Archive | 2012

The Old Courthouse (Newport, NH)

A few years ago, the old courthouse in Newport, NH was renovated and converted into a restaurant, called, simply, The Old Courthouse. It’s been a welcome addition to the area’s fairly meager “fine dining” scene, with a rather nice dinner menu, as well as one of the area’s better Sunday Brunches. However, what has often drawn me to the Old Courthouse is that they often have some pretty good theme dinners. In this case, they recently were celebrating Polish-American Heritage Month with a series of Polish dinners. Seeing that Carol is of Polish descent, and I’m of Lithuanian descent, and the area don’t really have a lot of Eastern European dining options, we decided to check it out.

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Gusanoz, Chapter 3 (Lebanon, NH)

It’s never a good thing when you hear that Restaurant Impossible (or any of its counterparts on other networks) is coming to town. To even be eligible to be on a show like that, your restaurant has to be on the verge of failure, and the owners up against the ropes. Being on a show like that literally is one of the last grasps of the desperate. So which local, failing, and desperate restaurant was Restaurant Impossible here to fix? Sadly, I can’t say I was surprised to hear it was Gusanoz, our local Mexican restaurant (indeed, probably the only place locally I can call Mexican without putting quote marks around it). Gusanoz is no stranger to these pages. Indeed, since I started writing Offbeat Eats, including this review I will have written them up four times (a record!). And, indeed, I’m not sure the paint had even dried on Restaurant Impossible‘s renovations back in May before my readers, friends, coworkers, and acquaintances started asking me if I had been by and checked out the “New” Gusanoz. Well, in short, I hadn’t. I might have checked it out right away, but that time of year was busy (back to back trips to Austin and Chicago, indeed, the very day Gusanoz was getting its makeover I was eating Carnitas at Carnitas Don Pedro in Chicago). And then several other trips (in no particular order, San Antonio, Iceland, and Germany) came up, and I decided that, overall, it was best to give them some time to settle in to the new state of affairs and see if the Restaurant Impossible changes “stuck”.

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Santarpio’s (East Boston, MA)

Have you ever had one of those places where you’ve driven by it dozen of times, always saying to yourself “You know, I should check that place out?”, but you never seem to get around to it? Santarpio’s Pizza in East Boston was one of those places for us. For years, every time we went to Logan Airport via the Callahan Tunnel and Route 1, we’d see this pizza place off to the side of Route 1A. You can’t really miss it, since the sign for Santarpio’s (I’ve heard some locals call it “Tarp’s”) on their second story is at eye level when you are on 1A. It’s been there forever, and I always wondered if it was any good. Well, recently I had to pick up my brother at the airport, and his schedule was convenient for doing a pizza run, so we finally went over to check it out.

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Sportello (Boston, MA)

(Closed) Well, my flight from London back to Boston arrived at 6pm, so we decided this would be a good opportunity for Carol to pick me up at the airport, and go get something interesting for dinner. A few months before, Carol had found herself with some time to kill at the airport, and their group went over to South Station and walked over into South Boston to Sportello, a little Italian place. They rather enjoyed the trip, so I figured I’d go there as well to check it out. Sportello is a rather funky place. The main concept here is “modern interpretation of the classic diner”, and that describes the decor rather well: walking into Sportello, you immediate see two large U-shaped counters surrounded by stools, of the type that described most diners when I was little. The overall palette is “gleaming white”, and like an actual diner, the bulk of the food prep is done to-order, right in front of you.

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Hawksmoor (Spitalfields, London, UK)

Because we were trying to do the trip to Frankfurt on the cheap, my tickets had what most people would consider to be an inconvenient 21 hour layover at London Heathrow. For me, this was an opportunity; my brother and sister-in-law live in London (hence all my frequent London and UK entries), so it gave me a nice opportunity to meet up with them, have some dinner, drinks, and pudding, get rested up, and get back to the airport in plenty of time for my flight. As far as dinner goes, it allowed me an opportunity to finally cross one major food destination of my to-do list: going to Hawksmoor, get a seat at the bar and try their famous Kimchi Burger. It was recommended to me a few years ago by someone on Flyertalk.com, but it’s been resilient to my efforts to actually get one; my first attempt was thwarted by my travel schedule (I was stopping off in London on the way to Spain), and my second thwarted by the large numbers of other people visiting Hawksmoor for Christmas festivities. But this time, I finally managed to pull it off, with my brother and sister-in-law in tow.

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Apfelwein Solzer (Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

Well, three days after I arrived, my conference concluded and I found myself faced with my last evening in Frankfurt. While I enjoyed some of the tourist destination in Frankfurt (Römerberg and Sachsenhausen were both fairly pleasant), I wanted to try and find a more relaxing and less touristy area to explore and have my dinner. So I decided to walk from downtown northeast to Bornheim, which is one of Frankfurt’s older neighborhoods. It also has a nice “village” atmosphere, and a nice boulevard, Berger Straße, lined with several restaurants and apfelweinwirtschafts. After looking at several of these, I decided to try out one of the, Apfelwein Solzer, for dinner.

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Central Grill (Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

One of the things I enjoy about going to large international cities is that they tend to have immigrant communities, which gives them plenty of good ethnic restaurants in addition to the native foods. For Frankfurt, one of the larger immigrant communities is Turkish, with several parts of town having notable concentrations of Turkish businesses. In particular, the directly east of the Hauptbahnhof has several large and well-regarded Turkish halal restaurants places. One of these, Central Grill, was my choice for lunch on my last day in Frankfurt.

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Adolf Wagner (Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

The next day, my conference got out in time to get an early dinner. I decided to check out another place in Sachsenhausen: Apfelweinwirtschaft Adolf Wagner. It’s a bit of a tourist destination, but it’s also one of the minority of Frankfurt Apfelweinwirtschafts that actually makes it’s own Afpelwein; most places carry Apfelwein made by Possmann, the major brewery in the area (who makes a good product, admittedly). Located on the edge of Sachsenhausen, south of the Schweizer Platz shopping area, Adolf Wagner is definitely on the tourist beat, and even with my early dinner time, it was definitely busy. But this made for some phenomenal people-watching, since Adolf Wagner is basically group seating (benches, mostly), and the staff loves to pack people in tightly, and it’s really fun seeing how people from different cultures (especially those with larger concepts of “personal space”) handle that, and being seated with unfamiliar people.

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Struwwelpeter (Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

My second day at the conference ended up having an extended lunch break, so I used this as an opportunity to go check out a few tourist sites, including walking up the Frankfurter Dom (the cathedral, which has a great view of the city), the Eiserner Steg (“Iron Bridge”, an old pedestrian bridge across the Main), and Sachsenhausen, one of Frankfurt’s neighborhoods known for Apfelweinwirtschafts (basically, cider houses). One of the better known ones is Struwwelpeter, named after the German childrens’ stories by Heinrich Hoffmann (most of which I actually think are more than a little creepy, as childrens’ stories go).

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Das Wirtshaus (Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

(Closed) The good news is that I managed to get work to pay for a trip to Frankfurt to attend a conference. Of course, there’s always a downside to that: my four days in Frankfurt for work were mostly spent… working. Sure, I could regale you with tales of food at the conference center, but unless you are looking to spend a lot of money on some below-average schnitzel, I don’t think I’ll bother. But after the conference let out at 6pm my first full day, several of us decided it was a great opportunity to go and actually check out the city. Giving everyone a chance to dress down a bit, we met up at Alte Oper (the old Opera House), and checked out the area. Just east of Alte Oper on Große Bockenheimer Straße (a major street for restaurants), there are no end of restaurants, and after checking several out, we ended up settling on Das Wirtshaus, a pub featuring beer, wurst, and schnitzel.

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