Tag Archives: breakfast

Health Check: The Post (Concord, NH)

Welcome to another of Offbeat Eats’ Health Check reviews, where we re-visit old favorites and check out how they are doing. In this case, a recent trip to visit the Wentworth Greenhouse Farmers Market, which actually had us passing through north Concord’s “Fisherville” neighborhood. This gave us a great opportunity to check up on an old favorite, The Post.

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Baja Cafe (Tucson, AZ)

One of the shortcomings of rural New Hampshire living is that we don’t have a lot of a great breakfast options. There are some breakfast gems both locally (like Lou’s in Hanover) or regionally (like Polly’s in Sugar Hill), but when I’m really craving a good, solid breakfast, I’m generally craving something Southwestern, and we don’t have a lot of good options that way. But I travel a lot, and I recently found myself in Tucson, Arizona, craving some sort of Southwestern breakfast, and also wanting to have breakfast at 6:30 in the morning. And there was one place in Tucson I know would meet these requirements: Baja Cafe.

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The Dinner Table (Swanzey, NH)

A few weekends ago, the snow hadn’t really fallen yet, and I used it as an opportunity to go on a short hike with my friend Alex. Looking for a relatively modest hike that still had some good views and was reasonably positioned between Alex’s place in CT and mine in NH, we settled on Wantastiquet Mountain, located in Hinsdale across the river from Brattleboro. It’s a relatively short drive for me, around an hour and change, but I’ve driven I-91 so many times recently I decided to take the NH route, going down through Keene, NH, and stopping for breakfast. Unfortunately, I don’t know any great breakfast spots in Keene proper (if I have Keene readers, I’d love to hear options). But just over the border in the adjacent town of Swanzey, right next to the Keene Airport, is a little joint called The Dinner Table.

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Taste (West Lebanon, NH)

In early August, I got to try out one of the more welcome additions to the Upper Valley’s breakfast scene. Every since the Pandemic started and The Lebanon Diner closed, most of the Upper Valley’s breakfast joints have been overwhelmed with demand, so it was very welcome that Taste started serving traditional breakfast and lunch at the north end of the West Lebanon Strip.

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Kalikala Cuisine (Kailua-Kona, Hawaii)

After my conference wrapped up, we spent another few nights on the Big Island, moving up the coast to the Royal Kona Resort, which originally was built as the Hilton Kona Resort. It’s a surprisingly well-maintained old resort that has much of the 1960s charm to it, but it currently doesn’t have a lot of dining action, and I quite frankly wasn’t impressed with the limited breakfast options. So we headed down Ali‘i Drive to see what we could find. As I mentioned in my review of The Fish Hopper, Ali‘i Drive is basically ground-central for the central Kona coast tourist trade, with any number of restaurants vying for tourist dollars. My eye caught a rather low-key outdoor dining spot almost immediately adjacent to The Fish Hopper called Kalikala Cuisine, and after talking with a man (who I found out was the owner) on the bench out front with a nice dog, we decided to give the place a try.

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Wit & Grit (Randolph, VT)

Mid-summer, we were meeting up with friends in Burlington, VT for one of the monthly Tiki events a Venetian Soda Lounge, and it gave us one of our relatively rare opportunities to grab breakfast on the way to Burlington. There’s been a lot of change in the dining scene in Randolph, Vermont in the last two years that I’ve been wanting to check out, including a new bagel place (Wee Bird), two restaurants merging (One Main Tap and Grill and Kuya Filipino became Kuya at One Main), and and old favorite, Black Krim, closed up shop and became Wit and Grit. Swinging through town, we decided we had time for a sit-down breakfast, so this time, we decided to check out Wit and Grit.

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Flapjack Pete’s (Lake George, NY)

The next stop in my travels was Lake George, NY, in the Adirondacks, for our annual visit with our Tiki friends at Ohana Luau at the Lake, staying at The Tiki Resort, one of the few remaining intact Tiki-style resorts in the US. While most of our activity focused on either the Ohana event, or several trips for mini-golfing to some of the many nearby courses, we do occasionally find ourselves venturing forth looking for breakfast. You can see from such previous reviews of The Lone Bull and Biscotti Bros. that the Lake George area has an almost uncountably large number of places that serve up breakfast fare in restaurants featuring some combination of “lumberjack” and “north woods” themes; while we previously have enjoyed The Lone Bull a couple of times, when we head that some of our friends were heated to Flapjack Pete’s, we decided we’d check them out, since they seemed to be one of the better in-town options.

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Everyday Cafe (Contoocook, NH)

Since the closing of The School House Cafe in Warner, NH, I had been on the lookout for a new place to catch a breakfast or lunch if we were driving down south along I-89, and one of the places that had been on my radar for a while was the Everyday Cafe in Contoocook, NH. With a trip in May to the NH Sheep and Wool Festival (this year located in Deerfield, NH), we finally had a reason to be passing near Contoocook at breakfast time, and decided it was a good change to check out Every Day Cafe.

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Regency Cafe Post-Pandemic Check-In (London, UK)

There are few London traditions of mine as sacred as going out for a good old-fashioned fry-up: a “Full English” breakfast, with at least bacon, sausage, eggs, beans, and toast, and I usually like to add even more to that (at a minimum, tomatoes, and usually black pudding as well). In the area around Pimlico, there’s exactly one place that anyone should even consider for that, and it’s the classic greasy spoon, The Regency Cafe. Virtually every trip of mine to London, even short ones, involve a trip to The Regency, except for holiday trips where they are closed. Indeed, one of my earliest reviews here in 2007 was for The Regency.

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The Breakfast Club (Manchester, NH)

On many of our trips to either Boston or Rhode Island, we’re usually looking to stop for breakfast on the way, but a lot of the places we used to frequent along I-89 (such as The Footfills or School House Cafe in Warner, both of which closed permanently during the pandemic) closed, so we much more frequently find ourselves looking for new breakfast joints around Concord or Manchester. While Purple Finch in Bedford remains one of our favorites, we occasionally take the time to check around town for other options, and a recent favorite of ours has been The Breakfast Club.

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