Offbeat Eats

This particular visit to France was a work trip, with visits to both a partner company in Grenoble, France, and another visit to the Paris Air Show (yeah, life is hard, isn’t it?). This time I took a completely different approach on getting to Grenoble; we fly into Paris Charles De Gaulle and took the TGV down to Lyon, catching a local train to Grenoble. This looked great on paper, but two major hitches in that plan: first, the baggage handlers at CDG took a full hour and 40 minutes to unload the aircraft and deliver my bags, which was just slow enough that I barely missed my train to Lyon. But after an hour and half relaxing with an espresso, I caught the next one, with a surprisingly smooth and efficient trip to Lyon (so, travel hint here: take the TGV: it’s one of the best train services out there). But then the trip from Lyon to Grenoble was interesting: recent rains had resulted in a landslide over the tracks, so they had to route us on a very scenic, but very circuitous, trip through the French Alps via Chambéry. However, we still arrived in Grenoble in time to get settled into our hotel and meet up with our hosts at one of their favorite spots in downtown Grenoble: Brasserie Chavant.

I do a lot of flying for both work and pleasure, and things generally go pretty smoothly. However, every once in a while I do have an event that reminds me how tightly woven and highly-subscribed our air transportation system is when something goes more than a little off. After a nice morning workout at my hotel in Minneapolis, I hopped on the light rail, got to the airport, and was about to board my 9am flight… “Your connecting flight’s been canceled. We’re going to have to rebook you.” The next flight they could get me was… 6pm the next day. Well, I’ve certainly had worse things happen than a spare day and a half in the Twin Cities. I spent most of it hanging around with friends out in Chanhassen, but this also gave me a chance to wander around Bloomington, MN looking for a righteous Sunday brunch before my flight, and that’s how I found Hazelwood Food + Drink.

Almost every time I’ve come through the Twin Cities, I try to get together with my PhD Advisor, Terry, for a meal. He and his wife Nancy are pretty good at finding interesting places to go, a mix of newer spots since I moved away from the area, and newer spots. In this case, they wanted to take me to one of their current favorite spots, Holman’s Table over in St Paul.

Starting with my last pre-Pandemic visit to Minneapolis in 2019, several of my food-loving friends that still live in Minneapolis all had one place they consistently wanted me to try on my next visit to the Twin Cities: Nixta tortilleria. Nixta quickly became known as an excellent source for both hand-made heirloom corn tortillas and takeout meals built around them (birria, quesadillas, chilaquiles, empanadas, tacos, tlacoyos, and tlayuda!), especially during the height of the pandemic… but Nixta wasn’t open every day of the week, and my visits in 2019 and 2021 weren’t able to accomodate Nixta’s schedule. Neither was my visit this spring, but there was a key difference this time: chef Gustavo Romero of Nixta got access to the adjacent storefront, and opened a full retail restaurant, Oro. My visit to Minneapolis happened just a few weeks after their grand opening.

This spring, I had another opportunity to visit one of my favorite low-key destinations, my graduate alma mater of The University of Minnesota. Between the various work events I was attending, I had a chance to explore a lot of the surrounding area, which has changed a lot over the 20+ years since I had lived there. While some stalwarts (like the excellent Al’s Breakfast) remain, much of the area, especially in the Stadium Village area SE of campus, has been almost completely torn down and been rebuilt. One of the building exceptions to that is on Oak Street. Oddly, it was one of those “cursed” restaurant locations when I lived there: I think in the years I lived there and since, it’s been almost a dozen different places, but for the last decade or so it’s had a tenant that seems to be able to persist: Kimchi Tofu House.

Since the closing of The School House Cafe in Warner, NH, I had been on the lookout for a new place to catch a breakfast or lunch if we were driving down south along I-89, and one of the places that had been on my radar for a while was the Everyday Cafe in Contoocook, NH. With a trip in May to the NH Sheep and Wool Festival (this year located in Deerfield, NH), we finally had a reason to be passing near Contoocook at breakfast time, and decided it was a good change to check out Every Day Cafe.

A fairly recent trip up to the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont had a passing through St Johnsbury a handful of times, and it gave us a good opportunity to check out a bunch of well-regarded places in town, including Kingdom Taproom, one of the area’s better-regarded beer bars with a very good selection of northern Vermont beers. But upstairs from Kingdom Taproom’s basement location is their sister establishment, Kingdom Table, which focuses on providing farm-to-table fine dining. Since we had a good amount of time before having to head back home, we decided to check out Kingdom Table for dinner.

After quite a bit of international travel, late April had me arriving back home in the Upper Valley just in time for Carol’s birthday, and we used it as good excuse to try out a place that’s been on our hit list since it opened: Bistro Midva in Windsor, Vermont. Located on South Main Street in a location that’s been quite a few different restaurants over the year (I remember the spot as Shepherd’s Pie, Au Jus, and Red Head Bistro, just to name a few), and in September 2021 a new set of owners, Chad and Arlanda Eržen Lumbra, decided to reopen the oft-challenged spot with Bistro Midva. The name is Slovenian (basically means “Two of Us”), but I’d call the menu more “European Bistro” in nature; offering up a nice modern menu using fresh, local ingredients like pork belly, locally-raised meat, fresh made pasta, and a nice set of wine and cocktails.

One of the peculiar things about regularly visiting London is that with a few exceptions, over the past 16 years we’ve generally exhausted the list of “standard” tourist attractions (some of them multiple times), which gives us a chance to have more relaxing visits focusing on friends, new restaurants, and revisits to favorite haunts. But one of the long-lingering items of standard tourist attractions still remaining on the list was actually visiting the Observation Deck on Tower Bridge, which way back in 2014 even got a nice upgrade with the addition of a glass floor. It’s actually a great spot, especially for gazing over the Thames or Tower of London complex, and highly recommended. Afterward, we were looking for a light lunch away from the crowds as we walked back to Westminster from Tower Bridge, and ended up going to a favorite of my brother and sister-in-law, Comptoir Libanais.

There are few London traditions of mine as sacred as going out for a good old-fashioned fry-up: a “Full English” breakfast, with at least bacon, sausage, eggs, beans, and toast, and I usually like to add even more to that (at a minimum, tomatoes, and usually black pudding as well). In the area around Pimlico, there’s exactly one place that anyone should even consider for that, and it’s the classic greasy spoon, The Regency Cafe. Virtually every trip of mine to London, even short ones, involve a trip to The Regency, except for holiday trips where they are closed. Indeed, one of my earliest reviews here in 2007 was for The Regency.