Offbeat Eats

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.

(Closed) 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.

(Closed) 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.

One of the joys of going to London is that it gives me a lot of opportunities to explore cuisines that I usually don’t find in New England, and may even have trouble finding in the US at all. In this case, my visit gave me a good chance to visit a second location of Iberia that recently had opened a short walk from my Brother’s London flat. To get something out of the way, “Iberia” is an interesting placename; Western European and North American English speakers usually use this term referring to Spain and Portugal (the Iberian Peninsula, after the ancient Greek name for the river, Íbēros), but the term also applies to another ancient geographical region almost 4000 km to the east, the ancient Georgian kingdom of Kartli, which was also known to the Greeks as Iberia. So Iberia in Pimlico is serving up classic Georgian food, and since it has been several years since I last had a foray into Georgian cuisine, we decided to make that our last major meal of my visit.

I started visiting the UK regularly when my brother started dating my now sister-in-law Sophie, and on most visits we had between 2006 and 2019, a common side trip was visiting my Aunt Sue, who lived just outside of Windsor, which is just a relatively short train trip from London, usually visiting with Sue, helping out around her house, and occasionally going out for a nice meal. She had a few favorite places, including The Pineapple in Dorney, the Windsor Farm Shop, and, for special occasions, Gilbey’s in Eton. Unfortunately, my aunt passed away in September 2022; in April we were finally able to complete the arrangements to bury her ashes in the splendid Stoke Poges Memorial Gardens in a small ceremony. Afterward, we retired to nearby Eton, and had a memorial dinner at Gilbey’s in her honor.

As my regular readers know, for the last few years one of our major hobbies here at Offbeat Eats has been backpacking, usually with Fitpacking (review here), with us doing periodic 50 mile hikes through various wilderness areas. This year’s first Fitpacking trip back in March took me back to an old favorite, the Superstition Wilderness Area (you can see a nice photo album over on Flickr) for 50 miles of hiking through some of my favorite canyons. As you could read over on the Fitpacking review, the food on Fitpacking is actually quite good, but I’d be kidding you if said that you don’t have the occasional cravings, and at some point on Day 4 of our hike, someone brought up “Cheeseburgers” as a topic, and I immediately found myself craving a specific item: a green chile cheeseburger (and, once the topic of “green chile” came up, I also found myself craving a green chile beer as well to go with it). While the southern Superstitions are generally no place to score a cheeseburger (although they’ve got a decent chile cheesburger up at Tortilla Flat if you’re by Canyon Lake), I knew just the place we needed to go when we got back into town. It was Fate. Fate Brewing Company, to be specific.