Welcome to another of Offbeat Eats’ Health Check reviews, where we re-visit old favorites and check out how they are doing. Late this summer, a visit to Lincoln Peak Vineyard to pick up our quarterly wine order nicely aligned with some of our Vermont Tiki friends going out for a group dinner at A Single Pebble. I’ve long thought that A Single Pebble is the best Chinese restaurant in Vermont, and realized that while I’ve been there a good dozen times since my 2013 review, I hadn’t been there since the Pandemic, so it was a good opportunity to see how A Single Pebble is doing.
Since my 2013 review, the restaurant hasn’t moved, but the neighborhood has definitely changed; A Single Pebble used to be across from Burlington Town Center Mall, but that mall closed in 2017 and has mostly been demolished for the long and drama-ridden CityPlace development. For at least a while longer, that puts A Single Pebble across the street from… a construction zone with very little actual construction. As far as the restaurant itself, it is pleasantly unchanged, still a nice pair of houses that were renovated and combined so that the main dining area is the former yard between them. For our visit, however, we managed to score a seat in the upper dining room/bar area, in a part of the left house that used to be the dining room. Otherwise, it’s still the same, pleasant, white-table-cloth and central lazy Susan experience from before.
We started off with cocktails. I myself got quickly drawn to the Yuzu Gimlet, a nice variation of the classic cocktail that replaced most of the limit with yuzu instead, so the final composition was Roku Japanese Gin, yuzu juice, simple syrup, and a dash of lime. Nice, tangy, and bold.
Especially since we were visiting with our Vermont Tiki friends, most everyone else at the table got their Pebble Mai Tai, the house variation of the classic Tiki drink that’s common to a lot of Chinese restaurant menus. The overall drink takes some heavy liberties with the Mai Tai concerpt, with Bacardi, triple sec, pineapple, fresh squeezed OJ, dash of grenadine, and a Myers rum floater, but at the end of the day, this was still a good cocktail even if it offends the purists.
In classic American Chinese Restaurant style, we ended up just ordering a good half dozen dishes from the menu and using the central lazy Susan to share the dishes around the table. First up, we had one the classic A Single Pebble dishes: mock eel. Made from carefully spiral-sliced crispy shiitake mushrooms glazed with a ginger-scallion-soy sauce, this is a perfectly textured dish that just works well: the crispy mushroom texturally evokes the same mouthfeel as a well-seared eel, and has just enough of the soy and ginger notes to give it a nice flavor that complements the woody mushroom notes. This will remain a favorite.
Next up was the Ants Climbing a Tree. New to me, but a regular favorite of our friend Heather, this is cellophane noodles with minced pork and tree ear mushrooms, tossed in a hot bean sauce. Really, this was a good overall noodle dish that nicely focuses on the noodles but gives them more than a bit of spicy pork and woody mushroom flavor. I can see why this is a popular dish.
We also orderd a bunch of dumplings for the table, both some regular steamed spicy pork dumpings, some tofu dumplings (shown), and the less-photogenic special dumplings, with spiced pork enrobed in sticky rice. All of these were good, and cooked to the perfect texture.
We also had one of the daily specials, the king trumpet stir fry. This was essentially a “mock three cup chicken” with the very large and woody king trumpet mushrooms replacing the chicken in the classic Taiwanese dish. While a bit firmer than I was expecting, the king trumpet generally worked well here, absorbing the soy, sesame, and rice wine flavors of the sauce, and still retaining a nice stir fry crisp.
And I finished with an old menu favorite of my own: the red oil chicken: poached chicken braised in a spicy garlic, chili, and Sichuan pepper sauce. This was very nicely executed, with tender, thin slices of flavorful chicken layered in a very, very bold garlic-chili-Sichuan pepper sauce that combined very nicely with some steamed rice.
We also ordered a few dishes that didn’t get photographed, like a thoroughly splendid deep-fried pork chop dish that was both tender and flavorful.
So, how’s A Single Pebble doing? I’ve always thought that A Single Pebble was easily the best Chinese restaurant in Vermont, and this visit showed that A Single Pebble remains true-to-form and is still one of the best dining experiences I know of in Vermont. I’m glad they continue to do well.
