On a quiet weekday afternoon in North Bennington, Chef Nic Brunina has laid three appetizers out at the pass - a preview, for us, of what he’s bringing to Hildene. A Vietnamese-style basil and crab spring roll with wasabi crème fraîche and soy pearls. A duck confit crostini layered with foie gras and a blueberry compote. A truffle-laced goat cheese bruschetta with apple and candied pecans. Come Saturday, he and his team will be making these fresh on site at Hildene, The Lincoln Family Home, plating them for fifty guests lucky enough to have grabbed tickets to the Food & Wine Pairing event during the Manchester Food & Wine Festival.
This is what Pangaea does, and has done, for going on two decades.
The pairing event itself is a single afternoon. The relationship behind it is much longer.
Brunina grew up in Bennington and ran track at Mount Anthony Union High School. He expected to go on into sports medicine - until a biology class senior year talked him out of it. He landed instead at the New England Culinary Institute in Burlington, graduating in 1998. His NECI class was the one that opened the Commons on Church Street, the institute’s student-run downtown restaurant.
By his own count, he’s left Vermont nine times. Phoenix first. Then Napa Valley to work with a renowned Japanese chef, where he staged at Bouchon in the Yountville culinary scene Thomas Keller was just then building. Then San Francisco. Then back.
In 2001, twenty-one years old, he started at The Equinox in Manchester as a catering prep cook. The hire was a story unto itself: a couple of NECI grads on staff vouched for him, the executive chef walked out, asked if he could start that day, and he did. By the time he left after the better part of fifteen years he had become a task force executive chef for the entire hotel brand, rotating through properties in Washington D.C., Boca Raton, and Long Beach.
Then his daughter was born. He didn’t want to be on a plane every Sunday night. He stepped sideways into food sales at Performance Foodservice for five years, learning the other half of the business - how restaurants source their ingredients, how distributor relationships actually work, the difference between what shows up on a menu and what arrives on a truck.
He helped open Union Underground in Manchester after that, from the construction phase through the night the doors swung open. That’s where Pangaea’s owner, Nick Disorda, first saw his name. The Manchester Journal ran a small piece on the new chef in town. Disorda called the day it published. He needed a director of catering. He knew Brunina’s background. Would he take the call?
The catering was the original ask. Brunina took it. Eight seasons later he helps run the whole operation.
Pangaea has been catering at Hildene since around 2007. The partnership predates Brunina by a decade. It was built the way these things tend to get built in close-knit, Vermont communities - by people who already knew each other. Hildene’s then-president Seth Gardner and Pangaea’s then-owner Bill Scully sat down to figure out how a historic property could host weddings and large events without the inconsistency that comes from a revolving door of caterers. The model they landed on, and that Brunina inherited, puts Pangaea, Hildene, and longtime floral partner Lily of the Valley on equal footing. Three companies, one team in the room. Brunina says any guest walking the grounds shouldn’t be able to tell which company any given staff member works for. That’s the design.
You see it most clearly at scale. At the Lincoln Symposium dinner at Hildene earlier this month, his team plated 250 guests in seventeen minutes. Seven cooks in the back. Twenty-two servers on the floor. No hot boxes, no heat lamps. Just oven, to plate, to table. On paper, the food in that room was the work of three different companies. In the room, it was one event.
That kind of choreography only works when the relationships are tried and true. Brunina has been at it for close to a decade. He works in tandem with Hildene Farm in the dene - the goat dairy and creamery, the apiary, the cattle, and the gardens led by Ann Ogden Hausslein. The Hildene Farm chickens supply the eggs in Pangaea’s kitchen there in North Bennington. Cattle raised in the dene work their way onto wedding menus up at Hildene. Produce flows the same direction. When Brunina plans a tasting in January, he’s planning it already knowing what will be coming out of the high tunnels in May.
For Brunina, sourcing is a rule with three numbers. Produce within fifty miles. Land animals within a hundred. Seafood within four hundred. The last one is a stretch, he admits, and there are categories where the rule has to bend - there are no shrimp farms in Vermont. But the rule matters less than what it points at, which is a network of small operators within driving distance whose work ends up on the plate.
Produce comes from the good folks at Mighty Food Farm, the certified organic vegetable farm just up the road in Shaftsbury, celebrating their twentieth growing season this year. Microgreens come daily from Kathy Snow, whose business has grown alongside Brunina’s needs over the years - she asks what he’d like to see next season, and tries it. Coffee for the café comes from Iron Coffee, just over the New York border, roasted and delivered within forty-eight hours. Milk and butter come from Battenkill Valley Creamery in Salem, New York. So does a truffle-laced goat cheese in the current rotation that Brunina has a hard time talking about without grinning.
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“You develop a partnership so it’s effective and reasonable for both parties. I have a world broadliner. I have to. But the local guys are where the menu actually lives.”
- Chef Nic Brunina
The Pangaea menu reads like a choose-your-own-adventure. The curry, the Provençal, the stir fries, and the risottos all come with selectable proteins, with tofu always on the option list.
Brunina is proud of one specific thing about Pangaea’s dining room: that someone in flip flops and a tank top can order a quesadilla two tables away from a couple celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary over a grilled tenderloin, and neither table feels out of place. That is not, he says, a small thing to engineer.
He’s pushed himself on the vegetarian side of the menu in particular, after a career that didn’t always do so. His pride dish in that lane is a seven-layer vegan Napoleon - stacked vegetables and a quinoa-tofu base served with a roasted-tomato marinara built from tomatoes he dries down slowly in the oven before they ever hit the pot. The technique is borrowed from his brother’s maple syrup operation. Slow concentration first, then assembly.
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“People order it and they don’t even know it’s vegan. That’s the goal. I’m not trying to do vegetarian. I’m trying to do food.”
- Chef Nic Brunina
The festival appetizers Brunina is bringing to Hildene this weekend are a fair sketch of where his kitchen sits right now. Globally inspired. Locally sourced. Technique in service of flavor, every time.
The spring roll uses crab and basil, served with a wasabi crème fraîche he builds by whipping wasabi into heavy cream and folding it into sour cream. The heat is real but not aggressive. The soy pearls beside it are made through Brunina’s favorite molecular trick. He heats a mixture of tamari, rice vinegar, agave, and agar to 190 degrees, then drips it from a squeeze bottle into oil chilled to 26 degrees in the freezer. The droplets shatter against the cold oil and seize into pearls that burst on the tongue. He uses the same technique with balsamic for summer bruschetta and with cranberry juice for vodka shots at the bar. They look like roe and taste like pure flavor bombs.
The crostini is the most classic of the three. Duck confit, foie gras, and a house blueberry compote stacked over toasted bread. It’s the bite that benefits most from sitting with the right red.
The bruschetta is the local one. The truffle-laced Battenkill goat cheese, fresh, local apple, candied pecans, and microgreens from Kathy Snow.
The Pangaea team will be at the Food & Wine Pairing at Hildene on Saturday, May 23 from 4:30 to 6:30 PM, plating those three bites for fifty guests against the backdrop of the property’s spring gardens. As of this writing, the Hildene event is understandably nearly sold out.
If you don’t catch them at Hildene this weekend, you’ll catch them at Hildene most weekends through October. That’s the rhythm. They cook in the dene at Hildene, they cook in the kitchen in North Bennington, and somewhere in the middle is a chef who’s been chasing this particular flavor of partnership for the better part of a decade. The kind that gets built one wedding, one symposium, one bustling weeknight at a time. The kind that lasts.
If you’ve never been to Pangaea, drive down some weeknight. The bar holds five seats and they tend to be taken by the same handful of locals night after night. They’ll have an opinion on what to order. That too, is a good sign.
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