Restaurant of the Week 

Mistral's at Toll Gate
10 Tollgate Road
Manchester Center , Vt.

Here in the Green Mountains of  Vermont is a French restaurant with a difference.

Long gone is the haute demeanor of the old Toll Gate, one of Vermont 's original Travel-Holiday award winners with a tuxedoed staff and sky-high prices. In its place is a less intimidating dining room, a simpler menu and the hospitality of personable chef-owners Dana and Cheryl Markey. Both local, they met as teenagers at the Sirloin Saloon, worked their way through area restaurants and ended up here, living upstairs in the rustic old tollhouse that looks like Grandmother’s cottage in the woods.

Although the two dining rooms seating 80 are country pretty with dark wood, lace curtains, blue and white linens, and gold-edged white china, it is the views through picture windows looking onto the trickling flume of Bromley Brook that are compelling. After dark, when the snow-covered brook and woods are illuminated, the setting is magical.

The menu offers a choice of about ten starters and a dozen entrées, most classic French with some nouvelle and northern Italian touches. Tempting starters include French onion soup gratinée, frog’s legs persillade, beef carpaccio with frisée salad, smoked salmon blini and escargots bourguignonne en croûte.

Main courses range from breast of chicken paillard with lemon-caper sauce to grilled filet mignon with roquefort ravioli. Homemade bread and a house salad with choice of dressings accompany. The options could be halibut stuffed with spinach and crabmeat, crispy sweetbreads dijonnaise, roast duckling with cherry kirsch sauce and medallions of venison with black truffle cabernet sauce. The specialty châteaubriand béarnaise and rack of lamb rosemary may be ordered for two.

The signature dessert is coupe mistral (coffee ice cream rolled in hazelnuts with hot fudge sauce and frangelico). Others include a complex chocolate godiva cake, praline cheesecake and assorted fruit sorbets.

While Dana is in the kitchen, Cheryl oversees the front of the house and an award-winning wine list.

(802) 362-1779 or (800) 279-1779. Entrées, $24 to $34. Dinner nightly except Wednesday, from 6.
 

Material excerpted from Getaways for Gourmets in the Northeast, by Nancy and Richard Woodworth. Copyright 2006.

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