Sweet Basil Cafe & Catering: The Northeast Kingdom's Beloved Dinner Destination
What began in 1993 as one woman's side catering business became the Northeast Kingdom's most cherished dining room, with a signature lobster-and-seafood Holy Basil and lines out the door.
In the Northeast Kingdom, good restaurants do not arrive with fanfare. They grow the way everything grows up there: slowly, from small kitchens and loyal neighbors, until one night you realize there is a line out the door. That is the story of Sweet Basil Cafe & Catering, the Lyndonville dining room that began as one woman's side gig and became the Kingdom's beloved special-occasion kitchen. At 32 Depot Street, just off the village's main drag, it is the rare small-town restaurant that locals plan their weeks around.
The whole thing started in 1993, when Delise Robarts began a small catering company called Sweet Basil Country Catering as a side project out of her own kitchen. Her home kitchen was tiny, with two refrigerators, minimal counter space, and a six-burner Garland range that took center stage as she built moveable feasts for weddings and parties across the Northeast Kingdom. The catering business boomed on reputation alone, with fresh seasonal food beautifully and tastefully displayed, and before long the operation had outgrown the little kitchen entirely. The search was on for a bigger room.
Cafe Sweet Basil opened its doors in March of 2001, and it was an instant success, with people lined up outside waiting for a table. A dozen years later the owner was still back in the kitchen cooking every meal from start to finish, and people were still lining up for Sweet Basil's special culinary touch. Reviewers have rated it 4.9 out of 5 across dozens of reviews, the kind of score that small-town places earn only by feeding their neighbors well, year after year.
Walk in and the room tells you everything about the Kingdom's idea of hospitality. The decor is relaxed, informal, and eclectic: paintings and lighting fixtures by talented local artists, a mix of tables from classic retro chrome-and-vinyl with Formica to simple wooden tops dressed in provincial linens, vines draping along the walls, and a string-art tricycle left over from a 1970s elementary school math class. It is the opposite of a design exercise, and all the more welcoming for it.
The cooking is where Sweet Basil earns its keep. The chef-owner's signature is the Holy Basil, a pile of big juicy chunks of lobster meat, shrimp, and tender sea scallops in a mouth-watering cream sauce, served over ample portions of pasta or rice. Appetizers have included smoked trout with grilled chapatti bread, horseradish cream sauce, and house-made tomato-ginger jam, the kind of plate that would turn heads in a city dining room. If you leave the cafe hungry, the old reviews like to say, it is your own fault.
The menu ranges well beyond New England standards. Expect blackened mahi-mahi tacos with pineapple slaw, a pulled pork burrito, potstickers, and a house-made fresh salsa that regulars swear by, served with crunchy tortilla chips or alongside a burrito entree. The bar program punches above its weight too, with martinis, margaritas, and house bloody marys mentioned in the same breath as the food, plus locally brewed beers and a solid wine list. Generous portions are the house rule across the board.
The cafe currently serves dinner Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings, opening at 5:30 and running to 8:30, with takeout and curbside service also available, and prices are solidly moderate for the quality on the plate. That schedule makes Sweet Basil a destination dinner rather than a drop-in lunch stop, and it is worth planning around. The owners post weekly specials on their Facebook page, and regulars know to check before they go, or just call the restaurant at 802-626-9713, because the chalkboard of the night often beats anything in print. The catering arm, Sweet Basil Country Catering, still builds moveable feasts for weddings and parties throughout the Kingdom, three decades on from its tiny-kitchen beginnings.
Lyndonville sits at the heart of the Northeast Kingdom, Vermont's most rural region, made up of Orleans, Caledonia, and Essex counties and bordered by Canada and northern New Hampshire. The village is home to the Lyndon campus of the state college, and just up the road, as the state's own tourism site notes, Lyndon is the gateway to the world-class mountain biking scene at Kingdom Trails. The region's biggest town, St. Johnsbury, holds the Fairbanks Museum with the state's only public planetarium and the Catamount Arts center. After a day on the trails or a long drive up from the south, a table at Sweet Basil is the reward: seafood, spice, and a martini at moderate prices, in a town where you might not expect to find them.
What makes Sweet Basil a Green Mountain Guide favorite is not scale or polish but staying power. Three decades after a woman with a six-burner stove started cooking for her friends, the cafe remains one of the NEK's surest bets, a chef-driven kitchen in a railroad village that could coast on tourist traffic and refuses to. It is the kind of place every Vermont region needs and too few have: the restaurant that once prompted a TripAdvisor reviewer to headline a visit simply, "Best Place to eat in the NEK."
If you find yourself in the Kingdom, make the reservation well ahead, come hungry, and order the Holy Basil. Then take a slow walk off dinner on Depot Street under the big northern sky. Most restaurants merely feed you; Sweet Basil, like the best of Vermont's small towns, adopts you for the evening.