One of southern Vermont’s most fêted culinary inns launches a nationwide search for a new chef. One of northern Vermont’s most talented chefs is on the lookout for new opportunity. When they collide, love ensues.
Come November 22, Jean-Luc Matecat — who has been chef at the North Hero House, Amuse at the Essex and Winooski’s Mule Bar — will move more than a hundred miles south to take over the kitchen recently vacated by longtime chef Jason Tostrup, who has joined Okemo Mountain Resort.
“It was a big decision, because I really didn’t want to leave Burlington,” says Matecat, but he suggests it was too sweet an opportunity to ignore.
When Tostrup announced he was leaving the Inn where he had cooked for eight and a half years, owners Marilee and Richard Spanjian cast a wide net for a new chef, and received 80 applications from as far away as Europe and Thailand. (The Inn at Weathersfield has picked up accolades from Food & Wine, Saveur and Bon Appetit magazines, as well as Fodor’s Travel Guides.)
After whittling down the pool, five chefs traveled to the Inn to cook for a search committee that included the Spanjians and former owner Jane Sandelman. Matecat showed up with some elk shank from an animal that his grandfather had shot at a private New Hampshire preserve — which he braised and served over cavatelli.
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