When Janet Martinez moved Burt's Irish Pub back onto Mountain Road in June 2025, she thought about Herb O'Brien, the late selectboard member and longtime regular who never let her forget where the bar belonged. The Stowe Reporter reported that Martinez recalled Herb saying, "You gotta get back home." Burt's had spent 23 years at a Luce Hill Road address after a fire pushed it off Mountain Road in 2002. This year the pub turns 50, and it's back on the strip where it started, occupying a building that has now hosted three different restaurants in the space of two decades.
That building isn't unusual for this stretch of road. A few tenths of a mile away, another address just cycled through its third occupant since 2019. If you've lived in Stowe long enough to remember what used to be where, Mountain Road can start to feel less like a street and more like a rotation.
The Address That Keeps Coming Back to Beer and Darts
For years, 2160 Mountain Road was Cactus Café. Then Kim Kaufman and Jimmy Goldsmith took it over and turned it into the Blue Donkey, a burger bar that ran for a stretch before the couple decided to give up the space. In June 2025, Martinez moved Burt's in.
The new location is the same size as the old Luce Hill spot but all on one level, with a backyard and, as Martinez's chef put it, an actual kitchen instead of the closet they'd been working out of for years. The pub still pours half Vermont beers and half Irish on tap, still does a proper 20-ounce Guinness, and still runs a menu that reflects Martinez's own background as much as the pub's Irish name suggests. She grew up the daughter of Colombian immigrants on Long Island, trained as a pastry chef at the now-closed New England Culinary Institute, and ended up behind a bar in Stowe almost by accident after moving to town in the late 1990s. The beef-and-potato empanadas on the menu, encased in annatto-tinted masa and served with a peppery sauce, are the one dish she calls truly authentic to her family.
Kaufman, for her part, said she was glad to see the building go to Martinez rather than sit empty. The pool table that used to take up the basement of the Luce Hill location now sits in a sunlit nook that opens onto the new backyard.
Three-Tenths of a Mile Away, a Different Kind of Handoff
The Stowe Reporter reported that McCarthy's Restaurant ran at 454 Mountain Road for 45 years before closing in 2019. Skinny Pancake took the space next and lasted about five years before shutting down in November, citing staffing difficulties tied to Stowe's housing costs.
The building sat empty for a few months until Michelle and Matthew Merrifield closed on it in mid-April this year. The couple met in culinary school in California, where Michelle earned a pastry degree and Matthew a culinary arts degree, and worked in kitchens in Napa Valley and New Orleans before Matthew took a chef de cuisine job at Shelburne Farms Inn that kept them in Vermont for four years. Michelle later worked as pastry manager at August First in Burlington.
They named their restaurant Barbarian, partly for the comic book characters Matthew grew up reading and partly for his love of Dungeons & Dragons. It also describes how he feels eating at the kind of upscale restaurants where he's spent his career. In Seven Days, Matthew said, "I always feel like a barbarian in a place I don't belong."
Barbarian opened for its grand opening on July 3, serving breakfast and dinner in a 40-seat dining room with a lounge area and a large outside deck. The menu leans into the same instinct as its name: hash browns paired with caviar, a patty melt on Michelle's housemade bread, doughnuts made from a potato recipe passed down through Matthew's family. The dining room mixes exposed stainless steel with booths and chandeliers, and the walls carry personal touches, comic book pages in the foyer, china that made the cross-country move from Matthew's childhood home, and a mounted boar's head above the fireplace that the couple named Sally.
What Actually Closes Restaurants Here
It's tempting to read these two buildings as proof that Stowe's dining scene is simply volatile, that concepts come and go the way they might in any tourist town. That's not quite what the record shows. Cactus Café and McCarthy's each ran for decades before anyone touched them. The turnover only picked up in the last several years, and the reason given for at least one of those closures wasn't the food or the crowds. Skinny Pancake pointed specifically to the difficulty of keeping staff in a town where housing costs have climbed faster than kitchen wages can keep up.
That's the same pressure every hospitality business on this road is working around, including the ones still open. Burt's new space gave its kitchen staff a real workspace instead of a closet. Barbarian's owners have talked openly about needing to take care of their team as much as their guests. In this labor market, that kind of care matters.
The Weekend That Tests Them Both
Both restaurants got an early stress test from Stowe's calendar. The British Invasion car show returned to the Stowe Special Events Field for its 35th year on September 18 through 20, with the Main Street Block Party kicking off that Friday evening. Weekends like that fill Mountain Road with a crowd that has nowhere else nearby to eat, which means Barbarian's first full autumn and Burt's first full year back on the strip both got tested by the same wave of visitors within days of each other.
Next up on the road is the 17th annual Oktoberfest at the von Trapp Brewing Bierhall, which means the season isn't slowing down for either kitchen anytime soon.
If you've got a memory of Cactus Café or McCarthy's you want to compare against what's there now, or you're just curious what else has changed hands on Mountain Road this year, the team at Flex Realty spends enough time in Stowe to keep track. Contact Us and tell us what you've noticed.
