Offbeat Eats

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.

As Summer started to turn to Fall, we wanted to make sure we hit a few of the hikes that had remained on our to-do list. We had tried to hike Mt Chocorua last year, but poor weather forced us to turn around most of the way up. This time, the weather was looking a lot more promising, and since we wanted to get an early start, we needed a breakfast spot enroute to the trailhead. We’ve found several nice places over the years in Bristol, but this time we decided we wanted to try a diner, so we headed out to the Bristol Diner, located just south of downtown.

A few weeks ago, our friends Geoff and Kristi were headed down to Concord, NH, and wanted to check out two spots in downtown Concord: Nawlin’s (a speakeasy that used to be called Mike’s BARbershop) and Hermanos Cocina Mexicana. It’s been a while (2016 to be exact, when I visited El Rodeo in Concord) that I’ve really checked out the Mexican food scene in the Concord/Manchester area, and a quick look at Hermanos Cocina’s menu looked promising, so we decided to give it a look.

Welcome to another of Offbeat Eats’ Health Check reviews, where we re-visit old favorites and check out how they are doing. Late this summer, a visit to Lincoln Peak Vineyard to pick up our quarterly wine order nicely aligned with some of our Vermont Tiki friends going out for a group dinner at A Single Pebble. I’ve long thought that A Single Pebble is the best Chinese restaurant in Vermont, and realized that while I’ve been there a good dozen times since my 2013 review, I hadn’t been there since the Pandemic, so it was a good opportunity to see how A Single Pebble is doing.

There are few traditions more sacred in Northern New England in than going out for soft serve ice cream in the summer (in local parlance, a “Creemee”, although the spelling varies a bit). Indeed, most folks hold an extra special fondness for taking it to the next level by getting a maple creemee, and there’s more than a little discussion, often heated, around local water coolers about which place has the best creemees. I certainly have my regional favorites (my overall favorite is Mac’s Maple in Plainfield, NH, although I’ve got to give a good nod to Red Hen in in Middlesex, VT for having far and away the best waffle cone in the region), but it’s one of those treats I only sporadically indulge in due to my becoming lactose intolerant about 20 years ago. With that in mind, I was drawn to a spot in Winooski, VT, for two particular reasons. The first was that this ice cream stand uses 100% plant-based products, so I can indulge without the usual gastrointestinal unrest. The second was… the name. Offbeat Creemee. With a name like that, I had to give them a visit.

As I mentioned in my recent review of the Strawberry Festival at the Claremont Union Episcopal Church, I’ve been trying to visit more of the various community meals that spring up around the Upper Valley. Harvest suppers, Church dinners, and fundraisers. With that in mind, in late July Carol and I spotted such an opportunity in the local newspaper, the annual Pie Breakfast sponsored by the Wilmot Community Association in Wilmot, NH. Wilmot is one of the smaller towns in the area, located NE of New London, Wilmot is a cruciform-shaped town that was formed from bits of New London, the Kearsarge Gore (a bit of NH land previously unallocated to any town), and Hill, NH. Like a lot of these towns, it actually has multiple “downtown” areas: Wilmot Center and Wilmot Flat. The Wilmot Community Association (the WCA) hosts occasional community building events, and one of their well-respected annual events is their Pie Breakfast.

Returning home from the Adirondacks involves more driving time than you think, since most of the drive is meandering along US Route 4 as it passes through eastern New York and Vermont. Interestingly, part of this drive is four-lane divided highway (roughly between Fairhaven, VT and Rutland, VT, a byproduct of one of the original alignments of I-89 that never came to be, and briefly considered in the 1970s as a potential I-92), but mostly the drive bounces from one small town to the next until you get to New Hampshire. Between our Lake George trips and most of our westward voyages to upstate New York, I think I’ve done that drive a good hundred times, and it isn’t all that often that we notice a new place showing up. But as we were driving through Whitehall (one of several claimants to be the Birthplace of the US Navy), we had spied a relatively new Asian restaurant, Whitehall Red Panda, and decided to give it a try.

There’s one other annual dining tradition associated with our annual pilgrimage to Lake George’s Tiki Resort for our annual Ohana Luau at the Lake gathering. After the event has wrapped up, and we’ve cleaned up and restored the Tiki Resort to as-found condition, it is traditional for a bunch of us to go down the road to visit a long-time Lake George restaurant, the Log Jam.

One of my more established traditions of our annual trip to Lake George is getting up early one morning and hiking from downtown Lake George up to Prospect Mountain via the Prospect Mountain Trail that approximately follows the old incline railway route. After arriving back at the trailhead in late morning, we almost always follow it with another tradition: eating at Lake George’s The Breakfast Spot.