Offbeat Eats

In early December I flew out to the Phoenix area as part of a trip to go backpacking in the Grand Canyon, but had a few days before and after the trip to visit with friends and family in the Phoenix area. Like many of my Arizona trips, I met up with my friend Allyson for lunch, and this time we decided to go to Old Town Scottsdale. Old Town Scottsdale is mostly “fake Old West” and “fake Native American Trading Post” shops on the tackier-end of the scale, but there are a few gems hiding amongst the various “Trading Posts”. One of the them is The Frybread Lounge, an Indigenous-owned restaurant serving up Indigenous staples, primarily focusing on frybread.

A recent trip to various spots of interest around Newfound Lake had us passing back through Bristol, NH around dinner time. While I’ve already got some good places in Bristol that I enjoy, such as The Bristol Diner and LinCross Roast Beef, I decided that this was a good chance to check out another spot. We’ve driven past Cielito in Bristol several times (it’s across the street from The Bristol Diner), and decided that this time we’d actually have dinner there.

Right before Thanksgiving, we had an opportunity to see one of my favorite brass musicians, Trombone Shorty, play at Rutland, VT’s historic Paramount Theatre. Looking at the various dining options in the area, I noticed a relative newcomer to the Rutland dining scene, Pao Pao Latin Cuisine, on the east side of Rutland city. So we decided to check them out.

A few years ago, we had a pair of favorite restauarants in Manchester, Republic Café and Campo Enoteca, that were a favorite light dinners when we were in the area, with Campo serving up French-inspired food, and the latter serving Italian food. But the pair didn’t survive the pandemic intact, at first, they combined operations as “Republic of Campo” (and you can still see the “Republic” on Campo’s sign today), but that didn’t last, and in 2022 Republic Café closed permanently (the name lives on in the only lightly-related Republic Brewing a mile away) and Campo Enoteca was sold to new owners. However, the new owners of Campo Enoteca have been successful at keeping the place operating, so I figured it was worth dropping in and doing one of our Offbeat Eats “Health Check” re-visits.

As I mentioned a while ago in my review of Claremont Union Episcopal Church’s Strawberry Harvest Supper, I’ve been trying to avail myself of the various community meals that spring up around the Upper Valley. Harvest suppers. Fire department fund raisers, Non-profit fundraisers, and that sort of thing. As I find them, I like to work them into my schedule. This year, I noticed in the Kearsarge Shopper an announcement for Newport, NH’s Church of the Good Shepherd’s fall Roast Beef Dinner on November 1st (yes, this means I’m 9 weeks behind at the moment; working on it…).

While our trip to Chrysalis was quite enjoyable, for our last night in Franklin, Tennessee we decided to see what downtown Franklin was like. Unlike a lot of towns that have sort of sprawled out, Franklin actually has a nice, central Town Square, and an approximate 16 block downtown central business district that has been maintained with historic architecture. It’s actually a pretty nice area to walk around, and there are a nice selection of restaurants. We ended up decided to try Red Pony, which is across Main Street from the neon-adorned historic Franklin Theatre.

While I lived in Tennessee for almost two years of my life, it’s been quite a long time since Offbeat Eats has done a review in Tennessee, primarily since I myself haven’t done more than pass through the Nashville Airport in years. However, a recent work trip had me spending most of a week in Lewisburg, TN. Lewisburg is well off of most folk’s culinary radar, and rather lacking in hotels, so we stayed in the substantially more developed town of Franklin, TN, halfway between Lewisburg and Nashville, which had a good variety of dining establishments. Indeed, with a late night arrival, our first dinner was spent at a local location of Culinary Dropout (see my review of the Scottsdale location here), which was a near-perfect culinary copy of the Scottsdale location, and enjoyable. On our second night, we decided to do Italian, dining at Chrysalis Modern Italian, in a small shopping center a few blocks from our hotel.

Back in December of 2023, Carol and I had a rather nice visit to Northampton, MA, including a fairly spontaneous visit to Homestead. (Review here), particularly enjoying the Focaccia and the house-made pasta. Our late October trip down to Connecticut to visit Hogpen Hill Farms Sculpture Garden had us returning home via Interstate 91, which ideally set us up for a stop in Northampton for some light shopping and dinner. Since it had been a while since our last visit we decided that a stop at Homestead. for an Offbeat Eats “Health Check” revisit was a great idea. (editorial note: “Homestead.” styles itself complete with the period at the end of its name, but it makes for some odd-looking sentences, so for the rest of this review I’ll simply call them “Homestead”).

As I’ve mentioned in a lot of my recent reviews, 2025 was a year of my trying to take a lot of the local places that I’m frequently driving by and saying “I should check that place out!” and actually, well, checking the place out. In this case, we were doing a day trip down to Connecticut, and wanting to grab breakfast on our usual route to catch Interstate 91 to parts south of here. Usually, that means a visit to The Barn Café or The Daily Grind in Claremont (neither of which I’ve reviewed, but the Daily Grind has the same excellent menu and food as their sister restaurant Frazer’s Place). However, both were looking more than a little busy, so we decided to cross the river and check out one of our perennial “should try” places, Exit Ate in Weathersfield, VT.

In a converted railroad depot in Bethel, Vermont, right next to Cockadoodle Pizza Café sits one of central Vermont’s more interesting little spots, Babes Bar. It’s a bit of a rarity for the area, since it’s one of the few freestanding bars out there (versus, say, nearby Crossroads Bar and Grill or Worthy Burger, which are indeed “bars”, but with substantial food menus as well. Opened by a married couple, Jesse Plotsky and Owen Daniel-McCarter, who moved to Vermont from Chicago a few years ago to move to the simpler life in Vermont, Babes is an interesting place. If there’s a single word that describes Babes, it is “welcoming”. This is a bar for locals. This is a bar for groups riding through. This is a bar for leaf-peeping tourists. And it’s a queer-owned bar that goes out of its way to be welcoming and inclusive to the LBGTQ community as well.