Thom Gorman is right at home with a very foreign language few of us know. It’s not verbal, however, but culinary: Gorman, the chef and owner with his wife, Joan, of the Millbrook Inn in the Mad River Valley town of Fayston, is amazingly fluent in the intricate art of Indian cooking.
If you want someone who embodies the diversity of cuisine that blesses Vermonters, look no farther than Gorman. He’s a tall, bearded and bespectacled Mainer who would look right at home on a lobster boat plying the waters of Penobscot Bay. But after he graduated from Boston University in the late 1960s, he took a life-changing turn and joined the Peace Corps for two years. He was sent to India to Nagpur in the middle of the country to work with a nutrition program. It opened not just his eyes, but a door to the world of down-home Indian cooking. “It gave me entry into women’s kitchens, which in a society like that I would never have been able to go into,” he says. “I actually got to see how they do it in the home kitchen in India. Like a lot of societies, including our own, it’s different from the food that you get at an Indian restaurant.” His experience gave him a grounding in the way Indians cook and hooked him on the cuisine. Like a determined linguist, he’s been expanding his culinary vocabulary ever since, in what he jokingly calls a “long 20-year process.” Today “fusion” cuisine is a buzzword, but Gorman has been offering it at the Millbrook Inn, located unobtrusively on Route 17 not far from Waitsfield, long before fusion came into dining parlance. Even by fusion standards, Gorman is an unusual mix, a self-taught chef conversant with seafood (his Maine side) and Indian cuisine from his travels. Gorman also specializes in homemade pastas and has developed several signature dishes such as his sumptuous venison crusted with cumin and coriander seeds served with a dark cranberry chutney, a creative mix of Indian and New American flavors. He also has a seafood green curry featuring Maine mussels, sea scallops and Gulf shrimp, served with rice and homemade chutney. As with any chef-owned restaurant, what you get at the Millbrook is a reflection of one person’s — or in this case one couple’s — passions and interests. With their restaurant open eight months out of the year for dinner 6 to 9 (every night but Tuesday in summer), the other four months they recharge their batteries and explore cuisines on trips to places like Thailand and South Africa. “We would go crazy if we did this 12 months a year,” says Thom, who still loves being a chef-innkeeper after 23 years at his craft — several lifetimes by innkeeping years — because he’s a one-man kitchen show and “doesn’t have to answer to anybody.” In their 28-seat dining room, he does the appetizers and main courses; she is the hostess and server, and also bread baker and pastry chef, known for her sumptuous desserts and trademark to-die-for anadama bread. It is served with every dinner. The bread and everything else is made from scratch, including the ice cream. Thom jokes, “We’re the only place in Vermont that doesn’t serve Ben & Jerry’s.” The almost antipodal menu has by necessity created a wine list of unusual range, featuring white wines that will stand up to strong Indian spicing or go well with seafood, and reds that go well with pasta dishes and beef. Their trip to South Africa, for example, resulted in the addition of several wonderful wines from a country Gorman says is becoming a new Napa Valley. For those suffering from boredom of the palate, a recent affliction for me, Gorman’s Indian specialties are like a breath of fresh, and spicy, air. Invited in to watch his wizardry, I watch Gorman move swiftly around his small kitchen, conversant with spices in a way that an observer can only marvel at. He is making one of his classic offerings at the Millbrook, a vegetarian thali. It’s a mix of four vegetable dishes served with three chutneys surrounding a mound of basmati rice. His hands are a blur as he works without measuring, pulling ingredients off the spice rack above his stove. A dash of turmeric here, a pinch of fenugreek seeds there, a swirl of fresh coriander and cumin or cardamom, a spoonful of coconut milk, a toss of small sliced chilies or fresh peeled ginger root, a dusting of myriad kinds of red pepper flakes and black mustard seeds, a bit of garam masala (a mix of Indian spices). In also go garlic and onion and a variety of vegetables. This dinner, served at the inn on a special oval plate, “is a typical way that Indians eat,” he explains. In southern India, meals are usually vegetarian, while in northern India lamb and chicken are common, so his menu carries both vegetarian and meat offerings. When he’s finished, he spoons everything onto the plate. There’s roasted eggplant, potatoes, green beans and a medley of squash, broccoli and cauliflower, each cooked in its own spicy sauce. Around the plate, Gorman puts three homemade chutneys of coconut, mango and tomato. The colors are lush, and when I dig in, the diverse, unfamiliar flavors practically explode off the plate. The spicing is subtle, not a hot burn but a slow, delicious heat, offset by the anadama bread and two perfect wines that he recommends: a lush, flowery 1999 Trimbacch Gewurztraminer from Alsatia and a Nova Vinho Verde, a light, fizzy Portuguese white that is an ideal summer wine.After this culinary flight across continents, Joan’s desserts return me to New England. It’s a return trip worth leaving room for. I sample the colorful blueberry-raspberry pie and a toasted coconut custard cream pie with hazelnut crust, which was rich, creamy and not too sweet. (The Belgian white chocolate mousse pie with chocolate cookie crumb crust is a local favorite.) If you’re looking for a spicy hot-weather antidote or a respite from tired summer flavors (in an air-conditioned dining room), a trip to India via the Millbrook Inn is just what the palate ordered. Andrew Nemethy of Calais writes about travel and food. He can be contacted with food-story ideas and news about restaurants at anem@together.net.