Cold weather hit hard and fast this week — just in time to freeze out the Dodgers and warm up with soup.

If you're looking for a bowl of soup to be a meal, the thing to eat is pho,  Vietnamese noodle soup. I headed to Pho Dang Vietnamese Café in Winooski, which moved in July from its home of 11 years to new quarters a few blocks north.

The restaurant at 348 Main Street, roughly double the size of the original, is a cheerful and buzzy space currently decorated with goblins and pumpkins. All 14 tables were full the night I dined there, with a steady flow of people arriving. I found a seat at a shiny wooden bar by the front door and within a couple of minutes was served a pot of tea.

My food followed fast: a first course of four deep-fried egg rolls ($3.95) and then a spectacular bowl of pho rau. The steaming bowl of  chicken and beef broth held a treasure trove of  crunchy vegetables, like a salad dunked in stock:  scallions, onions, bell peppers, mushrooms, broccoli, carrots and celery.  The mushrooms came in chunks, the peppers in big pieces, and the celery  slices were long and cut on the bias.

Cubes of tofu floated in the rich broth and noodles settled at the bottom; I unearthed them with each bite. I dressed the pho with a squeeze of lime, cilantro leaves and  bean sprouts.  My “small” bowl was $7.25 and needed a double set of  utensils — soup spoon and chop sticks — to eat it.

At the original Pho Dang, it was fun to peer into the little kitchen and see big pots of broth simmering on the stove and cooks doing great things with it. The view is gone, but the great food remains.

Dining on a Dime is a weekly series featuring well-made, filling bites (something substantial enough to qualify as a small meal or better) for $12 or less. Know of a tasty dish we should feature? Drop us a line: food@sevendaysvt.com.

Update October 18, 2018:  Food at Philo Ridge Farm is available for takeout as the farm addresses its waste-water permitting, according to farm officials.

When I pulled into the parking lot of  Philo Ridge Farm in Charlotte the other day, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to dine on a dime at its market café. After all, I squeezed into a space (which was hard to find) between a Mercedes SUV and a Volvo station wagon. A silver BMW arrived not long after I did.

I learned not to judge a café by the cars in its lot. As it turns out, it was no problem at all to eat lunch here for $12.  The difficulty was deciding what to get.

Pizza was $2.75 a slice, $3.25 for the daily special topped with eggplant — lots of it — grown on the farm. Fried chicken, garnished with sprigs of rosemary and displayed in a big cast-iron skillet, was less than $3 per piece. A salad of gorgeous farm-grown vegetables was $8. I ordered a meatball hero ($10) and never looked back.

But I did keep looking up and around at the place, unlike any I've seen in Vermont, where I stopped for lunch in a big barn-like building at a crossroads in Charlotte. The market café is a bold combination of a Beacon Hill gourmet shop and a farmstand. The food and its presentation are so pleasing,  you take two samples of Cobb Hill cheese even as you watch a fly buzz and land on each slice.

Shelves are stocked with farm produce and meat, along with value-added products from the kitchen such as chicken and beef broth, hot sauce, tomatillo salsa, dilly beans and hot peppers. At a deli counter, you can order food to eat in a large adjoining dining room furnished with communal tables. Seating is also available at a wooden bar and on a couch that faces a fireplace. Doors open onto a patio and farm fields beyond. But it was raining hard the day I was there, and the lunch crowd was eating inside.

The tables were full, so I carried my sandwich to the coffee table and pulled up a chair. The meatballs, kept hot in a pot of red sauce, were simply seasoned to highlight the flavor of the farm-raised beef. Four of them were set on a bed of sharp melted cheese that lined the bottom of a warm, crusty baguette. I wondered about eating a South Philly kind of sandwich at a  400-acre farm in Charlotte, but the meatballs and marinara went down just fine.
I left Philo Ridge with half a chicken, raised and roasted at the farm, for $10 — thus scoring two inexpensive, first-rate meals in one day from this new place. It would probably make sense to go back for pizza, since the executive chef at Philo Ridge, Andrew Feinberg, is a former chef-owner of Franny’s.  This was an acclaimed pizza place in Brooklyn that Feinberg opened and ran with his wife, Francine Stephens, now the food and farm director at Philo Ridge.

A couple of days after my lunch, I was dining on beer and popcorn at Zero Gravity Craft Brewery. Frank Pace, chef-owner of neighboring restaurant the Great Northern, stopped by to say hi. I asked him if he’d been to Philo Ridge Farm; he answered yes, and raved.

Pace predicted that Philo Ridge Farm could become the first Michelin-starred restaurant in Vermont. Meanwhile, you can get a slice for $2.75.

Dining on a Dime is a weekly series featuring well-made, filling bites (something substantial enough to qualify as a small meal or better) for $12 or less. Know of a tasty dish we should feature? Drop us a line: food@sevendaysvt.com.