Bloom Where You Are Planted
Chef Mary Dumont opens the door at her new vegan pub-style restaurant with plans for more. Many more.
Photos by Linda Campos
Twenty-one years ago Michelin-three-starred chef Alain Passard sent shock waves throughout the culinary world when he—gasp!—removed red meat from his iconic Parisian restaurant L’Arpège. For health and political reasons, Passard made the bold move of dedicating himself to cooking with vegetables, supplied exclusively from his own organic farm. While not an odd choice now, it is still not the status quo, Michelin stars or not. When local chef Mary Dumont, once the winner of the Cochon 555, a national cooking competition celebrating heritage breed pork, decided to open not just a vegetarian restaurant, but a vegan restaurant, heads turned.
Dumont comes from a family of restaurant owners and chefs; she began her culinary journey as a server on the West Coast, but was quickly coaxed into the kitchen and it was clearly her calling. She made her way home to the coast of New Hampshire and made her mark at the historic Dunaway at Strawberry Bank in Portsmouth. Then Harvest in Harvard Square, Cultivar in Boston and now Plant Pub in Kendall Square, Cambridge.
“When I was working in kitchens in California I became accustomed to working with farmers and producers and having a real dialogue and exchange of ideas,” says Dumont. “We had farmers in the kitchen all the time. When I got back to the East Coast things weren’t done that way just yet. There was plenty of talent and beautiful product but the connections weren’t being made. When I was at Harvest, especially in the early years, I would stop at farms on my way into work and pick up fresh produce. It’s much easier and better now.”
For nearly a decade, Dumont raised the bar at Harvest, a 40-plus-year-old restaurant that launched the careers of many of Boston’s finest chefs (including Frank McClelland, Lydia Shire, Jasper White, Jimmy Burke, Chris Schlesinger, Barbara Lynch and Ana Sortun) but the restaurant had become tired and lacking ingenuity. With Dumont behind the stove and an interior renovation, Harvest was given new breath and Dumont’s name was firmly ensconced on the local and national food horizon with accolades aplenty.
“I have never been particularly meat-oriented,” she says. “At Harvest, the menu was meant to serve a lot of interests, but stay focused on regional and seasonal ingredients. Vegetables were front and center, but I also created meat dishes I am proud of. Anything I do, I put all my effort into it. My job then was to have a varied menu that changed quite frequently—I think I did that pretty well and I had a great team.”
When it was time for a solo project, Dumont’s focus was clearly on ingredients that were locally produced and in season. So much so that, “When my wife and I opened Cultivar the goal was to grow as much of our own produce as we could and have vegetables be the stars.” To that end, the couple installed a “Freight Farm” hydroponic garden housed in a former shipping freight container right at the restaurant. “We grew all sorts of herbs and lettuces—the root vegetables did really well. It was this beautiful bit of calm, an oasis in the midst of all the chaos of City Hall Plaza.” Those vegetables appeared all over her menu, but it was the Cultivar salad that was the most popular dish on the menu. “A salad—it was gorgeous and our best seller. Fresh lettuces, baby vegetables and green goddess dressing made from our herbs. Stunning in its simplicity.”
Cultivar was a critically acclaimed project, but short-lived for all the reasons great restaurants don’t always succeed. Dumont took some time to regroup and found herself finding her home garden a place of inspiration and quiet. “I am not particularly religious, but our garden is a very spiritual place for me. It is a lot of really hard work, but so gratifying.” She says, “I spent so much time thinking about what I wanted my next venture to be and the garden was telling me. I knew I wanted a concept that was wellness-focused and more casual, but the pieces weren’t coming together. I was looking at commercial real estate properties hoping the space would help me define what I could do, and through an agent I met my partner, Pat McAuley, who was looking for a place for his idea. Our ideas dovetailed. We were definitely two halves looking for the whole.” And so Plant Pub was born.
Pat McAuley is the founder of the dating app Hint and co-founder of the Barrel House Z in Weymouth, a craft brewery and beer garden. McAuley had been working with a vegan impact investor, Sebastiano Cossia Castiglioni, and a triumvirate was created; Dumont and McAuley felt Castiglioni was not just a financial investor, but a man committed to vegan businesses and a positive support. “He’s philosophically invested in what we are doing and the vegan way of life.”
The transition from nearly two decades creating sophisticated menus with multi-course plated options to a pub concept was not the difficult leap Dumont thought it would be. “I love the idea of a pub—it’s universal in a lot of ways. It’s casual. It’s a place where just about anyone would want to come and have community. The menu and beverage program is an equalizer. It’s pizza, burgers, beer and wine. Just vegan. Still delicious and satisfying, but vegan.”
Creating the menu seemed easy at first, but recipe development became a small hurdle and Dumont embraced the challenge. “It was fairly easy to come up with a dough for the pizza I really felt good about, but this is a menu that isn’t going to change weekly—this pizza dough has to be THE pizza dough that has to work thousands of times. I had to really think about scaling ingredients and technique on a whole new level. Our goal at Plant Pub is to open many locations—I had to keep that in mind with every recipe I created.”
And her pub menu needed a good burger. A good vegan burger. A consistently good vegan burger. “It was never an option for us to buy a frozen product: One, it isn’t mystyle, and two, there isn’t a good one.” Dumont spent weeks experimenting with mushrooms and back-to-basics lessons in caramelization. “I’d make one and think ‘This is good, but I need it to be better,’ so it was back to the kitchen. I love the burger we have and I loved developing it.” Dumont also made the decision to include the “Impossible Burger” as an option. “I’ve listened carefully and read the criticism about how it’s so processed, etc., but if you think the burger you’re eating isn’t processed, you’re wrong. It’s incredibly expensive to get local, grass-fed, humanely raised beef, and even if you can, that doesn’t take into account the physical and environmental impacts of eating beef. I feel good about our choice.”
Dumont’s well-tested pizzas come from a high tech TurboChef Double Convection oven, which cooks her pizzas in exactly two minutes and 45 seconds. From said oven comes her interpretation of the classic Margherita. The fresh buffalo milk mozzarella you’d expect in Naples? At Plant Pub, it’s Numu vegan mozzarella from not-so-faraway Brooklyn. The tomatoes in her sauce are organic and the basil plucked from her garden. The burger options are a choice of Dumont’s house-made vegetable based patty or the “Impossible,” with toppings: classic lettuce, tomato and onion or spicy Asian coleslaw and kimchi or guacamole and herbed ranch. Ramen bowls, street tacos, nachos, cauliflower Buffalo wings and soft serve ice “cream” round out the menu.
Pat McAuley’s beverage program isn’t playing a supporting role. The carefully curated beer and wine list focuses on biodynamic and organic options, as well as a strong nonalcoholic beverage selection. “We have nonalcoholic drinks like ‘curious elixirs’—we wanted them on the menu so no one felt excluded. We also offer nonalcoholic beers that I found myself gravitating towards before we opened,” Dumont says. “I would spend a few hours mowing the lawn and feeling completely satisfied and rewarded with some really amazingly tasty beers that have no alcohol—I am much more clear-headed and feeling better.”
Dumont and McAuley have forged their way through the opening of their first pub, a venture born at the height of the pandemic, but are already looking at real estate for Plant Pub number two: “more of beer hall experience and possibly brewing our own beers—alcohol and non-alcohol options.” The team has a mantra: “good for you, good for the planet” and plan on more Plant Pubs. Many more Plant Pubs.
This story appeared in the Winter 2022 issue.
