It's early on a Saturday morning in November 2002. While in the shower Kate Bertolini has an idea she can't wait to share with her husband, Martin, and their friends Florence and Keith Chamberlin:

"Let's open a restaurant!"

In that instant you realize you've been preparing all your life for something. The restaurant is that thing. It felt crazy but somehow right.

In early December our friend Gerry Prevost — who teaches in the excellent culinary program at St. Johnsbury Academy — puts us in touch with Ryan and Allyson O'Malley, who would become our chefs. It seems that Ryan was a favorite student of Gerry's who had decided to come home to look for an opportunity after studying at Paul Smiths College and chefing around the Adirondacks.

We hit it off immediately. Ryan and Allyson's vision for a restaurant in St. Johnsbury is in perfect sync with what we are hoping to create.

In April of 2003, after considering several locations in and around downtown St. Johnsbury, we closed on the property at 98 Mill Street. After we bought it we kept running into people who also loved the building and dreamed of doing something here.

Florence and Kate cook up the restaurant's name after their first visit to the property. "You know it's great, there's the brick and copper and wood and water — all these great elements..."

It was really that innocent. It wasn't until we lived with the name for a while that we realized the other layers of meaning hidden in our moniker. Of course, there are the four elements — earth, air, water and fire. We weren't really thinking in those terms, but it became clear that each of the four partners' personalities perfectly embodied one of the four elements. Enough said about that.

And then there are chemical elements. The simple building blocks of all matter. We liked that too, because we thought of our cuisine being elemental — simple, focused, concentrating of the best raw materials available to us.

Four months of building, planning, hiring and training and we're ready for our first diners on July 30, 2003.