Offbeat Eats

I love it when you pass by cozy little cafés and can immediately tell that the place is popular with the locals and has its set of “regulars”. That was the case with a small little cafe located just about two short blocks from my friends’ condo in Saratoga Springs: the Country Corner Café.

After completing a day of working remote in Saratoga Springs, I took off to explore the downtown area while waiting for my hosts to arrive. After having a really enjoyable pint at Whitman Brewing, I wandered along Broadway doing some liht window shopping and looking at both cocktail and dinner menus. One place that drew my eye was a relative newcomer to Saratoga Springs, Rhea. Seeing folks enjoying bowls of ramen and some nicely-composed cocktails, I decided it would be on my short list for dinner, and when my hosts arrived, they agreed. So we headed back to Rhea and managed to score three seats at the bar, despite the relatively busy Friday evening.

I was recently helping friends with a hike along the Northville-Placid Trail in upstate NY, and my friends Liz and Wes helpfully offered that I could stay in their condo in Saratoga Springs over the weekends while doing the trail support. This worked out quite well, since I was able to drive over early on a Friday, work remotely for the day, and have the entire weekend available for hiking and trail support. It also gave me a chance to explore Saratoga Springs, which, honestly, my previous first-hand experiences had been merely getting stuck in traffic on my way to the NY Thruway. On my first trip there, they had left a number of recommendations for lunch, so on my lunch break I decided to go check out the sandwich shop on the list: Fat Paulie’s.

Last Spring, as we were doing one of our preparatory trips to Lake George for Ohana, we stopped in for dinner at Common Roots Brewery in South Glen Falls (our review here). At that visit, I had noticed that Common Roots (whose brewery building itself is relatively new) had been on quite the building spree. Across the parking lot from their main brewery, Common Roots also runs their Bierhall & Barrel House Private Event Center, which in the mornings also operates as Common Roots Café for breakfast. The space is quite nice, albeit extremely cavernous when not being used for events. Since I was passing through South Glens Falls in early September on my way to the Adirondacks, I decided it was a great opportunity to stop in for coffee and breakfast.

One of the more interesting Pandemic-era changes around the “Lower Upper Valley” was that, while there were a lot of restaurant closures, there were also some openings of note, primarily replacing those closures. Particularly when it comes to Mexican cuisine. Newport, NH used to have an outstanding Baja Mexican place, with the odd name of The Little Red Baron, but it closed in a squabble between the town (who owned the building) and the restaurant over septic system refurbishment, and there had been a gap in the area’s Mexican offerings for a while. But, in relatively short succession in 2023, we had three Mexican places show up: Rancho Viejo in Claremont (replacing the departed Pleasant Street Restaurant), Jalisco Mexican Bar and Grill in Newport (replacing the departed and dearly-missed Country Kitchen), and the similar named Casa Jalisco Bar and Grill in Claremont. While I have been to the first two a few times, the last of these I hadn’t had a chance to check it out, and a recent event in Claremont gave me an excuse to drop in.

2024 has definitely been a year where I’ve finally had a chance to visit a lot of places that I’ve driven by a gazillion times, thinking “I should check that place out.” In this case, a trip down south had us swinging through Windsor, VT. The location has a long history, way back in 1962 it was an A&W Root Beer. It closed in the early 1980s, reopening in 1988 as Stub and Laura’s, run by the late, colorful A.W. “Stub” Aldrich until 2008. It had at least one other interim name and owner that I’ve forgotten, but in 2013 it opened in its current incarnation, Frazer’s Place, serving up breakfast, lunch, dinner, and ice cream, with both outdoor seating and a limited amount of indoor dining. And while it’s had a lot of good word of mouth, I never had a good opportunity to stop in until we few weeks ago, when we passed by right at breakfast. So we decided we just had to stop in.

The last few years, Chef Jeff Porter has been moving around a lot. He was getting good reviews in South Carolina when he moved back to back to his hometown of Newport, NH, and after some time working as a chef at one local golf course, he opened a food truck in Newport. After a pretty good start in the food truck, he moved to brick and mortar, moving his restaurant, Breaking Bread, into another country club, the Newport Country Club (which I’ve never been to, but it’s one of those spots that seems quite itinerant, since it’s been a good half dozen different restaurants in my years living here). Finally, a pair of storefronts on Newport’s Main Street became available next to the police station, and he moved Breaking Bread downtown. On one of our recent trips to an event in Newport, we finally had a chance to stop by and check it out.

Shortly before the pandemic (in that era now affectionately known as “the good old days”), on one of our many trips to Northampton, MA, we decided to duck over and check out nearby Easthampton, MA (which, despite the nominally cardinal names, is not east of Northampton, but southwest…), finding a nice little restaurant called Coco that also had an outstanding cocktail bar called The Cellar Bar. I actually quite enjoyed Coco, particularly for their fried chicken dinner, and their creative cocktails (that’s one of the few places I’ve ever encountered Mastika in a cocktail). But that was 2019, and like many, many restaurants, Coco struggled mightily with staffing and finances through 2020 and 2021, eventually announcing abruptly in August 2021 that they were closing permanently. But the underlying demand in Easthampton was strong enough that a handful of employees got together with some other local restaurant owners, and after six months of closure, the restaurant re-opened as Calico.

One of our goals this summer was to head down to Stockbridge, MA, to re-visit the Norman Rockwell Museum to see their Art and Humor of MAD Magazine exhibit (which is on display until October 27th; I really highly recommend it). Stockbridge is about a three hour drive for us, especially if we eschew the particularly boring I-91 drive, so we decided it would be best if we at least got a light meal before heading north. Looking around the greater Stockbridge area, we decided to take a short drive to the south to visit Barrington Brewery & Restaurant.

There were few places in recent history that have had as much anticipation as the opening of Redcan (well, maybe the West Leb Jersey Mike’s, but that’s another matter). With the departure of Trailbreak Taps and Tacos, that moved over to the former Dana’s space in Quechee by the Gorge, there’s been a bit of a hole in the White River dining scene, with much anticipation once the building owner mentioned that he already had a replacement restaurant tenant lined up. The anticipation ratcheted up another notch when it was announced that the new spot was going to be run by Jason Merrill, one of the partners that had previously brought us Worthy Burger and Worthy Kitchen. The Worthys have, in my opinion, lost a little bit of their shine, but are still very popular, especially with the tourist crowd. And Jason has had a lot of chef experience himself, including working at The Hanover Inn prior to its conversion to Pine. Named as a tip of the hat to his mother (who liked Coca Cola), Redcan focuses on high-end American food served small plate style. While they opened in late June (you can read a nice review by fellow UV food reviewer Susan Apel on her Artful blog from her mid-July visit), between inability to get reservations and competing travel, we didn’t get there until August, but we actually managed to get a pair of celebratory visits in with friends.