Offbeat Eats

Anyone that’s known me for a long time knows that two of my favorite sandwiches are the related roast beef sandwich, and the French Dip. As I discussed in detail with my review of Jamie’s Roast Beef in Peabody a few years ago, roast beef sandwiches are definitely a regional specialty, but the specialty is really focused on Massachusetts North Shore. While pretty much any town between Boston and the NH border has several roast beef sandwich joints to choose from, the density starts to roll off pretty quickly, and by the time you get to central NH, they are getting kind of thin. But a recent trip through the Merrimack valley had us passing right by an old favorite, Beefside in Concord, NH, and we decided to give it one of Offbeat Eat’s “Health Check” re-visits.

A recent trip over to Dover, New Hampshire resulted in us looking for breakfast options around the greater Hooksett area (the region between Concord and Manchester, NH, straddling the Merrimack River). Until very recently, this would have been an almost automatic choice of The Robie Store for breakfast sandwiches… but The Robie Store closed permanently a few weeks ago. So, after taking a look at various online reviews, I ended up picking Shirley’s Kitchen in Suncook Village as a good option. Their online media showed a mean-looking Benedict with some decent home fries, and I always have rather liked Suncook Village (just around the corner from Shirley’s is Oddball Brewing, which we’ve previously visited and enjoyed).

Last month, we were looking for a good place to go to celebrate Carol’s birthday, and realized we hadn’t been to one of our area favorites for a while: Windsor Station in Windsor, VT. As you might suspect from the name, Windsor Station is in the former railroad station, and it’s one of the area’s best fine-dining options.

We recently had to do a short day trip over to the Adirondacks in New York, and that left us looking for a new place for breakfast on the drive over. We’ve had a lot of great little spots on this drive, like Sugar and Spice and Big Apple Diner, but on this particular trip our timing lead us to wanting to explore Fair Haven and Castleton a bit. We ended up going to downtown Fair Haven, where we found The Wooden Soldier.

Back in 2021, one of my favorite breakfast spots, Country Kitchen in Newport, NH, announced that they wouldn’t be reopening after Covid-19 closures. I miss that spot; it was definitely a bit of a dive, but the food was good, the prices quite affordable, and they really had a nice selection of locals that were always dining there. But the place wasn’t closed for long, in 2022 it was announced that the building was reopening, this time as Jalisco Mexican Bar and Grill.

One of the odd details of NH that you don’t really appreciate until living here is that we only have two major interstates (I-89 and I-93), and if you aren’t driving between Manchester and Vermont (I-89), or heading to the Whites from Boston, there’s a good chance the ideal route for your travel isn’t highways, but a lot of 35 mph driving through some of NH’s quieter towns. Particularly, for us the optimal routes to Maine or Lake Winnipesaukee regions end up passing through either Franklin or Bristol NH, both fairly quiet former mill towns. Bristol, in particular, is a surprisingly nice little town, just south of Newfound Lake, with a nice little downtown. The downtownalready punches about its weight with at least three breakfast diners (The Bristol Diner, Gina’s Place, and Gilly’s), a good Mexican place (Cielito), and a brewpub (Shackett’s), but I repeatedly found myself driving by a place that opened a few years ago, Odysea.

After a weekend of robotics judging in Burlington, activities wrapped up around 7:30pm. The I-89 route back to my home in New Hampshire isn’t exactly heavily populated with dining establishments, and many of the few options start closing at 8pm, so I consulted my list of places in the Burlington area that I wanted to check out, and decided to check out Zaytoona for some Middle Eastern food before heading home.

Like my trip to Portland in March, early April had me spending several days in Burlington, VT at the University of Vermont (UVM) campus, volunteering as a robotics competition judge. Like usual, this involves rather early mornings and a good 12–14 hour day of volunteering, and then usually my evenings are my own for going on a long walk and finding some new places to enjoy. In this case, I decided to check out more of Burlington’s “Old North End” (which I occasionally visit, see our 2017 review” of The Shopping Bag, one of the neighborhood’s burger spots). But this time, I decided I wanted Mexican, so I had another destination in mind: Taco Gordo.

Our second day in Montreal involved a pleasant outing to the McCord-Stewart Museum (which had an excellent Offbeat-eats relevant exhibit, On the Menu, featuring menus and other paraphernalia from various Montreal eating establishments), a quick trip out to Verdun for Cabane Panache (the annual Montreal maple festival), and then off to Snowbird in La Petite-Patrie for Tiki drinks. After enjoying our drinks at Snowbird, we wanted to find an interesting place to dine, and found one right across the street: Restaurant Abouda, serving up Tunisian food.

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.