef/owner in 2007 was to unite the formal dining menu from Pauline’s upstairs space with the more relaxed café menu in the ground-level dining room. Customers, he said, often wanted items from each menu, plus combining the two made supplying and operating the kitchen more efficient.
Reviews, recommendations and TripAdvisor rating
Lisa Tomasik has lived in Vermont almost all her life but just discovered Pauline’s a couple of years ago. The Charlotte resident runs Elemental Massage Therapy on the other side of Shelburne Road from the restaurant.
“I love this place. I am so glad I found it,” Tomasik said. “I’m kind of obsessed with it.”
She stops by Pauline’s once a week or so. She raves about the friendliness of the staff and says Hoene comes out of the kitchen regularly to say hi.
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“I absolutely love the food,” Tomasik said, citing one of Pauline’s trademarks, crab cakes. She also likes the garlic tomato toast appetizer and shrimp risotto entrée.
“A big thing for me is the drinks,” Tomasik said on a recent Thursday night that found her enjoying a margarita. Pauline’s hosted Tomasik’s 40th birthday party, and she said the staff made signature drinks just for the occasion.
Hoene said Pauline’s clientele is more or less evenly split between locals and out-of-towners. The stretch of Shelburne Road from South Burlington to the Shelburne town line Pauline’s sits near is filled with lodging drawing travelers looking for a nearby place to eat.
Greg Nixon is general manager of the South Side Inn, which he and others bought in March. He often suggests to guests that they dine at neighboring Pauline’s.
“Everybody that’s been there raves about the food,” Nixon said. “They’re top-rated.”
Pauline’s is listed on the customer-review site TripAdvisor as the top-ranked restaurant among 41 in South Burlington. “A little gem of a place,” a TripAdvisor customer review in October said of Pauline’s.
Changing relationship with food
While Hoene has seen changes over the years in how people eat out, he has also noticed new patterns in food distribution that concern him, mentioning “disrespect” for farmers and cooks.
He cited the shrimp industry as an example; one supplier he has used has good quality shrimp but the number of shrimp per pound has increased because the shrimp are smaller. That means he has to put extra shrimp on a plate, affecting that all-important quality of dining out, the presentation.
“Our society has devalued the nurturing aspect of food to such a degree I can’t understand it. I’m always on guard against that type of thing,” Hoene said. “It’s frustrating as someone who cares about the product and how they want to present it to the customer.”
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Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Pauline’s served lunch, dinner and Sunday brunch; now the restaurant only offers dinner five nights a week. Hoene said he has found himself working even harder because of post-pandemic labor shortages.
“The concept (at Pauline’s) as it is now is working fine,” according to Hoene. But those supply-chain issues and changing customer dining habits have him considering a smaller menu and more focused cuisine, with “fast-serve and delicious” food.
Hoene sees the end of his tenure at Pauline’s in sight. He’s thinking of looking for a buyer and running the restaurant for two more years.
“Most of my friends in the business have either passed away or retired,” Hoene said. He will probably stay in the restaurant industry, just in a situation with less overhead and responsibility than he has now as chef/owner at Pauline’s.
Pauline's Cafe: Hours and Location
WHAT: Pauline’s Café
WHEN: 5-9 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday
WHERE: 1834 Shelburne Road, South Burlington
PHONE NUMBER: (802) 862-1081
WEBSITE: www.paulinescafe.com
Contact Brent Hallenbeck at bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com.
This article originally appeared on Burlington Free Press: South Burlington restaurant Pauline's gets top rating after 46 years
