The Upper Valley region doesn’t have many “fine dining” restaurants, especially once you get out of the core. Since we moved to the area in 2001, the New London Inn has been one of the area’s few “dinner date” restaurants, but the actual restaurant has had a lot of iterations, ranging from the “New London Inn” which we found a bit stodgy, the Coach House (which we rather liked), and most recently, it’s now operated as “The Elms” by the same team as the Oak Roam at the Inn at Pleasant Lake. Celebrating our anniversary in October (well, the anniversary is in late September, but September was a crazy-busy month) gave us a good reason to go over and check out The Elms and see how the new ownership was doing.
While the ownership and operation of the the restaurant has changed several times, the actual dining area itself has only changed slightly, getting a slight updating the decoration and a few installation of “The Elms” signs about. Otherwise, the dining room has the same sort of pleasant ambiance that you think of when you think “New England country inn”: a lot of wood paneling, fireplaces, country-chic decorations, and tablecloth service. It’s one of the more inviting dining rooms in the area, actually.
A nice advantage of the The Elms (that it shares with it’s sister restaurant The Oak Room over at the Inn at Pleasant Lake) is that they maintain a good bar, including a good selection of house-made cocktail. As we looked over the menu, we both enjoyed one of our there custom cocktails, the Silent Poet, with Laird’s applejack, Benedictine, PX, Chartreuse, and dried lemon. A nice, herbal cocktail, this was a great start to the meal.
Deciding we wanted some appetizers, we started with an order of the polenta croquettes. These were nice little croquettes of chevre, covered in a nicely-crisped brown butter polenta, served up with tomato jam, pickled veggies, and basil. The tomato jam was particularly flavorful, making for a nice combination of crisped polenta, rich goat cheese, and good flavor notes from the tomato and basil. I’d definitely get these again.
We also got the nightly soup special, which was a tomato bisque. I usually expect a “bisque” to be a bit on the dairy-creamy side, but the version we had here was a particularly rich and flavorful tomato-centric bisque, with a deep, vivid red color, that really focused on rich, concentrated tomato flavor, and I was really pleased with the result, which was hearty, flavorful, and nicely herbed. Served up with microgreens, this was an excellent soup.
For my main course, I decided to go with a relatively straightforward choice of their roasted chicken breast and thigh. This was a relatively simple preparation: a roasted breast and thigh, nicely prepped (the thigh was boneless, the breast airlined), with potato-leek bread pudding, porcini gravy, and pickled wild mushrooms. The key here was the execution: the chicken was prepped perfectly, cooked to the perfect tenderness while getting a nice, crisp skin, and the pudding, gravy, and mushrooms added some nice flavors to round it out. I adore a simple roast chicken, and this delivered.
Carol, meanwhile, went for their corned pork tenderloin. Several slices of a well-brined pork tenderloin, served up with braised parsnips, roasted apples, shaved Brussels sprouts, parsnip cream, and “crispy hay” (phyllo dough, crisped up), this was a good dish focusing on nicely-prepared pork, complementing the roasted meat with a nice combination of bold parsnip and sweet apple flavors. Also a very enjoyable dish.
And for my regular readers, nobody will be surprised that dessert was one of our “regular” orders: we can’t resist crème brûlée, and the version served up by The Elms was a nice one: creamy, with a good solid vanilla flavor and a great crust, served with a shortbread cookie.
So yes, I’m quite pleased with the current iteration of the New London Inn’s restaurant: The Elms serves up a great fine dining menu with pleasant ambiance, a nice staff, and reasonable prices. We’ll definitely go back for a future dinner, especially if we need to celebrate something.
