Offbeat Eats

Last month, we were looking for a good place to go to celebrate Carol’s birthday, and realized we hadn’t been to one of our area favorites for a while: Windsor Station in Windsor, VT. As you might suspect from the name, Windsor Station is in the former railroad station, and it’s one of the area’s best fine-dining options.

We recently had to do a short day trip over to the Adirondacks in New York, and that left us looking for a new place for breakfast on the drive over. We’ve had a lot of great little spots on this drive, like Sugar and Spice and Big Apple Diner, but on this particular trip our timing lead us to wanting to explore Fair Haven and Castleton a bit. We ended up going to downtown Fair Haven, where we found The Wooden Soldier.

Back in 2021, one of my favorite breakfast spots, Country Kitchen in Newport, NH, announced that they wouldn’t be reopening after Covid-19 closures. I miss that spot; it was definitely a bit of a dive, but the food was good, the prices quite affordable, and they really had a nice selection of locals that were always dining there. But the place wasn’t closed for long, in 2022 it was announced that the building was reopening, this time as Jalisco Mexican Bar and Grill.

One of the odd details of NH that you don’t really appreciate until living here is that we only have two major interstates (I-89 and I-93), and if you aren’t driving between Manchester and Vermont (I-89), or heading to the Whites from Boston, there’s a good chance the ideal route for your travel isn’t highways, but a lot of 35 mph driving through some of NH’s quieter towns. Particularly, for us the optimal routes to Maine or Lake Winnipesaukee regions end up passing through either Franklin or Bristol NH, both fairly quiet former mill towns. Bristol, in particular, is a surprisingly nice little town, just south of Newfound Lake, with a nice little downtown. The downtownalready punches about its weight with at least three breakfast diners (The Bristol Diner, Gina’s Place, and Gilly’s), a good Mexican place (Cielito), and a brewpub (Shackett’s), but I repeatedly found myself driving by a place that opened a few years ago, Odysea.

After a weekend of robotics judging in Burlington, activities wrapped up around 7:30pm. The I-89 route back to my home in New Hampshire isn’t exactly heavily populated with dining establishments, and many of the few options start closing at 8pm, so I consulted my list of places in the Burlington area that I wanted to check out, and decided to check out Zaytoona for some Middle Eastern food before heading home.

Like my trip to Portland in March, early April had me spending several days in Burlington, VT at the University of Vermont (UVM) campus, volunteering as a robotics competition judge. Like usual, this involves rather early mornings and a good 12–14 hour day of volunteering, and then usually my evenings are my own for going on a long walk and finding some new places to enjoy. In this case, I decided to check out more of Burlington’s “Old North End” (which I occasionally visit, see our 2017 review” of The Shopping Bag, one of the neighborhood’s burger spots). But this time, I decided I wanted Mexican, so I had another destination in mind: Taco Gordo.

For my third morning in Portland, instead of having another hotel breakfast, or doing a repeat trip to the excellent Becky’s Diner, I decided I needed to try something a little more, well, Offbeat. And due to my schedule, a place that opened fairly early (7am). This led me to a little spot in Portland’s west end, in a little building that used to be one of those small neighborhood grocery stores: Ugly Duckling.

At the edge of Portland’s Eastside is an old dive bar, Tomaso’s Canteen. For decades, this was a legendary dive bar, Sangillo’s Tavern, known for its 8am opening, cheap beer, and rough crowds, and it was a well-known hangout for those coming off a night shift. Unfortunately, various events at Sangillo’s drew the notice of first the police, and then the liquor board, and Sangillo’s lost its liquor license, permanently closing on February 14, 2015. A few months later it opened as Tomaso’s Canteen. Shorter hours (11am opening now), bar food, and a better tap list, it’s still a dive bar, but on the less-divey end.

My robotics judging in Falmouth required me to get up fairly early in the morning, before most every decent breakfast joint in Portland is open. But since Portland remains, to this day, an active fishing port, there are a handful of places that are open early in the morning, and right down the street from my waterfront hotel was one old school stalwart, Becky’s Diner, which opens at 5am.

My recent travels to Portland, Maine, during one of the less-popular times of the reason (New England’s “Mud Season” between Winter and Spring), turned out to be rather fortuitous in that, despite my visit falling during Maine Restaurant Week, many of the places that are usually teeming with both locals and tourists were actually relatively calm, which gave me a good opportunity to visit one of my favorite spots that’s usually got a waiting list: Eventide Oyster Co.