Right before heading out of town for a week, we met up with our friends Liz and Wesley and headed over to Oakes & Evelyn for dinner. You might be thinking, “didn’t Rich write up Oakes & Evelyn fairly recently (I did, in 2023)?”, as it’s a semi-regular fine dining destination of ours. But in this case, we weren’t doing the hour and a quarter drive up to Montpelier, but instead, driving to Woodstock. A few months ago, Oakes & Evelyn announced that they were opening a second location, taking over the restaurant operations in Woodstock’s The Jackson inn. After several months of renovation and preparation, Oakes & Eveyln finally had their opening night at their new location, and we decided to give it a try.
Stepping inside, it’s a nicely renovated space, with a small bar area adjacent to the entry way, and a small hallway heading down to the main dining room. The Jackson has always had a nice dining room (although it has been decades since my last visit), and it’s been nicely refreshed, and is a spacious, well-lit, and welcoming dining room, with a nice giant window overlooking the gardens. It’s a different overall feel from the cozy Montpelier dining room, and in many ways a nice improvement.
Oakes & Evelyn Montpelier always had a thoughtful, well-composed cocktail menu (much of it featuring the excellent Bar Hill gin from down the road), and most of that has carried over to Woodstock (indeed, much of the cocktail menu featured the same drinks as our April visit to the Montpelier location for their Easter Brunch). I ended up ordering the Chipolos Garden, with beeswax-washed gin, mezcal, snap pea, mint, and lime. A nice margarita-adjacent cocktail, this was refreshing (although this is one of those little places with opening night jitters, Carol and I both ordered the same cocktail but got a different overall composition, garnish, and glassware. A minor issue).
One of the things we really have always enjoyed about Oakes & Evelyn is that its one of the few places in the region that really does good crudos and tartares, and they’ve carried this over to Woodstock, with our visit having hamachi, tuna, and king salmon crudos available. We decided to go with the Hamachi crudo, which was served with salsa verde, local tomatoes, and chili crunch (and on a usual order, olives, but we had them omit those). A perfectly-sliced and seasoned crudo, with the salsa verde and chili crunch adding some nice spicing to the hamachi and tomatoes without burying the fresh flavors, this was exactly what I was hoping for from a second Oakes & Evelyn location.
The table also ordered two orders (twelve total) Cape Code oysters, served up with habanero, cucumber & lime vinegar, horseradish creme fraiche, lemon. Nicely cleaned and prepped, and the associated vinegar was a particularly good condiment. Overall, an excellent raw plate.
For my main course, I opted to go for the pasta dish, a house-made bucatini served up with Vermont mushrooms, fresh peas, local bacon, shallots, and parmesan. The star here was the perfectly-done fresh bucatini; there are very few places across Northern New England who can do a perfect al-dente pasta with a sauce well-married to it (for those wondering, Trattoria Delia in Burlington, and Windsor Station in Windsor, which I have not yet formally reviewed). This was spot-on perfect pasta, and the nice selection of Vermont Mushrooms and bacon worked nicely together. Overall, this was about as good as a pasta dish gets.
Carol, meanwhile, went for the pan-roasted halibut, served with local corn puree, chorizo, asparagus bits, leeks, shishito, and a corn vinaigrette. We’ve always had good luck with fish at the Montpelier location, and Woodstock was no exception: a perfectly cooked, tender, and flaky slab of halibut with a good crisp on it. The corn-puree and vinaigrette added a nice, sweet corn note to the dish, and the chorizo and shishito added nice little combined notes of heat and umami as you add the fish. A great entree.
For dessert, I opted for the chocolate and peanut butter ganache tarte, since on our April visit to the Montpelier location, we had an absolutely splendid chocolate and peanut butter ganache that served in a dish instead of a pastry tarte. Here, this was a decent dessert, but it didn’t quite have the punch of the Montpelier version: the pastry tarte itself was a bit bland and tough to eat. But otherwise, this was still a good desert, with the peanut butter ganache being particularly good. I expect a little bit of tweaking to happen to this dish.
Meanwhile, Carol opted for the Earl Grey crème brûlée. This was a good, smooth brûlée with a nice topping, although the Earl Grey flavoring was rather subtle, and in one of those odd little opening night service quirks, they served this with a fork which was a bit of a mess, but we eventually got them to substitute a spoon.
Overall, we really enjoyed our dinner at Oakes & Evelyn Woodstock. The food was essentially the same experience as the top-notch menu at their Montpelier location, including some favorites of ours like the crudos and bao buns. I’d love to see a good tartare return to the menu, and there were a few little tweaks to both the dishes and service, but we’re talking tweaks. Opening night at a new restaurant pretty much always has some hitches, but the few issues we had were small, and the evening went both smoothly and promptly, with a very pleasant staff. The renovated dining room is a really great space, especially if you are party of two and can score the nice seat by the big window. And, since this is an operating small inn, breakfast is a regularly-scheduled service instead of a special event, and I’m looking forward to trying that out as well. Overall, they’ve managed to capture the same level of dining in a new location. Considering that this new location is about half the distance from my home, we’ll definitely be coming back.
