Offbeat Eats

During our March trip to Montreal, prior to our outing to the 2026 Pied de Cochon Cabane à Sucre, several of us arrived two evenings before the event, and decided to go out for a light dinner. Since our hotel (our long standby Hôtel Château de l’Argoat) is in Montreal’s Le Village area, we decided to explore more of Rue Ontario Est’s restaurants. After looking in the window and seeing a rather impressive set of grilled chickens, we decided that Sardine Rose, a small Portuguese restaurant, was just the ticket.

For my third morning in Portland, instead of having another hotel breakfast, or doing a repeat trip to the excellent Becky’s Diner, I decided I needed to try something a little more, well, Offbeat. And due to my schedule, a place that opened fairly early (7am). This led me to a little spot in Portland’s west end, in a little building that used to be one of those small neighborhood grocery stores: Ugly Duckling.

At the edge of Portland’s Eastside is an old dive bar, Tomaso’s Canteen. For decades, this was a legendary dive bar, Sangillo’s Tavern, known for its 8am opening, cheap beer, and rough crowds, and it was a well-known hangout for those coming off a night shift. Unfortunately, various events at Sangillo’s drew the notice of first the police, and then the liquor board, and Sangillo’s lost its liquor license, permanently closing on February 14, 2015. A few months later it opened as Tomaso’s Canteen. Shorter hours (11am opening now), bar food, and a better tap list, it’s still a dive bar, but on the less-divey end.

My robotics judging in Falmouth required me to get up fairly early in the morning, before most every decent breakfast joint in Portland is open. But since Portland remains, to this day, an active fishing port, there are a handful of places that are open early in the morning, and right down the street from my waterfront hotel was one old school stalwart, Becky’s Diner, which opens at 5am.

My recent travels to Portland, Maine, during one of the less-popular times of the reason (New England’s “Mud Season” between Winter and Spring), turned out to be rather fortuitous in that, despite my visit falling during Maine Restaurant Week, many of the places that are usually teeming with both locals and tourists were actually relatively calm, which gave me a good opportunity to visit one of my favorite spots that’s usually got a waiting list: Eventide Oyster Co.

As our regular readers know, approximately every two years we do a group trip up to Montreal, rendezvous with friends, and head out to the surprisingly rural outskirts of the Montreal area (St. Benoît de Mirabel) for Au Pied de Cochon annual Cabane à Sucre maple celebration. You can read up on previous visits of ours in 2014, 2017, or 2024, or their similar fall harvest dinner in Fall 2019. The basic formula remains the same: a sumptuous feast featuring maple and seasonal dishes, served up in an unending serious of generously-portioned family-style courses. Over the years, the actual meal varies a bit (some years are more traditional, some more experimental, and some have been tightly themed, like 2017’s Japanese-theme), but it remains one of the Montreal-area’s more difficult reservations to get (usually setting an alarm for when ticket sales start in December for the winter Cabane). This year’s culinary Olympic feast was for myself and 9 colleagueswas in mid-March, during a brief recurrence of winter during the spring thaw.

A recent weekend spent judging a high school FIRST Robotics competition had me driving over to Falmouth, ME for the weekend. An unfortunately fact of life of western NH living is that there isn’t any terribly good way to get to the Maine Coast: you’ve either got to go way out of your way and pay multiple tolls to get their via the interstates, or you’ve got to go on a long cross-country jaunt, much of it at 35 mph, taking a more direct route. I usually opt for the latter, since while slightly slower, it’s more fuel efficient, more relaxing, and there are better options for stopping. In this case, I found myself looking at options for lunch in and around Somersworth, NH, which is where I encountered Tasya’s Kitchen.

As I mentioned in my review of Cedar Street Café, since the hotel we were staying in didn’t have on-site breakfast, it was a good excuse to go check out some of the local establishments, despite the relatively heavy snow. Our college Doc Tesla had given a hearty endorsement to a relatively new spot he had found just a few miles west in Sturbridge’s Fiskdale village, The Little Rest Stop, so we decided to go over and check it out.

While we were staying at the Sturbridge Host hotel for a few days (whose on-site restaurants, weren’t, at least for the winter, open), we decided each morning to venture forth and try various local breakfast spots for breakfast. The first we tried was Cedar Street Café, which is just down the street from the hotel, although confusingly, not actually on Cedar Street (it’s sister restaurant Cedar Street Grille is, and the parking lot entrance is across from the Grille, although depending on which mapping service you are using, you may get some odd directions). Another of the local restaurants owned by Table3 (same owners as The Duck), the Café focuses on coffee, breakfast, and light lunch.

In early February, we gathered with a bunch of our friends for Nor’Easter Island, which is a wintertime event put on by the Greater Boston Vintage Society where we gather at the Sturbridge Host hotel in Sturbridge, MA for several days of vintage vending, swing dancing, and tropical drinks (all communities with more than a little overlap). However, in the middle of the winter, the Sturbridge Host is more than a bit of a ghost town, with no on-site dining, so when it came time for dinner, a bunch of us all decided to meet up at an old standby dining spot in Sturbridge’s downtown: The Duck.