Offbeat Eats

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.

And most Vermonters, and Vermont-adjacent individuals like myself, are proud partisans when it comes to Creemees, having a strong preference for the products of one producers over another, with a handful of perennial favorites always being bandied about. One of these is Randolph Center’s Silloway Maple.

The Upper Valley region doesn’t have many “fine dining” restaurants, especially once you get out of the core. Since we moved to the area in 2001, the New London Inn has been one of the area’s few “dinner date” restaurants, but the actual restaurant has had a lot of iterations, ranging from the “New London Inn” which we found a bit stodgy, the Coach House (which we rather liked), and most recently, it’s now operated as “The Elms” by the same team as the Oak Roam at the Inn at Pleasant Lake. Celebrating our anniversary in October (well, the anniversary is in late September, but September was a crazy-busy month) gave us a good reason to go over and check out The Elms and see how the new ownership was doing.

A recent trip down through lower NH gave us a good opportunity to stop in Concord with two purposes: a quick visit to Lithermans Limited brewery, and hopefully a chance to finally check out 603 BBQ next door, which is the rare NH “Barbecue” place that really gets consistently good reviews. While Lithermans was quite good, a few delays in our departure meant arriving at Lithermans at 12:15, by which time the line for 603 BBQ was already a good hour long. Not wanting to spent that much time of a delightfully nice Fall day waiting in line, we opted instead to check out a promising-looking small sandwich shop we had passed on our way in, Nina’s Bistro & Sandwiches.

During our visit to Fort Lauderdale for the Fraternal Order of Moai FOMCon, we stayed at the Ocean Manor Beach Resort, one of Fort Lauderdale’s older and more venerable beach hotels (Johnny Carson had a penthouse there, and the Rat Pack were regular 60s and 70s visitors). And it has a reasonably good Tiki bar out back with a nice breakfast, but after a few days, we really felt we needed to explore a bit and find some broader breakfast items. Which led us to a smaller café a few blocks away on Ocean Boulevard called Brew It Café.