Offbeat Eats

It’s been a crazy-busy year, but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t been eating, just behind in our writing. Back in September, we decided to take a weekend to ourselves and head up to one of our favorite cities, Burlington, VT, for a relaxing day of hanging around. After doing some light shopping, we headed down to the South end of town to pay another visit to Switchback Brewery. While there, we noticed that a rather lot of people were in the area, all headed for a local food festival, Eat X NE, focusing on local farm-to-food options (as well as their partner event, BrewHaHa, a modest beer festival focusing on local beers). We decided to check it out, and were very pleasantly surprised: the fairly lousy weather had finally broken giving some nice, clear weather, and we got to sample a handful of new beers, and check out some of Burlington’s food trucks. One of these were a modest little trailer called Lazy Farmer.

A recent trip to Burlington, VT for a visit to the Mini dealer up there gave us an excuse for a long-overdue visit to a place that had been on our hit list for a while: Folino’s Wood-Fired Pizza. Folino’s is nestled in a small building across the street from the Shelburne Museum, and it shares the building with one of our favorite Vermont brewers (of many, the way the Vermont beer scene is these days): Fiddlehead Brewing. It’s a particularly good combination: beer and pizza are already a natural combination, and Folino’s adds to this by being a BYOB joint. So you order up your pizzas, head next door and buy a few growlers of beer, and head back over to Folino’s to settled back with some frosted glasses and enjoy your beer and salad while waiting for your pizzas to be ready. It’s quite the nice setup.

(Closed) On one of our recent trips to Manhattan, we ended up wandering up Broadway around Madison Square Park, and that’s where we found that UrbanSpace runs a seasonal pop-up market called Broadway Bites, featuring a rather interesting mix of food stalls lined up along Greeley Square Park, located at the intersection of 33rd Street and Broadway. There were quite a few interesting vendors there: the Poffertjes Man (Dutch pancakes), a Cannoli vendor, a grilled cheese stand, and the like. But one in particular attracted my attention, and my mid-afternoon snack hunger: AsiaDog.

As many of you know, I love good barbeque, especially Texas barbeque, enough that several times I’ve even traveled down to Texas almost every year for at least one smoked meat bender. But living up here in New England, good BBQ joints are few and far between, and it takes more than a little bit of research to find the good places (another nod here to the excellent work of Gary over at PigTrip.net who does an excellent job picking the wheat from the plentiful chaff). But while a few of the places up here do some decent work, I’ve been really craving some good barbecue, so one weekend in late June, we got on the bus, and headed down to check out Mighty Quinn’s Barbeque in New York City.

Another of our recent road trips was to the NH Seacoast area, primarily to go to the most excellent NH Hosta Nursery. Afterward, we explored the area, primarily by ducking over into Newbury, discovering two very nice craft breweries (Riverwalk Brewing and the NBPT Brewing Co). After enjoying both of these destinations, we were hungry for a bit of dinner, and decided to head up the road to Seabrook, NH for Jasmine’s Famous Roast Beef and Seafood. As I have mentioned in several other reviews of New England Roast Beef joints, the Roast Beef sandwich is a bit of an art form here: Once you get to the coastal region, all sorts of places are available that sell two things: roast beef sandwiches, and all variety of fried seafood. Not sure where the combination came from, but it’s a common one. But the thing that ties so many of these places together is the focus on a basic sandwich: roast beef.

One of the fairly substantial culinary changes I’ve seen over the last 20 years or so is that Vietnamese cuisine has changed from a fairly niche ethnic cuisine limited to areas with high Southeast Asian populations, to a relatively common cuisine that is enjoyed by quite a large number of Americans of all ethnicities: it’s pretty common now for people to know about phở, that wonderful Vietnamese noodle soup, as well as several other Vietnamese dishes, like the bánh mì sandwich. And heck, even Vietnamese-inspired condiments like nước mắm and Sriracha sauce (I know, it’s at least as much Thai as Vietnamese in origin…) are now fairly common: we even have a bottle of Sriracha in the fridge here at work in New Hampshire. But it’s still somewhat of an urban cuisine, so I don’t get to enjoy a good bowl of phở unless I’m traveling. But one of my recent trips to DC let me visit an old favorite: Pho 75 in Arlington, between the Courthouse and Rossyln Metro stations.

A quick check of my review list will show that the DC area is one of my frequent work travel destinations. For a large number of these trips, I end up staying in Crystal City. If I’m avoiding various special events, the rooms are cheap, the area has good Metro access, it’s a short walk (really) from Reagan National Airport, and if one wants to ride on a Capital Bikeshare rental bike, it’s right on the Mount Vernon Bike Trail (and I can get almost anywhere in DC or Arlington in 40 minutes by bike on a nice day). But it also has its weirdness: Crystal City was built as a super-block of integrated office, residential, and retail space, kind of like a self-contained city. And unfortunately, the food choices of Crystal City itself aren’t terribly great unless you are looking for high-end dining catering to the business dinner (like Ruth’s Chris Steak House and Legal Seafoods), and a rather large fraction of it is chain restaurants. But there’s one thing that the savvy diner can do if found in Crystal City: look West. Just one block West of Crystal City, on the other side of the Jefferson Davis Highway, lies 23rd Street, which has a surprisingly vibrant collection of restaurants, including a diner, a sports bar, two Ethiopian places, and, finally, my destination: Kabob Palace.

In the 13+ years we’ve lived in Northern New England, there have been quite a few changes to the food and drink world in the area. On the food front, Vermont has had a substantial improvement in the dining scene, with additions such as The Farm House (which was a McDonalds when we moved here), Worthy Burger, Kismet, and Tuckerbox being notable new additions over the last decade (and the first of these are also great examples of the substantial improvement in Vermont’s beer scene as well). And a few places that unfortunately are no longer with us, such as Five Spice Bistro in Burlington. But a recent trip through the Green Mountains led us to Waitsfield, where we happened across one of our old favorites that’s still with us, mostly unchanged, since one of our first visits to Vermont in 2001: American Flatbread Waitsfield Hearth.

(Closed) While I occasionally make a few exceptions to this rule, I generally don’t review cocktail bars that are just cocktail bars. And indeed, that’s the case with Drink. Located in Boston’s Fort Point neighborhood, downstairs from Sportello (which I reviewed in 2012, and is owned by the same folks), Drink is primarily a cocktail bar, but they do have a limited bar menu. And while that bar menu has a few gems, that’s not why I’m reviewing them; instead, it’s one particularly off-the-menu item that drew my attention.

(Closed) Several years ago, we bought a Mini Cooper from Mini of Peabody in Peabody, MA, and as a result, had several trips down to the area (until recently, they were the nearest Mini dealer). And along the way, we discovered quite a few gems down that way, including Kelly’s Roast Beef in Saugus, Billy’s Famous Roast Beef in Wakefield, and Richardsons Dairy in Middleton. But one of our greatest finds was a small place on Route 1 with a giant 7′ sausage on their sign, Karl’s Sausage Kitchen. Inside Karl’s was a European wonderland of both excellent sausages and European groceries, and they became a regular stop of mine (indeed, they became my primary suppliers of Curry Ketchup and Feuerzangenbowle zuckerhuts). But I never wrote them up here, since they didn’t serve food onsite. Until a magical event happened in 2012: the packed up and moved from their old shop in Saugus up to a brand new location just off Route 1 in Peabody, MA. And, more importantly, now included a cafe with German food and beer. So when I was in the area for work, I had to make it a point to check them out.