Change is always inevitable but it is about doing it with the right balance of planning, motivation and focus. For Nick Disorda and Lani DePonte-Disorda, co-owners of Pangaea in North Bennington, shutting the business down for renovations since January was a calculated risk. On the eve of their soft opening for the renamed Pangaea Restaurant and Cafe (which brings them both under the same moniker), the pair spoke about logistics, efficiency and the anticipation and excitement of re-opening.
Lani explains that the renovation has been Nick's dream for a long time. “Right now he is in the back training the AM shift on the line [so he might come talk later].” Lani explains that there have been many different iterations of restaurants in this specific space, “but it never coincided that the owners of the restaurants were the same as the owners of the building.” She adds that they actually bought the building in 2019 “part and parcel to work towards this renovation. That was in our head from the very beginning.” She continues that the kitchen itself has just been amended as they went along...”the different 'Oh well, we'll put this here and we'll make it work,' and 'We'll cobble this here and we'll make it work there.' So it's never really been made [specifically] for food service.” Lani adds that the building was originally a mercantile, with apartments in the back. “So things have just been cobbled together for 60, 70, years.” Pangaea itself, Lani continues, first opened in this space in 2002 “so we've been here over 20 years now. We've got some staying power. Our kids are in the village. We know we're going to be doing this for a long time. So [Nick and I] said, 'This is the time to invest in the space and make it the space that we want it to be.'”
Lani adds that it is about efficiency in staffing, “but also about efficiency of what we're able to offer with this [new] kitchen. The way that it is now — after the renovation — we can offer a larger menu and maintain our standard of quality. We can service more people while maintaining our standard of hospitality.” She continues that it is also kind of a gift “to the people who have been working with us for a really long time — all of our core staff have just been like tripping along through the labyrinth forever.” Lani adds that their staff takes a lot of pride in what they do, “and we wanted to be able to give them the space and the skills and the support to be able to do what they do to the best of their ability — and this kitchen allows them to do that.”
Lani explains the logistics behind the increase in efficiency with the renovation. “For all the years that Pangaea had been open before....it used to be Pangaea Fine Dining, and the fine dining kitchen was in the physical space that the Cafe is now.” She points to where their new barista station is. “That is where the kitchen was that serviced the fine dining room, and then up the stairs was the back kitchen that serviced the lounge.” She says that after COVID happened, “we kind of consolidated [those]. We had one restaurant with one menu that ranged from casual to really special occasion type of stuff.” Previously what had been happening was that the front line for the restaurant was in the old fine dining kitchen. This is where the main food was cooked, and then in the back was kind of a prep kitchen. “But it was just kind of [all] hobbled together.” Lani says they tried at different times to put all the cooking in the back and then one person in the front...or one person in the back. The issue is that there are specific lines whether it be sautés (which are the main entrees) or the grill (which are more the burgers and sandwiches). “We tried them separate. We've tried them together. We've tried them all up in the back. We've tried them all up in the front. Nothing really worked.” It was also logistics of travel from the kitchen to table that needed to be streamlined. “And from a server standpoint, when the kitchen was in the cafe side of the building, you had to walk from the lounge where everybody sits for dinner, out through the back, behind the bar, up the steps, up the ramp, through the back kitchen and then down the stairs into the cafe space to pick up your food...and then bring it all the way back to the tables. So now we've created a pass through that which is much quicker.”
Lani explains that it was probably about a full year of planning with architects before they did the renovation. “We had different architects bidding, submitting different designs.” One of the essential components, she adds, in the renovation was creating a walk-in cooler with a set-in freezer. Previously, she explains, “we had something like 16 different chest freezers plugged in, sucking energy, super inefficient, super unsustainable...and we try as much as we can to have sustainability. It is on our mind everywhere.” Now with a walk in-cooler and walk-in fridge, they get rid of all the plug-in coolers. Then there is the line. “You'll hear people in the restaurant industry talk about 'the line.' And it's called 'the line' for a reason. You have to be able to walk up and down that line and have economy of motion. So it was about putting everything that we needed on that line in one space for every menu that we have. It makes it more thought out and organized.”
Lani is excited with this new kitchen since it means they will be able to add more items to the menu. “So we cut down our menu quite a bit towards the end — before we closed for renovations. It [became] very sparse [because it] was just not a kitchen that was amenable to cooking a lot of items.” With the revamped menu, she thinks they doubled the amount of items available. “We are still going to be doing specials. We are still keeping those items that people love like the spicy Bangkok Stir Fry, the specialty burgers.” She says they also have the cassoulet dish coming back, “which is an old favorite.”
Lani adds that they also wanted to give the Cafe (formerly Prospect Coffee House) an update, “to make it feel more like a cafe, while still keeping that atmosphere.” Lani explains that previously, the barista station was kind of up towards the front, “and it created this blockage. So there was a lot of inefficiency of motion, and flow in the space.” She also adds that the bathrooms previously were up the stairs. “We brought them down the stairs because we wanted to make this space ADA accessible.”
Lani explains that before this renovation took full effect, “everything up those back stairs was stripped completely to studs. The only thing that was left were the exterior walls. We really pulled everything apart.” She smiles, saying it was pretty exciting to rip the kitchen out. “We had a whole week of demo. It was therapeutic. We had a whole week where we had staff coming in and we were like, 'It's Pangaea Rage Room! Take a sledgehammer to the brick steps! Let's go!' That was really nice. It was fun, and it felt good, because it was like getting rid of something that we knew wasn't working anymore to make way for something that was going to be really beneficial to our staff and customers alike.”
Lani adds that the biggest challenge, “honestly, was just the risk of it. It's really risky to do something where we had to close for five months. With our staff who agreed to come back on, we furloughed them so that they could still be making some money throughout this time and still have a job to come back to...guaranteed.” She says their core staff had work to do all along. “We had them sign up for shifts for demo days, cleaning days, storage days. So the first couple weeks we had a lot of our staff [here]...it kind of felt like camp. They were a part of the process. And they were still able to get a paycheck.”
Lani says she and her daughter also painted small white cats in the corners of every space so that people can find them like Easter eggs. “It made it a fun project for [our kids] to be a part of, too.” But, she adds, there was a fear of being closed for that long and being like, “What's that going to be like for the community?” Lani admits though that people are ecstatic about them re-opening.
That said, during the renovation, Lani says the door was always open. “Basically, as long as it was safe for people to walk in, we've had it open so they can come in, talk, and see what we were doing.” She adds that the entire time “we've been giving people tours.” The biggest question, she says, everybody had was, “'When you're going to reopen?' That's it, Number one.”
She adds that the renovation took the amount of time that Nick had expected. “I had this idealistic vision in my mind that we'd reopen in March and it would be like a little bit slower, and we'd have the time to ease into it. And he was like, 'You know, that's not gonna happen.' And then I was like, 'Okay, well, maybe April?' And he's like, 'It's going to be May.” And I was like, 'There's no way. We can't stay closed for five months. What do you mean?'”
Lani says what took the most time was the kitchen. “Demo went really fast because we had a lot of our staff members here to help out. And then just, honestly, things plugged along really fast, up until it was time for inspections.” She says the hardest aspect was to get state inspectors and fire inspectors out. “For example for our soft opening (May 8), we're opening at 8 a.m. we can't actually serve hot breakfast or lunch until 10, because the state inspector, is coming to inspect the hoods, and can't be here until 9 a.m. on Thursdays. So we'll have baked goods and coffees and teas and smoothies from eight until 10, and then full service starting at 10. But everything completely is good to go.”
Lani says they will be technically open on Friday night (May 9), “but it is an invite only thing, like a “friends and family” type deal. That's fully booked. There's plenty of space on Saturday night at the moment.” Lani does add they will be closed this Sunday (May 11) “because all the managers and any employees who want to come...we're gonna kind of do a debrief of the soft open, what worked, what didn't work, what we think we need, and [it will also] give us some time to order from our delivery trucks so that we can be back open the following week.” Lani is hoping that at the latest Thursday [May 15]..."everything's going be open for regular hours...hopefully a couple days earlier.” She adds that, in terms of supplies, considering recent happenings, “the one thing that we did to jump the gun on is that we ordered all [of[ God's tequila because there was going to be a shortage on that. We have so much tequila on-site because we do the catering events as well.”
Pangaea still does maintain their catering business which Nick spearheads. But as Lani explains, “the catering has its own prep kitchen up at the Hildene. And the Hildene had their own renovations two summers ago.” She also adds that the catering business is much slower in the winter “because it's only like a handful of small corporate events.”
Now that they have rebranded both spaces as Pangaea, Lani says it is about “creating more connectivity between the cafe and the restaurant. The cafe used to be Prospect Coffee House, and they were separate social medias, separate staff. Now it's Pangaea Restaurant and Cafe and they both serve dinner.” She adds that right now the staff is getting cross trained on everything, “so that everyone knows how to do everything." It is now all under Pangaea VT on Instagram and Facebook. “That is where you find anything about either the cafe or the restaurant, special events, special venues, etc.”
Normally, Lani says, they would go visit her family in Hawaii in January but the renovation this year changed that. “We couldn't go this year. But honestly, every single time I walk into the kitchen now, I get teary eyed because of what it is now. It wasn't like it [was] in complete shambles before. We made it work. But, you know, the floor was falling through and everything was old. We were just doing the best we could with what we were provided.” She smiles that they also have new wood outside on the delivery ramp “so the delivery drivers don't have to pull their hand carts up the stairs. It makes everything so much smoother.”
And for people who have worked in the restaurant industry before and have seen kitchens in old buildings, Lani says they will understand the feeling of joy walking into a state-of-the-art kitchen: "This is ours?" "We get to cook out of this?'" "The kitchen is totally modernized.”
As before they still infuse the spaces with local art. Both spaces are still comfortable like before but with greater efficiency. “We have a local artist (Mark Berry) who rotates his art throughout here in the cafe. And then we have three different local artists on the lounge side.” Lani also says with the more open floor plan in the cafe, “live music is actually a huge thing on the docket in this space for the coming year. Nick and I are working on building out a program specifically for that.”
Nick then comes out from training the staff in the kitchen and chimes in: “The specific blueprint plan [for this] probably started two years ago, talking with Geoff Metcalfe, going through, looking at the space, taking about the kitchen and how it would be laid out.” He says that the thought of what he wanted to do here started way back in 2013. Lani adds that, “For us, the impetus behind purchasing the building was to be able to get this renovation to happen. It was inevitable.”
Nick admits that whole thing was kind of a challenge, “even back to figuring out how it was going to work and how we were going to fit [it in] the space. There was [also] the financial challenge of making all the numbers work for the bank.” He adds that during the discovery, “things came up, but nothing major.”
By doing the renovation, it is also allows them to be open seven days a week but also have balance.
Lani adds, “We have a really good core group of people here. So Nick and I don't hold specific weekly shifts at either side, because we have to fill in when necessary.” Lani says she bartends on Friday nights “because it's really fun for me, but that's is the only set shift I really have.” She adds that they have to be “unattached so that we can jump in when things fall through, because they inevitably do. They always will. And we realized that shortly out the gate. When we first were working five nights a week here, it was just like, 'Oh, if we're owning this, we also can't be the main five-night-a-week people. It just doesn't work.”
Nick says it was “stressful...closing, stressful...doing something like this...but it is exciting. It's not new for us. It's doing everything that we've already kind of mastered, but now with the right tools.” He says they always joked to the staff: “One day we're gonna be real restaurant [after] being open two decades. And still, like six months ago, I was like, 'Don't worry, guys, we're gonna be a real restaurant in six months,' because it was pieced together in how it was set up, because of the layout...but people loved it. So it's exciting [with the renovation done], and I'm ready to get back to it.”
Pangaea Restaurant and Cafe Soft Opening Weekend Schedule:
Friday [May 9] (Restaurant) 5 to 10 p.m. [Only bar seating available. First come first serve]
Saturday [May 10] (Cafe) 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. [Breakfast/lunch available to 4 p.m. Switches to dinner menu at 5 p.m.] (Restaurant) 5 to 10 p.m. Call 802.442.4466 for reservations
Restaurant and Café CLOSED Sunday [May 11]
Full reopen by Thursday [May 15] at latest.
To learn more, visit https://www.facebook.com/Pangaea.VT/