Offbeat Eats

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.

When Carol and I moved to the Upper Valley way back in 2001, the fine dining scene was substantially different; there were fewer options for fine dining, and most of the stalwarts from that era, such as Hanover’s Cafe Bon Gustaio, have long since departed the landscape. And most of the remaining places that aren’t associated with hotels have moved on as well. But one particular fine dining restaurant has managed to stay in pretty much continual operation for over fifty years, and that’s Woodstock, VT’s The Prince and the Pauper.

Right before heading out of town for a week, we met up with our friends Liz and Wesley and headed over to Oakes & Evelyn for dinner. You might be thinking, “didn’t Rich write up Oakes & Evelyn fairly recently (I did, in 2023)?”, as it’s a semi-regular fine dining destination of ours. But in this case, we weren’t doing the hour and a quarter drive up to Montpelier, but instead, driving to Woodstock. A few months ago, Oakes & Evelyn announced that they were opening a second location, taking over the restaurant operations in Woodstock’s The Jackson inn. After several months of renovation and preparation, Oakes & Eveyln finally had their opening night at their new location, and we decided to give it a try.

(Closed) A recent trip to Montpelier to visit Barr Hill to have some cocktails with friends ended up with our taking the back way through Barre, VT to get home, and hoping to pick up some dinner while in town. When we first moved here, Barre was a bit of a food desert, but over the years it’s sprouted more than a few decent eateries like Cornerstone Pub and Kitchen. But this time, I figured it was finally a chance to check out a rarity in the region: a ramen joint, Si Aku Ramen.

With all of the recent travel between Saratoga Springs and our home in NH, I got to tweak the routes a few times so I wasn’t driving past the same places all the time, and one of our returns trips had us taking State Highway 11 across the state instead of our more usual US-4 route. This took us right through Chester, VT right around a “late lunch” hour, which finally gave me an opportunity to stop and check out another perennial establishment on our “should visit sometime” list: Southern Pie Café.