The Country Is Just Discovering Gas-Station Food. Vermont Never Lost It

Vermont's best road food is hiding at the gas pump. Tell us where you fill up with an email to news@compassvermont.com

There’s a piece making the rounds in The Wall Street Journal about the improbable rise of gas-station food — brisket smoked for fourteen hours at a Texas mega-stop, paella at a Miami filling station, Japanese-style egg-salad sandwiches imported to 7-Eleven coolers.

The trade numbers back the trend: food now accounts for nearly 30 percent of what Americans buy inside convenience stores — up from about 12 percent two decades ago, according to the National Association of Convenience Stores — as chains scramble to replace the dollars cigarettes and beer used to bring in.

It’s a good story. It is also, from where we sit, a little funny — because the thing the rest of the country is calling a renaissance, Vermont has been calling Tuesday for about two hundred years.

We never had to rediscover good food at the pump, because we never stopped making it. The owner-operated deli counter, the scratch baking, the creemee window humming a few feet from the diesel nozzle — that isn’t a trend here. It’s infrastructure. The general store got there first, and in a lot of these places the food came first and the gas pumps are almost an afterthought.

And our version looks nothing like the one the Journal describes. There’s no Vermont Buc-ee’s, no billboard luring you off the interstate to a fluorescent food court — partly by law, partly by temperament. Ours are smaller, family-run, and usually you have to know they’re there. The brisket isn’t a marketing strategy bolted onto a fuel business. It’s somebody’s recipe.

A few of ours, just to start the brainstorming:

• Hero’s Welcome, North Hero. Gas, groceries, a deli, and a creemee window, all of it holding down the middle of the Champlain Islands. As much a town square as a store.

• The Cupboard Deli & Bakery, Jeffersonville. A genuinely good bakery — donuts, muffins, full loaves of bread — that happens to share a building with a filling station out on Route 15.

• Marty’s 1st Stop, Danville. Fill the tank, then watch them cut your sandwich meat to order. The deli case is the reason people pull off Route 2, and the gas is the afterthought — the Beatties opened the place as a food store in 1990 and didn’t put in the pumps until a year later.

• Cambridge Village Market. Pumps out front, a butcher counter and made-to-order sandwiches on fresh-baked bread in back.

That’s four. There are dozens — hundreds, really. Every Vermonter has one: the place you’ll add fifteen minutes to a drive for, the order you don’t have to think about, the counter person who starts making it when your truck pulls in.

So here’s what we want from you.

Tell us your spot. The town, the order, and why you keep coming back — the creemee flavor, the breakfast sandwich, the soup that’s only good on cold days, the pie. Drop it in the comments or email us at news@compassvermont.com. We’d love to share more great spots across the Green Mountain State.

The country thinks it just figured this out. Let’s show them how long the list really is.