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.

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.

A few years ago, there was a pop-up donut bakery, Farmer and the bell, that was making French-style cruller donuts in the back of the Angkor Wat Cambodian restaurant in Woodstock, VT each weekend. After getting quite a following (they’d regularly sell out after only a few hours), they first moved to doing a slightly larger bakery space in the Parker House in Quechee, VT, serving up donuts on weekends in 2022, and still selling out quickly. In 2023, as the owners were starting their family, they put the business on pause, raised capital, and leased a spot in east Woodstock where an old former gas station had been a perennial eyesore, and built their own store, opening in early October 2025. We’d been meaning to go for several weeks, but most times we were passing through Woodstock, their parking lot was completely full, and we figured we’d come another time. But during early January, we finally had a chance to stop by and check them out.

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.

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.

Ever since I moved to the Upper Valley, I’ve had a handful of favorite diners in the area. For years, one of my favorites was The Fairlee Diner in Fairlee, VT, for some good pancakes, good Benedicts, and some well-above-average home fries. Really, it was a great spot. And it closed in April, 2022, a few months after my last review. But a few months later, with some minor renovation, the place reopened as “Jan’s Fairlee Diner”, and I finally had a chance earlier this summer to drop and and give the place a try.