New Bristol cafe preserves community — and makes preserves
Brent Hallenbeck
BRISTOL – A Vermont native who lived out West for several years returned home to continue her business making preserves, while opening a café she hopes will build community.
What is the place?
The café, bakery, grocery and production facility known as the Minifactory opened March 26 on Main Street in Bristol.
The café menu on a recent visit included several selections of coffee and tea. Food options featured both sweet and savory yogurt dishes; a Belgian waffle with maple syrup, raspberry whip and buttered nuts; and a breakfast sandwich consisting of ham, egg, brined vegetables, pimento cheese and peach Bulgarian pepper tomato jam. (Café owner V Smiley called the thick-but-not-heavy biscuit sandwich a “jaw-expander” that might require a knife and fork to eat.)
The sunny space that seats fewer than 40 customers makes room for shelves full of Vermont-made specialty items such as spices, vinegar, flour and chocolate. The selection includes Smiley’s own preserves, which she sweetens with honey and produces on Tuesdays at the Minifactory. Varieties for sale on the V Smiley Preserves website include raspberry and strawberry jams as well as more unique items such as a lavender, blackberry and rhubarb jam and a nectarine, plum and cherry conserve.
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What’s the story behind it?
Smiley grew up on her family beef-and-vegetable farm in New Haven, just west of Bristol, and left to attend art school in Maryland. She comes from an artistic family — her sister, Moira Smiley, is a vocalist/instrumentalist who has toured internationally and runs a community choir Wednesdays at the Minifactory.
V Smiley noted that people who go to art school often become cooks to help pay the bills. She moved to Los Angeles and then Seattle, where she cooked and began making preserves. She was already planning to move back home.
“I always had the goal of building a community and destination spot wrapped together,” Smiley said.
Three years after moving back to Vermont, Smiley began in 2018 to offer Friday-morning pop-ups on Main Street in Bristol at the Tandem commercial-kitchen site, where she started to build the model for her café.
“It was my risk-averse way of doing it,” Smiley said of trying out her café before opening her own spot. She also built her clientele before opening the café by selling preserves at locations including the Burlington Farmers Market.
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Smiley’s preserves are honey-sweetened, unusual in what she called “the jam world.” Her 6-ounce jars of preserves don’t come cheap, Smiley noted, as they’re $13 at the Minifactory and $14 at the Burlington Farmers Market. Made from natural substances, Smiley said they’re labor-intensive and expensive to produce.
Buyers, however, don’t have to slather the preserves onto whatever they’re eating. “The flavor is really intense,” she said. “You don’t need a lot of it. A little goes a long way.”
Those interested in how Smiley makes her preserves might want to visit on Tuesdays, when the Minifactory becomes more production facility than café. The staff turns the bulk of its attention to production on that day, so a more-limited menu takes effect.
Smiley is a self-described “huge produce nerd” who wanted the Minifactory to include groceries for sale that, in many cases, are complementary to her preserves and reflect the robust culinary community in her home state.
“We are a small part of an incredible network of small food producers in Vermont,” Smiley said.
Hours and location of Minifactory
Minifactory café/bakery/grocery, 16 Main St., Bristol. 8 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Saturday; 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Sunday; 7 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Monday-Tuesday. (Tuesday is production day for V Smiley Preserves so a more-limited food menu is served.) (802) 453-3280, www.vermontminifactory.com
Contact Brent Hallenbeck at bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com. Follow Brent on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BrentHallenbeck.