Offbeat Eats

With many frequent trips to SE NH or Boston, we often find ourselves looking for dinner options around the greater Manchester, NH area. Manchester has a lot of great options, but a recent favorite of ours is actually brewery that’s been around a while, but only recently known as Candia Road Brewing Company.

Way back in 2008, in the early days of Offbeat Eats, we visited Robie’s Country Store. It was a particularly good and lavish breakfast, but in the years following that visit, the store started to struggle, the breakfasts weren’t as good, and while Robie’s Country Store stayed open, the food counter closed. A replacement store, Roots Community Table at Robies, was good, but also closed a few years ago. But then I got notice in January this year that a big shift had happened. The Robie family of Hooksett (which operated the General Store since the 1800s) was actually related to the Robies of the Robie Farm in Piermont, NH, which are pretty well known in the region for their farm-raised meats (it’s pretty common around NH and VT to see “Robie Farms” meats on high-end restaurant menus, and at the various consumer coops). They had refurbished the place, and re-opened as The Robie Store, a specialty product store, cafe serving breakfast and lunch, and a butcher shop providing farm fresh meats straight from the farm in Piermont.

Due to a decrease in various airlines’ service to Manchester, more of my travel these days has been out of Boston, but our recent combined trip to Arizona and Arkansas actually had us scheduled through Manchester (as luck had it, weather resulted in us getting rerouted through Boston, but that’s another story…), so we decided to do one of those Park/Sleep/Fly deals, driving down the night before our trip. That gave us a good opportunity to check out Manchester’s dining scene, and we decided to try out a place that had been on our hit list for a bit: The Birch on Elm.

Before the Covid pandemic hit, we had a handful of favorite restaurants around the small Town of Warner, NH. Halfway between the Upper Valley and the Concord area, this made it a nice place to either take a break from the drive, or for meeting up if Carol and I were on separate itineraries. Two of our favorites were The Foothills and

I recently had a short business trip that involved both dropping equipment off in Haverhill, MA and then driving up for a tour of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS) Space Science Center at University of New Hampshire (which was excellent). This ended up having me driving through parts of New Hampshire’s Seacoast region at breakfast time, which is quite unusual for my travels. Looking at the various dining options, I decided I’d take a back route to Durham via the small town of Greenland, NH, and stop in and check out one of the area’s breakfast spots: Country View Restaurant.

Welcome to another of Offbeat Eats’ Health Check reviews, where we re-visit old favorites and check out how they are doing. In this case, a recent trip to visit the Wentworth Greenhouse Farmers Market, which actually had us passing through north Concord’s “Fisherville” neighborhood. This gave us a great opportunity to check up on an old favorite, The Post.

A few weekends ago, the snow hadn’t really fallen yet, and I used it as an opportunity to go on a short hike with my friend Alex. Looking for a relatively modest hike that still had some good views and was reasonably positioned between Alex’s place in CT and mine in NH, we settled on Wantastiquet Mountain, located in Hinsdale across the river from Brattleboro. It’s a relatively short drive for me, around an hour and change, but I’ve driven I-91 so many times recently I decided to take the NH route, going down through Keene, NH, and stopping for breakfast. Unfortunately, I don’t know any great breakfast spots in Keene proper (if I have Keene readers, I’d love to hear options). But just over the border in the adjacent town of Swanzey, right next to the Keene Airport, is a little joint called The Dinner Table.

In an an interesting parallel to our visit to Colton’s Social House in August after hiking in Yosemite, late September and early October found us backpacking again, this time much closer to home in the Pemigewasset Wilderness area in the White Mountain National Forest. After a week of hiking, we emerged back at the Lincoln Woods trailhead and, after stopping off at the most excellent Notch Hostel for a shower, we headed off for some much-needed sustenance at Black Mountain Burger Co.

In early August, I got to try out one of the more welcome additions to the Upper Valley’s breakfast scene. Every since the Pandemic started and The Lebanon Diner closed, most of the Upper Valley’s breakfast joints have been overwhelmed with demand, so it was very welcome that Taste started serving traditional breakfast and lunch at the north end of the West Lebanon Strip.

Since the closing of The School House Cafe in Warner, NH, I had been on the lookout for a new place to catch a breakfast or lunch if we were driving down south along I-89, and one of the places that had been on my radar for a while was the Everyday Cafe in Contoocook, NH. With a trip in May to the NH Sheep and Wool Festival (this year located in Deerfield, NH), we finally had a reason to be passing near Contoocook at breakfast time, and decided it was a good change to check out Every Day Cafe.