This article by Tommy Gardner was first published in the Stowe Reporter on March 2.
Stowe has plenty of restaurants to choose from, but good luck finding a place that serves a quarter-pound burger — with or without cheese — for under six bucks as well as one of the biggest breakfast sandwiches in town, whether breakfast time is dawn, dusk or somewhere in between.
That place is the Snack Shack at Stowe Arena, and you’d better hurry up because it’s almost last call.
Julie Roy has been slinging sammies at the ice rink so long that the folks who used to skate there as youth hockey players are bringing their own kids. Now, after 23 years running the Shack, Roy is hanging up her oven mitts.
“Of all the jobs I’ve had, I love this one the most,” she said. “I love baking for people and cooking for people. Quite honestly, I love the praise that people give me. When they say, ‘that’s the best soup I’ve ever had,’ it’s very rewarding.”
Roy said before starting the Snack Shack in 2000, she was a stay-at-home mom for about a decade. When her youngest kid turned 10, husband Mark suggested a food cart — he’d run the concession stand at the Barre city pool when he was in high school and figured Julie had the chops for the work. Her cousin in Connecticut ran a hot dog cart, and he gave the Roys some tips, from cooking the dogs to handling the cash box.
“We bought a hot dog cart that weekend and my dad went down and picked it up for us and, you know what? There wasn’t one part of me that thought this wasn’t going to be a successful business,” she said. “I just knew it.”
Thus began Roy’s College Dogs, which Julie ran for 20 summers in Waterbury’s Rusty Parker Park before calling it quits in 2020.
“We sold it to a great lady who lived in Maine, and she turned the hot dog cart into a vegetarian cart,” she said. “I joked with her and I said, ‘That cart’s never seen a vegetable in 20 years.’”
The hot dog cart was only a summer gig, and during that first summer, after Roy saw a newspaper ad seeking someone to run the concession stand at Jackson Arena, she leapt at the chance.
The shack’s first location was spartan and so disconnected from the rest of the facility that Roy had to fetch water and lug it over to make coffee or hot cocoa. Eventually the shack was moved to a better location.
“We felt like we were high off the hog because they had water for us,” she laughed.
Plenty of Stoweites will get a certain look in their eye when recalling the open-air days of Jackson Arena — that uphill-both-ways nostalgia borne from remembrance of sub-zero games — and Roy gets the same way.
The shack did all its cooking back then on a pair of Walmart-purchased pancake griddles and some tiny French fry baskets. The aroma of cooking bacon was catnip to hungry players. If things got too smoky, she’d open the door as well as the food window, and close them again when it got too chilly. She couldn’t set up soda bottles to display because they would freeze.
“We would go home and smell so bad,” she said.
After 13 years, Roy was thinking about getting done, but then town voters approved the new rink after a series of no votes.
“And we were, like, you know what? We deserve to come and work in a good kitchen,” she said.
That was 10 years ago, and Roy quickly took advantage of the more spacious digs, adding more homemade fare to the menu.
She began baking her own breads and making her own soups, and hungry skaters, fans and regulars in the know gobbled it up.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, Roy pulled out a couple of sheet pans with individual loaves of banana bread. Those are perhaps the best selling baked good.
“One of my favorite things is when a kid comes and he just opens it up, rips it in half and eats the whole thing,” she said.
The number one menu item overall, though, is the Hat Trick, an egg and meat sandwich served on a kaiser roll with a hashbrown tucked in there. It’s on the menu all day.
Tim Meehan, a Stowe builder and regular rink-goer, said he is “a devotee” of the Hat Trick. When asked this week to say a kind word about Roy and the Shack, he audibly grunted in disappointment over the phone. He hadn’t been informed.
“It’s a great place to stop in, especially Saturday morning after skiing, when the little kids were playing, which is always fun to watch,” Meehan said. “I always thought it was worthy of support.”
Roy said she has seen kids progress through the youth hockey ranks through high school, disappear for a while, and show up again with their kids, now in the youth program.
“The families up here are incredible. I couldn’t give you their names, but I know, say, this one takes her coffee black,” she said. “I have one gal who always asks for my cinnamon rolls, and she’s not here today but said she’ll be here next week, so I’ll make them then.”
Tony Whitaker, the rink superintendent, said his twin boys, now in their 20s, have been frequenting the place since they were young children. He said Roy’s personality has made the Snack Shack a popular place for locals and visiting teams alike.
“I told the kids when we were younger to tell Julie to just put it on my tab,” Whitaker said. “It wasn’t just a business to her. She got to know everyone in the rink.”
