(Update: Kingdom Table closed in February 2024, and Boule Bakery across the street moved in. The downstairs tap room also closed in early July 2024. They’ll both be missed by the St J’s community)
A fairly recent trip up to the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont had a passing through St Johnsbury a handful of times, and it gave us a good opportunity to check out a bunch of well-regarded places in town, including Kingdom Taproom, one of the area’s better-regarded beer bars with a very good selection of northern Vermont beers. But upstairs from Kingdom Taproom’s basement location is their sister establishment, Kingdom Table, which focuses on providing farm-to-table fine dining. Since we had a good amount of time before having to head back home, we decided to check out Kingdom Table for dinner.
Kingdom Table has a really attractive space right on Railroad Street, which is actually a bit more of a “Main Street” than the actual Main Street up the hill, with a good number of nearby businesses (Boule Bakery and Central Cafe across the street, and Whirligig Brewing next door). In a building that originally was one of the salesrooms for the Morse Fairbanks Scale company, and before that several different storefronts including a kitchen and bath store, it’s now a nice, well-lit space with hardwood floors and a nice, central bar. Menu-wise, the focus is on gastropub-style farm-to-table dining, with both a series of burgers, and a relatively compact menu that focuses on having a few courses of appetizers and entrees featuring locally-source, in-season food.
We started off with an order of bread, served up with a maple compound butter (hey, this is Vermont). I don’t usually bother photographing “bread baskets” when reviewing a place, but they did a particularly good job with this: a nice, fresh, and crusty loaf and a compound butter that was nicely deep in maple flavor without being overly sweet.
We both went for the soup course, which was a carrot and squash soup. You couldn’t miss this dish when walking in, since this very creamy and flavorful carrot and squash soup was served up with some freshly butter-seared sage absolutely filled the restaurant with the smell of fresh sage. A nicely composed soup, with very rich roasted carrot and squash notes, with just enough spicing to give it the slightest bit of a curry-like flavor.
For our main courses, we both went with one of their local specials: a crusted pork ribeye. I feel like too often places get lazy with pork, just doing pork loins or chops, but here they did a proper ribeye-style pork steak, with roasted curry applesauce, glazed carrots, and brown butter sweet potato puree. This was a solid dish: the pork cooked just to the point of perfection, a really nice fennel-forward herb crust, served upon a mixed bed of the applesauce and carrots. While the sides and garnish had a lot going on, the focus here was still on the pork, making this a thoroughly enjoyable dish.
Overall, we really enjoyed Kingdom Table, and there’s a lot to the menu we didn’t explore; courtesy of Kingdom Table downstairs, they have a very well-rounded beer and cocktail list, some great looking burgers, and some nice looking desserts. It’s definitely worth a visit if you find yourself in the Northeast Kingdom.
