Offbeat Eats

(Closed) For our last full day in Valencia, the weather had cooled off a few degrees to be just “pleasantly warm”, so we decided it would be a good day to go check out the beach and go swimming (I had been to the beach twice before, but at night). After a few hours of swimming and relaxing on the sand, we needed a light lunch, so we decided to go walking. The southern end of Malvarossa beach is actually several blocks of restaurants all packed together (including the very nice La Pepica that I had eaten at two nights before), but we ended up instead walking out on the breakwater of the Port of Valencia, where we came across 39º27N, and decided to have a light lunch there.

(Closed) As frequent readers of my blog are aware, one of my major clients is NASA Glenn Research Center, so I travel fairly frequently to the Cleveland area. As several of my other reviews, such as Greenhouse Tavern and Wonton Gourmet indicate, Cleveland is quite the food destination, and I’ve so far only touched the tip of the iceberg (with such recommended establishments as AMP150, Lola, Lolita, B-spot, and several others remaining on my hit list for reviewing). However, most of these places (with the noticeable exception of AMP 150) are downtown or other places not easily accessible to GRC (which is by the airport, well west of downtown), so for years the question of “Where shall we go for lunch?” was typically answered with “well, thte food court at the mall isn’t too bad…” Indeed, that’s where we’ve eaten, more times than I could count.

(Closed) A few weeks ago, we found ourselves driving through Hillsborough and Peterborouh in southern NH. Looking for a snack, we had recalled that several years earlier we had passed some sort of German bakery, but couldn’t recall details. This time, armed with GPS and 3G wireless, we found the place: German John’s Bakery in Hillsborough. A modest storefront in a building shared with an ice cream parlor (which appears to be run by the same folks), it’s a cozy little bakery with a several racks of baked goods, a chalkboard listing available sausages, some shelves of German groceries, and a few tables. We opted for a few classic soft pretzels, and went outside to the tables out front.

(Closed) Revolutionary Burger is a bit of an interesting experimental concept, in that they don’t have a storefront, and aren’t their own restaurant, they are basically a sub-restaurant of the local Lebanon restaurant, Gusanoz. Apparently, one of their employees recently went on a trip to Southern California, and really enjoyed a trip to iconic In-N-Out Burger, and decided to try making a similar burger here. So they invented the Rev Burger, which is their rendition of the basic In-N-Out-style California burger: 100% real beef, never frozen, char-broiled over open flame, a toasted bun, lettuce, tomato, onion and, of course, the “special sauce”. You can order it with american cheese as well, making a “Che Burger” (Anyone else chuckling at the irony of having the Che Burger made with American cheese?). You can even order them In-N-Out style, for example, ordering a “2×2” which is two patties and two slices of cheese. They also offer fresh-made fries, shakes, and beverages (basically, a similar small menu to the In-N-Out they are copying).

(Closed) On our recent trip to Montreal, on the way back to our home in Grantham, NH, we decided we needed to stop for lunch someplace near Burlington. While the Burlington area has many establishments we rather enjoy (including Hong’s Chinese Dumplings, Sneakers, and Penny Cluse Cafe, the last of which I realize I’ve never blogged here. I’ll have to correct that), we decided to try another area establishment, finally settling on checking out Libby’s Blue Line Diner, just off of I-89 in Colchester, VT. Libby’s sits up on a hill right off of Route 2, and is your basic Worcester diner (Worcester Diner #838, to be exact), although like almost all extant Worcester diner cars, which suffer from a lack of facilities, when it was moved from MA and installed in Colchester, the owners build some additional seating area, an entryway, and an expanded kitchen onto the building. But they did an outstanding job with the interior restoration, so this particular Worcester Diner’s seating area isn’t as worn and tired as most (the exterior, however, looks like it could use some paint and mild repairs)…

(Closed) Cleveland continues to be good to me on my regular visits here. On my last visit here I had an outstanding evening at Greenhouse Tavern, and learned that a substantial fraction of the culinary professionals there know and respect each other. Indeed, one of the last pieces of advice from the bartender at Greenhouse Tavern was that if I wanted some good beer and pizza, I should check out Bar Cento (where Greenhouse’s Jonathon Sawyer was chef before opening Greenhouse). Interestingly, I also got a recommendation for Bar Cento from my friend Rick in Vermont, who happens to know the new chef at Cento, Michael Nowak, from his days as a culinary student at NECI. So that was two reasons to head to Bar Cento on this trip…

(Closed) Two weeks ago, I had a free evening in Cleveland during a business trip. Coming to Cleveland after a huge bender in NYC (including Scott’s Pizza Tour), I continued the heavy eating with a trip to Hyde Park Prime Steakhouse (part of the conference) and Wonton Gourmet earlier in the day. So, while I needed dinner, I decided to go someplace light. Greenhouse Tavern has been on my list for a while, so I decided that a burger at Greenhouse was just what I needed. However, it turned into a most interesting evening (in a good way), almost as interesting as the infamous Willie Mae’s Scotch House Adventure). Why? Two different (but related) reasons…

(Closed) If there’s one thing I really like, it’s a good bagel, in particular a New York style one. Unfortunately, fewer things in life seem more certain than the exponential decay in bagel quality one experiences as you move further in distance from NYC. By the time you are barely 50 miles into Connecticut most bagels have been replaced by some sort of circular bread product that resembles a bagel only slightly in appearance, and even less in taste. It’s as if someone took a real bagel, described it in writing, and made someone re-invent it from that description. Most “bagels” leave me disappointed and wanting. And sometimes it’s rather hard to explain, since their exists a pretty big bagel gap: it seems that most people outside NYC have never actually had a good bagel (for example, seeing the gushing reviews on Yelp for one of our local bad bagel ships), don’t know what a bagel should be, and wrongly think that all bagels taste the same. On the other hand, I’ve met several people in NYC that haven’t ever had a bad bagel.

(Closed) On our recent trip to New York City, Carol and I wanted to go someplace nice but not over the top to celebrate our tenth anniversary since we started dating. A quick search of OpenTable showed that the Saturday night slots at most places were really starting to fill up, but we noticed that the Financial District location of Brasserie Les Halles had decent availability, so we decided to give it a go. Les Halles has been on my hit list for a while, mostly since I love bistro food, French-style butchering, and good fries. And, admittedly, Bourdain’s plugging of the place made me curious…

(Closed) One of my favorite breakfast item is corned beef hash. And, as I mentioned recently in my review of Bode’s, it’s one of those dishes that’s easy to do poorly, but hard to do really well. It’s also one of the food items that I get a lot of recommendations for. I’ve often had people recommend places to me for good CBH, and a majority of the time, I’m disappointed, since I usually end up with something that’s either canned CBH, or a faithfully executed homemade replica of canned CBH. So when one of my homebrewing friends gave a strong recommendation for the Gold Star Restaurant in Worcester having the “best hash ever,” I responded with some skepticism, but put it on my hit list.