Ask anyone in Richmond where to eat dinner tonight and the answer depends on when you last asked. What hasn't changed is who's cooking it.
Walk down Bridge Street this August and you'll pass two buildings that have swapped names, menus, and ownership so many times over the past five years that it's easy to read the turnover as instability. It isn't. Look at who actually holds the spatulas at 30 and 39 Bridge Street right now and you find a small group of people who've been trading these same two kitchens back and forth since 2020. The restaurants keep changing. The cooks keep showing up somewhere else in town.
The Address That's Been Three Restaurants in Five Years
Thirty Bridge Street has had a rough time settling on a name. The space ran for about a decade as Hatchet before closing in the spring of 2025, and this June it reopened as Schaefer's, an all-day, family-run diner from chef John Roettinger and his wife Courtney. Both spent years in Burlington kitchens before this. John worked nights at Klinger's Bread and later landed his first fine-dining job at L'Amante. Courtney ran the front of house at the Scuffer Tap & Table on Church Street, where the two actually met, and later managed the floor at Waterworks Food + Drink in Winooski before their daughter Remi was born.
Schaefer's opened for breakfast, lunch, and dinner on June 1, and a Seven Days review published a month later called it exactly what Richmond was missing. The restaurant is named for John's great-grandmother Lydia Schaefer, who ran a 24-hour diner across from the train station in Hoboken, New Jersey, from the 1940s into the 1980s. Her motto, "simple food done right," is stenciled onto the new Vermont version's identity.
Here's the detail that actually matters if you live nearby: the old creemee window at 30 Bridge Street, the one that first served Bridge Street Café and later Hatchet, is now a kids' corner stocked with books, alphabet blocks, and Matchbox cars. Three restaurants, one window, and it's gone from serving soft-serve to giving toddlers somewhere to sit still while their parents order steak frites. That's not a renovation story. That's a building holding onto its own memory even as the sign out front changes.
Two Addresses, One Small Circle
Thirty-nine Bridge Street, a few doors down, has had its own version of this. The building opened in late 2020 as the Big Spruce with a Mexican-inspired menu, then went through several menu overhauls before its original owner, Gabriel Firman, closed it in October 2024 to concentrate on his other restaurant, Hatchet, right up the street. The chef Firman brought in to revamp Hatchet's menu that October was Christian Kruse, who'd been running the Big Spruce kitchen for him since earlier that year.
By March 2025, Firman had shuttered Hatchet too and put both restaurants up for sale. Kruse, who by then had worked both kitchens for Firman, bought the Big Spruce himself. He reopened it in phases, starting with the creemee window at the end of May 2025 and building toward a full dining room relaunch that fall. Big Spruce has been open under Kruse's ownership since completing that relaunch, serving contemporary American food with a private event space called the Parlour Room.
"Doing my own thing again has been a dream since forever," Kruse told Seven Days when the sale was first reported.
The timeline is worth laying out plainly, because it's the whole story in miniature:
| Address | 2020 to 2024 | 2024 to early 2025 | Now |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 Bridge St | Bridge Street Café, then Hatchet | Hatchet, revamped menu under Kruse as culinary director | Schaefer's |
| 39 Bridge St | The Big Spruce, Mexican-inspired | Closed by Firman in October 2024 | The Big Spruce, reopened and owned by Kruse |
Kruse worked both buildings before he owned either one. That's not two restaurants opening. That's one cook's career finally landing somewhere with his name on the lease.
The Third Window, One Block Over
If you want a third option that isn't tangled up in the Firman-Kruse story, Stone's Throw added its own creemee, coffee, and pastry window beside the main door of its pizzeria at 39 Esplanade Street last year. Co-owner Tyler Stratton built the window to mirror the success the five-location group has had with creemees in Fairfax, using a Kingdom Creamery of Vermont base for classic flavors like maple. When the basil crop comes in heavy, the seasonal flavor turns into blueberry-basil.
Between Big Spruce's window and Stone's Throw's, downtown Richmond now has two creemee stands within a few minutes' walk of each other, something Bridge Street hasn't had in years. That's a small thing until it's 7 p.m. on an August evening and you're deciding which line is shorter.
The Friday Constant
None of this reshuffling touches the one fixture that hasn't moved in years: the Richmond Farmers Market on Volunteers Green. It runs every Friday from 3 to 6:30 p.m., May 29 through October 9 this year, with live music, four rotating hot food vendors, a handful of local vegetable farmers, and a view of the sunset over the Winooski River from the same lawn where the town holds its Fourth of July celebration. The market's community listings are sponsored by the WaterWheel Foundation, the charitable arm of the Vermont band Phish.
If you've never gone, the rhythm is simple:
- Park on the left side of the Volunteers Green lot or down toward the ball fields. The right side is reserved for restaurant parking.
- Arrive by 4 or 5 for the best pick of produce and the shortest line at whichever hot food vendor is drawing the crowd that week.
- Stay through sunset if you can. That's the whole draw.
Where the Walk Goes After
Richmond rewards the after-dinner walk more than most towns its size. The Round Church, a sixteen-sided meeting house built in 1812 and maintained today by the Richmond Historical Society, sits on its own green just south of the Winooski, and by most accounts it's the only building of its kind still standing in North America. From there, the Warren and Ruth Beeken Rivershore Trail runs 3.1 miles along the river through floodplain forest that the Richmond Conservation Commission has managed since a 1993 land donation from Carl and Esther Parker. It's flat, it's shaded, and on a July evening you'll share it with dog walkers, not crowds.
If you'd rather point your legs uphill, Cochran's Ski Area, the family-run hill that's produced multiple Olympic skiers, has built out a mountain bike trail network for the warm months, maintained in part by the volunteer group Richmond Mountain Trails. None of it requires a car ride out of town.
The Actual Pattern
Step back from the individual openings and the shape of it becomes clear. Richmond's food scene this summer isn't defined by novelty. It's defined by a small enough professional community that the same names keep surfacing in new rooms. Kruse worked for Firman at two different addresses before buying one outright. The Roettingers built Schaefer's out of two Burlington restaurant careers that happened to intersect at the Scuffer years before either of them thought about Richmond. The kids' corner sitting where a creemee window used to be isn't a coincidence. It's what happens when a town this size keeps recycling its own talent instead of importing it.
That's a different kind of stability than "nothing changes here." It's closer to knowing that if a restaurant on Bridge Street closes, the person who ran the kitchen probably didn't leave town. They're two doors down, figuring out the next name to put over the door.
If you're already living here, none of this requires a decision from you beyond which window has the shorter line on a Friday night. If you're weighing whether a town this size can support the kind of food and community rhythm you actually want week to week, that's a longer conversation, and it's one the team at Flex Realty has with buyers and sellers across Vermont and New Hampshire every day. Reach out when you're ready to talk it through.
