Offbeat Eats

Back in 2019, I talked a bit about Northfield, Vermont, the small Vermont town nestled in a valley just west of I-89, and it’s growing food scene. Particularly, I had talked about the downtown trio of businesses all in a row: Carrier Coffee Roasting, Good Measure Brewing, and Cornerstone Burger Co, which was an offshoot of the larger Cornerstone Pub and Kitchen in nearby Barre. It made for some nice “one stop shopping”, especially knowing that there were good breakfast, lunch, and dinner options whenever we were going town. But Cornerstone decided to close their Northfield pub in early 2022, and in this case, it happened to be a particularly good opportunity for Good Measure Brewing next door to expand.

My brother’s visit to the States was a short one, and we soon found ourselves heading back to Logan Airport so he could catch his flight. Since we had a bit of time to spare, I decided to take the kindler, gentler route to the airport, which involves avoiding Boston itself and taking Route 1 down to East Boston. He mentioned that he had one last food craving he wanted to satisfy, and that was a “proper Massachusetts-style roast beef sandwich”, so I decided that the best thing to do would be a short diversion to Peabody, MA to visit Jamie’s Roast Beef.

When my brother was visiting the States last fall, in addition to satisfying his cravings for, among other items, New Haven Pizza and American-style pancakes, we also had a bit of family busy to attend to, visiting my aunt and uncle in Rhinebeck, NY. There are a lot of nice places to dine around Rhinebeck, but heading just south of town, there’s an attraction you can’t really miss in Hyde Park, the Culinary Institute of America.

After a successful outing to Pepe’s the night before, on our way out of New Haven over to New York State we decided that a classic American-style diner breakfast was what we really were craving. As an American expatriate living in the UK, Dan has a lot of access to British-style breakfasts (which are great), but he really wanted an American breakfast (in particular, American-style pancakes), and I was craving some sort of Benedict, so we set off for a well-recommended local place: The Pantry.

With all the traveling I do, I occasionally find myself visiting one of my favorite restaurants, and realizing upon reviewing the extensive history of Offbeat Eats that despite thinking that I’ve reviewed a place, that I actually hadn’t written it up yet. A trip late last year to New Haven resulted in my brother and I meeting up for pizza at what’s always been the benchmark for pizza in our extended family: Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana. And I was shocked that somehow, over almost 18 years of reviews, that Pepe’s hadn’t yet gotten a review. Pizza, more than most any other common food I can think of, is a story of regional styles (before they restructured their content, Serious Eats had a really good guide on it, but a similar guide is still to be found over on Spruce Eats), and one of my overall favorite styles (much of this courtesy of Pizza Cognition theory, since it was the “pizza” I was raised with as a benchmark), “New Haven Style Pizza” remains my overall favorite pizza style. And for anyone around New Haven, or familiar with its “Apizza” style, it’s impossible to have a discussion of the style without an argument about which iconic place dominates. Most folks recognize the triad of New Haven pizza places at the top of the food chain: Frank Pepe’s, Sally’s Apizza (down the street), or on the other side of town, Modern Apizza (which I have reviewed), but if I’ve got the time, I still always gravitate towards Pepe’s. Admittedly, much of this is faith (I’ve still got extended family members with strong preferences, and a visit to Sally’s is an eyebrow-raiser), but when I think of “New Haven Pizza”, a slice of Pepe’s is exactly what I’m picturing in my mind. So after a call to my cousin, we all gathered at Pepe’s to catch up and enjoy our favorite pizza.

In late October, right before the snow started to fly around here, we got together with our friend Alex for a set of short hikes in Marlboro, Vermont around the old Hogback Mountain ski area, which was situated along the tops of Mt Olga and Hogback Mountain. It used to be one of southeast Vermont’s more popular ski areas, but rising expenses and insurance costs in the late 1980s made the resort unprofitable, and it closed. In 2010, after local fundraising efforts, most of the old resort was acquired by the Town of Marlboro, and is now a natural area for hike-in skiing and hiking. After a pleasant hike looking at the now-abandoned ski lift equipment, we decided to check out the nearby brewery, Beer Naked Brewery, and their associated pizzeria, Pizzapalooza.

As our regular readers know, here at Offbeat Eats, every once in a while we do a “health check”, revisiting one of our favorite spots and see how things are doing. We first visited Oakes & Evelyn in Montpelier back in May 2021 when they were a brand-new restaurant and the dining scene was still re-emerging from it’s long Covid-19 slumber. As you can read in that review, we were really impressed by that visit, and vowed to return for future trips. So in 2022 when we were looking for a place to celebrate our anniversary, we ended up choosing a revisit to Oakes & Evelyn, and even returned in December to celebrate my birthday (both of these visits had pretty similar Fall menus, so this review will cover both visits).