Offbeat Eats

(Closed) One of my annual traditions is volunteering at one of the local FIRST Robotics competitions, usually as a Robot Inspector or a Judge. This year’s volunteer assignment was for the New England District Championship at Boston University’s Agganis Arena, and that gave me another opportunity to check out some of the Brookline area dining options. One particular place had caught my eye since I had walked by it several times on last year’s “Death March” (my annual tradition of walking ~20 miles through an urban area, exploring neighborhoods and eateries that I normally wouldn’t visit). That place is right in central Brookline in the basement of a building: Roast Beast.

(Closed) For our last meal in Hawaii, we decided to check out Alan Wong’s The Pineapple Room. Alan Wong is one of of several Hawaiian Chefs (along with Sam Choy, Roy Yamaguchi, Peter Merriman, and Bev Gannon, amongst others) that have worked for the last few decades to establish “Hawaiian” as a proper cuisine type. For all my discussion of local Hawaiian food, such as the Loco Moco, the Spam Musubi, and the Plate Lunch, there’s also a lot going on in Hawaiian cuisine in the fine dining sector. One of the places that’s often recommended is Alan Wong’s restaurant, called simply “Alan Wong’s Restaurant”, but our itinerary didn’t have the time, and we didn’t have the stomach space, to visit there. But Alan Wong also runs a lesser known restaurant, The Pineapple Room, which is nicely hidden away inside Ala Moana Mall. Specifically, inside the Women’s department in the Macy’s. It’s also fairly easy to get reservations there, and you also have a pretty good chance of getting a walk-in seat. So on our way to the airport (after a pleasant hike up to Koko Crater), we stopped at Ala Moana for some light shopping and one last meal.

(Closed) An important agenda item for me any time I’m visiting an area with a substantial Hispanic population is scoring a good Mexican breakfast. While my home turf in New Hampshire has a few decent Mexican places, none of them currently offer breakfast, so when I’m in an area with some good Mexican breakfast options, I have a hard time resisting a trip for a good huevos ranchero or a well-performing breakfast burrito. But while visiting Carol’s relatives in Murrieta, CA last month, we had a free morning and a strong appetite, and ended up finding San Jorge Tortilleria and Market. Nestled in a strip mall behind a tire shop off of Madison Ave in a quieter part of Murriet, San Jorge is one of those quiet, un-assuming places. Walking inside, it’s also immediately obvious that San Jorge is putting most of the emphasis on the “Market” side of the operations (although they do a very impressive job with the “Tortilleria” part of things, with some rather impressive piles of fresh corn and flour tortillas all bagged up and ready to go). But amongst the various foods and sundries, San Jorge also has a nice food service counter, serving up Mexican breakfasts and lunches.

(Closed) As I begin to close out my reviews for 2013, I’ve got a review of possibly one of the most interesting (and most interestingly named) places I visited during the year: Beaver Choice in Mesa, AZ. Beaver Choice had been on my radar for a while—while visiting Arizona in August of 2012 for some “extreme climate testing”, I had checked out various review sites for something new and interesting, and Beaver Choice came up near the top of several East Valley listings, so I drove by to check them out (at the time, they were located on Broadway in Tempe behind

(Closed) For the first night of our trip, we decided to stay near LAX and head east the next day. From many, many previous work trips to the area, I’m pretty familiar with the El Segundo area, and I rather like the area. Due to an odd historical/geographical quirk, El Segundo is somewhat isolated from the surrounding LA area (the Northern border is LAX, the Southern border is a giant Chevron refinery), and it still has a classic downtown that feels like it’s left over from a former era, with all sorts of small businesses, restaurants, and the like. Several of the restaurants are quite good, and this time we decided to check out Farm Stand.

(Closed) Earlier this year, I went out with several friends to The Elephant Walk in Cambridge, MA for Cambodian food, and that outing reminded me how much I like the traditional dishes and flavors of Cambodia (similar to Vietnamese, the combination of French and Southeastern Asian influence makes for some particularly tasty dishes). In any case, as I was heading back from last week’s trip down to MIT, I decided to take a small detour and check out Tepthida Khmer in Lowell, MA.

(Closed) Earlier this week, I had another of my periodic trips down to MIT to visit with collaborators, and, like usual, I used it as an opportunity to check out some additional restaurants, since Cambridge and Somerville have all sorts of great dining spots. This time, I was craving Persian food, particularly since rural NH is particularly lacking in Middle Eastern places. Looking over the offerings near MIT, I ended up picking Kolbeh of Kabob, across the street from Cambridge Hospital.

(Closed) As I mentioned in the previous review, we’re always doing the drive between Grantham and Manchester, or from Grantham to Boston, so we’re always looking for new places to eat. Another place that recently showed up on my radar was the School House Cafe in Warner. The School House Cafe has been around since August of 2011, when two former waitresses from The Foothills (Warner’s other major breakfast spot) converted the old school house on Route 103 in the Davisville Village part of Warner (Exit 7, for you NH folks) into a catering kitchen, and they converted the rest of the space into a small restaurant that’s open for breakfast and lunch. The result is a menu of “down home” cooking, focusing on omelets, pancakes (big, honking thick plate-size pancakes, like the Foothills), and breakfast combos.

(Closed) Coming back from my quick trip to Canada, my return itinerary also brought me back through Burlington, so I decided to check out another newcomer to the Burlington scene: Guild Fine Meats. Guild Fine Meats is the latest storefront operation from the folks that brought you Farm House Tap and Grill and El Cortijo. Back about a year ago, their opened their fine dining steakhouse, Guild and Company, on Williston Road in South Burlington. More importantly, they also took over the Winooski warehouse that was being run by SamosaMan (who seems to have disappeared from the Vermont dining scene), and turned that into their meat commissary, where they do their own butchering, aging, and other charcuterie supporting their several businesses. Well, earlier this summer they decided to open up a retail operation selling their meats, as well as sandwiches made from them.

(Closed) I’ll be honest, we don’t make it down to Claremont, NH all that often, and a lot of restaurants tend to open and close there, especially since Claremont doesn’t exactly have the best reputation for food. But there is one place that’s been there over a year, and we continue to keep hearing good things about it: New Socials Bar and Grill. So when we found ourselves home on a Saturday with nothing in the fridge, we decided that finally gave us some motivation to go check them out.