Each month the Skinny Pancake will give you a behind the scenes look at an employee who embodies the missions and values of the Skinny Pancake. This month, we’re excited to introduce you to Chris von Staats!

Chris von Staats live at Skinny Pancake’s Jazz Night, Tuesday evenings 7-9pm

Chris von Staats, the Skinny Pancake’s Bar Manager, is a man of many talents.

From his creative, locally-inspired prohibition era cocktail creations, to his professional, industrious demeanor managing the Skinny’s bar, and his musical talents (including great vocals and lightning-fast fingers on the guitar), Chris appears able to do it all with relative ease.

When Chris isn’t serving up craft cocktails with a hat tip to drier times, you can find him commanding the stage with an ever-evolving set list at Jazz Night at the Skinny Pancake’s Burlington waterfront location on Tuesday evenings from 7-9pm.

We spoke with Chris on Jazz Night to learn more about what it’s like working for the Skinny Pancake, and what keeps him motivated, movin’ and groovin’.

The Skinny on Chris von Staats and Jazz Night

Chris describes an evening at Jazz Night as a “sophisticated night out on the town,” and a “throwback to an older time.” W ith cocktails from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and von Staats’ group playing Billie Holiday in the background, it’s clear why:

Jazz night special cocktails

Ward 8: rye, lemon juice, orange juice, house-ma de grenadine, homemade maraschino cherry

Casino: Gin, Lemon juice, luxardo maraschino liqueur, housemade orange bitters, lemon, rosemary

SP: It must be interesting pouring drinks one night and playing jazz the next… What’s it like to work at the Skinny Pancake both as an employee and a performer?

CVS: It’s definitely a fun experience. In many ways, it makes me feel so much more connected to the Skinny Pancake. At my place of work, I get to do all the things I want to do. It’s a pretty sweet situation. Also, it’s funny how sometimes the lines are blurred for when one job starts and the other one begins…

On Jazz Night, when I am playing, I’m still coming up with cocktail specials and making sure the bar and everything else is all set. Sometimes, I’ll be playing and one of the staff who knows I’m a manager will come over and say something like, “Hey we need your help! The dishwasher broke!”

And I’ll run back during a set break and go and fix the dishwasher. Or when I am bartending here, if the band is having trouble setting up the sound, I’ll run out and help them set up the sound because I know how to do it.

It’s become where playing here and working here are both a part of my job, and I love it.

Chris von Staats live at skinny pancake’s jazz night, Tuesday evenings 7-9pm

Chris von Staats Mixing up something special

Skinny Pancake (SP): Why do you love working at the Skinny Pancake?

Chris von Staats (CVS): The core values of the company are all things that I love, too. There’s a lot of pride in the stuff that we [Vermonters] make here. For instance, one thing I try to do is make everything in-house. We just started making our own maraschino cherries, our own house grenadine, and our own house bitters—we’re doing everything from scratch.

We’ve also got 10 draught lines of local beer, and plenty of local top-shelf spirits. We’re using local produce and juices when possible in our cocktails, too. I love supporting that and being a part of that, and the Skinny Pancake does too… It’s local from the ground up, and that’s one of the things I love about working at the Skinny.

SP: If you were stranded on a deserted island with a group of people and could only serve one drink, what would it be?

CVS: It would be a “Singapore Sling.” We’ve run it here as a cocktail special before. It’s an old drink from the early 1900s, with a ton of ingredients; it’s a tiki drink. It’s a great example of a well-made, old cocktail that’s still one of the best. And, there are enough ingredients in it, eight in total, to hopefully sustain all of us on that island for a bit.

SP: What’s your favorite crepe and locally-inspired beverage?

CVS: The Jonny crepe, for sure. I order that almost every day. Also, the Crepedilla with the local, braised beef can last me three meals sometimes. I love that as well.

In terms of a beverage, when I started as the Bar Manager, of course, I was all about cocktails, and rarely thought about beers. And now, lately, I’ve really been loving beer. I’ve become somewhat of a beer snob [laughs]. I’m always trying to bring in new, different local producers, and experimenting with flavors and styles.

SP: If you were going to talk with someone who didn’t know much about the Skinny Pancake, what would you tell them?

CVS: I’d want them to know the Skinny Pancake is so much more than just a restaurant. The Skinny’s connections and roots run deep. We support so many local producers, and we support programs and initiatives that are something to be proud of as well, like 1% for the Planet and Green Drinks.

Also, Skinny Pancake has an incredible connection to the town [of Burlington], and Vermont as a whole. There’s a huge number of employees that work here, with all of the different branches throughout Vermont, and now Hanover. I can’t go anywhere in town without running into one of us!

Come on down to Jazz Night Tuesdays from 7-9pm at the Skinny’s Burlington waterfront location to see Chris von Staats throwing it back to an earlier time.

Thanks to Chris for having this interview, and for being such a rockin’ employee of the Skinny Pancake!

Zach Nugent has had quite a run, a long strange trip you might say. And most of that run has been soundtracked by Jerry Garcia’s guitar. He says he first heard Grateful Dead music at the age of 3 or 4. “Music was the Grateful Dead and the Grateful Dead was music. That’s all I knew,” he told me.

At the age of 12, when Zach picked up a guitar, “Ripple” was the first song he learned. “Or at least, what I thought sounded like ‘Ripple’,” he says with a chuckle.

Over a decade later, Nugent is still playing “Ripple,” but instead of in his bedroom in Royalton, VT,  he’s playing in front of thousands of people at the Capitol Theater in New York with Melvin Seals and JGB, in the same spot and alongside the same keyboardist that Jerry played with years ago.

While his home is currently in Burlington, he was raised in Royalton and attended The Sharon Academy. Before Zach returns to the Upper Valley with his own Dead Set crew at the Skinny Pancake in Hanover on 11/26, I caught up with him in Washington, DC. Nugent has been on the road since September playing across the country and is excited to get back to his home base in Vermont. “I hopped immediately on the road when Melvin asked me to join the band and I think I’ve slept in my bed twice since.”

When asked how he found himself to be filling Jerry’s musical shoes, he points to the formation of an informal, weekly, Grateful Dead jam at Burlington’s Nectar’s. What began four years ago with a few Deadheads noodling on couches quickly took on a life of its own. Every Tuesday since then Zach has helped guide a tour de force of special guests from all over the musical map to play tunes from the Grateful Dead songbook. Usual suspects include members of jam bands like Phish, Moe., Turkuaz and  Melvin Seals himself. But there’s also been less likely folks on stage, such as musicians from Lady Gaga’s touring band (yep…that Lady Gaga).

“The unifying power of Grateful Dead music is incredible” we both agreed.

While always a worthwhile evening, the one catch of the weekly Dead Sets has been that the fun didn’t start until 10pm on a Tuesday night. The necessity of hitting the road to play out of town venues on the weekends has unfortunately led to alienating would-be fans who simply can’t stay out after hours on a school night.

“Lots of people have been telling me for years, ‘I’d love to see you play, but I can’t stay up that late,'” Zach relays. Lucky for the Upper Valley, the show next Saturday starts at 9 and is on a weekend. Zach’s stoked because that means everyone can come: friends from back home, folks that have heard about him as a local legend, and even his parents – “Oh, they’ll definitely be there,” he says.

“Audit”…it’s not a particularly inviting word. The taxman has put a real damper on the concept. So, when we tell you we’re not only excited, but thrilled by the idea of self-auditing ourselves, try to stick with us for a moment. We’ll do our best to keep it interesting…

It turns out this is our 9th annual local food audit. When we first started this, we bought just over 50% of our food locally. Over the years, we’ve proudly been able to increase that number through more direct planning with farmers as they start to plant, while finding affordable and scalable local products to replace conventional options.

We’re happy to report that this year, we’ve bested all of our previous years’ performance. We’re also stoked to have run the numbers of Montpelier, Burlington Waterfront, and our new Hanover, NH outpost separately. Topping the list, the Montpelier Mini-Skinny clocked in with a hefty 76.27% of local food purchases, which just so happens to be a record for all of Pancakia. At 74%, our newest location in Hanover also outperformed any previous year’s records. And, just barely edging out their own performance from 2015, our original restaurant on the Burlington waterfront weighed in with a respectable 71.78% of our food for the month having been bought locally.

And now, how about a round of “perhaps you’re asking?!?”

Perhaps you’re asking: “how do you define ‘local’?” Good question! Transparency is so important especially when there is no official definition of ‘local food’ and no certifying agency. For example, “Vermont plus 35 miles” is pretty broad for Burlington when Montreal is closer to it than Brattleboro. Also, we all certainly love our craft beers, but few of their ingredients are sourced locally. Is that local? At the Skinny, we use the acronym “S.C.E.N.E.” (Security, Community, Economy, Nutrition and Environment) to identify five primary benefits of buying local. When in doubt about whether an ingredient counts as ‘local’, we measure said ingredient against this acronym “S.C.E.N.E.” Of course, mesclun mix from a farm up the road is local. But we also count locally brewed beers, roasted coffee beans and other value added products produced in the region too all of which contribute to the local economy, community, perhaps security and environment too.

Perhaps you’re asking: “why do some of our locations perform better than others?” It turns out different folks from different towns have slightly different tastes. We may sell more of one product in one town and another in the next. As a result, our “product mix” is different each month. As some crepes are more locally-sourced than others, that alone will lead to a difference between locations. Especially as we extend to regions a bit further away, the availability of local products is constantly changing based on who’s growing it and weather patterns.

Perhaps you’re asking: “why aren’t 100% of your purchases local?” Our goal has never been to be 100% local. Our goal is to buy as much local food as possible. In order to do that, we need to keep the volume UP, which means we need to keep the food affordable enough for folks to eat on a regular basis, which means we need to occasionally source ingredients that aren’t local. Also, people really like Nutella, strawberries, bananas and avocados.

Perhaps you’re asking: “who cares”? We do. Were we to maintain this average throughout the year, it means we spend over $2,000,000 a year into the local food economy, about 8x as much as we bought locally when we first started. In an era where a butterfly bats its economic wings in China and everyone’s pensions plummet, we take comfort and pride in keeping our cash right here in Vermont.