As I mentioned a while ago in my review of Claremont Union Episcopal Church’s Strawberry Harvest Supper, I’ve been trying to avail myself of the various community meals that spring up around the Upper Valley. Harvest suppers. Fire department fund raisers, Non-profit fundraisers, and that sort of thing. As I find them, I like to work them into my schedule. This year, I noticed in the Kearsarge Shopper an announcement for Newport, NH’s Church of the Good Shepherd’s fall Roast Beef Dinner on November 1st (yes, this means I’m 9 weeks behind at the moment; working on it…).
Church of the Good Shepherd is located in central Newport, one of three churches immediately adjacent to the town green, on the southeast corner. It’s an interesting church, which you can tell was built in two phases. The original church was build in 1850 with gas lighting (later updated to electric lighting), and in 1880 they build both a vestry and a parsonage. The parsonage is now gone (it was sold to the US Postal Service in 1936 and razed to build the current Post Office), but the vestry remains, with stamped tin wall decorations, and that’s where they hold community events like the Roast Beef Supper.
Like most of the Church Suppers in the area, Church of the Good Shepherd has learned basic crowd management the last few years: they have you show up and buy tickets, assign you to table groups, and have you wait in the sanctuary for your table to be set and call you in. This allowed us a few minutes to enjoy the nice stained glass and the cool 1920 Möller Organ Works organ, which appears to be in good operating condition. But our table was quickly called, and we shifted over to the Vestry to get seated.
The Vestry is where they hold the Roast Beef Dinner, and like most other community suppers, unless you’re with a group large enough to fill a table, you’re highly likely to end up sitting next to complete strangers who also like community suppers, which works out rather well. From our tablemates, we discussed current Newport news and activities, and got the download on what other area churches throw good suppers. The table consensus was that the South Church (South Congregational UCC, about a half mile south) throws a really good Thanksgiving turkey supper, but, alas, we had other plans for that day.
Unlike some of the other Church suppers, they now do the Roast Beef Supper cafeteria style, so after getting our table spots situated, we headed up to the serving line, working out way down through roast beef, baked potatoes, cranberry relish, squash, salad, and beverages, returning to our table to dine.
As far as community suppers go, this was a good dinner. Generous amounts of roast beef available from medium-rare to well-done (I opted for the rarer end of the spectrum). The cranberry relish and squash were decent sides, and the foil-wrapped baked potatoes were a particularly nice touch. Adding in a small salad, this was a satisfying meal.
But the best part was dessert. The supper had a very good selection of pies, cakes, and other desserts, and even some ice cream. Unlike most of the other area suppers, they’d actually let you have more than one piece, and in fact encouraged it. So that was a nice touch as well.
Myself, I’m a sucker for a decent homemade chocolate cream pie, and they had several. Selecting one of the creamier-topping one, this was a good homemade pie with a decent crust, a not-too-sweet filling, and a nice real whipped cream topping. Definitely a good dessert.
So, how was it? This was a great community supper especially focusing on “community”; a good cross-section of Newport and surrounding towns was there. Several folks have asked me how this stacks up with other area suppers, and I’ll have to mention that this isn’t really a competition—most of the area community suppers deliberately stagger their schedules so they aren’t competing with each other. That said, this was a fine roast beef supper, and you should mark your calendars to check their website next October to find out when the next one is.
