Offbeat Eats

(Closed) A fairly recent trip up to the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont had a passing through St Johnsbury a handful of times, and it gave us a good opportunity to check out a bunch of well-regarded places in town, including Kingdom Taproom, one of the area’s better-regarded beer bars with a very good selection of northern Vermont beers. But upstairs from Kingdom Taproom’s basement location is their sister establishment, Kingdom Table, which focuses on providing farm-to-table fine dining. Since we had a good amount of time before having to head back home, we decided to check out Kingdom Table for dinner.

(Closed) After quite a bit of international travel, late April had me arriving back home in the Upper Valley just in time for Carol’s birthday, and we used it as good excuse to try out a place that’s been on our hit list since it opened: Bistro Midva in Windsor, Vermont. Located on South Main Street in a location that’s been quite a few different restaurants over the year (I remember the spot as Shepherd’s Pie, Au Jus, and Red Head Bistro, just to name a few), and in September 2021 a new set of owners, Chad and Arlanda Eržen Lumbra, decided to reopen the oft-challenged spot with Bistro Midva. The name is Slovenian (basically means “Two of Us”), but I’d call the menu more “European Bistro” in nature; offering up a nice modern menu using fresh, local ingredients like pork belly, locally-raised meat, fresh made pasta, and a nice set of wine and cocktails.

One of the peculiar things about regularly visiting London is that with a few exceptions, over the past 16 years we’ve generally exhausted the list of “standard” tourist attractions (some of them multiple times), which gives us a chance to have more relaxing visits focusing on friends, new restaurants, and revisits to favorite haunts. But one of the long-lingering items of standard tourist attractions still remaining on the list was actually visiting the Observation Deck on Tower Bridge, which way back in 2014 even got a nice upgrade with the addition of a glass floor. It’s actually a great spot, especially for gazing over the Thames or Tower of London complex, and highly recommended. Afterward, we were looking for a light lunch away from the crowds as we walked back to Westminster from Tower Bridge, and ended up going to a favorite of my brother and sister-in-law, Comptoir Libanais.

There are few London traditions of mine as sacred as going out for a good old-fashioned fry-up: a “Full English” breakfast, with at least bacon, sausage, eggs, beans, and toast, and I usually like to add even more to that (at a minimum, tomatoes, and usually black pudding as well). In the area around Pimlico, there’s exactly one place that anyone should even consider for that, and it’s the classic greasy spoon, The Regency Cafe. Virtually every trip of mine to London, even short ones, involve a trip to The Regency, except for holiday trips where they are closed. Indeed, one of my earliest reviews here in 2007 was for The Regency.

One of the joys of going to London is that it gives me a lot of opportunities to explore cuisines that I usually don’t find in New England, and may even have trouble finding in the US at all. In this case, my visit gave me a good chance to visit a second location of Iberia that recently had opened a short walk from my Brother’s London flat. To get something out of the way, “Iberia” is an interesting placename; Western European and North American English speakers usually use this term referring to Spain and Portugal (the Iberian Peninsula, after the ancient Greek name for the river, Íbēros), but the term also applies to another ancient geographical region almost 4000 km to the east, the ancient Georgian kingdom of Kartli, which was also known to the Greeks as Iberia. So Iberia in Pimlico is serving up classic Georgian food, and since it has been several years since I last had a foray into Georgian cuisine, we decided to make that our last major meal of my visit.

I started visiting the UK regularly when my brother started dating my now sister-in-law Sophie, and on most visits we had between 2006 and 2019, a common side trip was visiting my Aunt Sue, who lived just outside of Windsor, which is just a relatively short train trip from London, usually visiting with Sue, helping out around her house, and occasionally going out for a nice meal. She had a few favorite places, including The Pineapple in Dorney, the Windsor Farm Shop, and, for special occasions, Gilbey’s in Eton. Unfortunately, my aunt passed away in September 2022; in April we were finally able to complete the arrangements to bury her ashes in the splendid Stoke Poges Memorial Gardens in a small ceremony. Afterward, we retired to nearby Eton, and had a memorial dinner at Gilbey’s in her honor.

As my regular readers know, for the last few years one of our major hobbies here at Offbeat Eats has been backpacking, usually with Fitpacking (review here), with us doing periodic 50 mile hikes through various wilderness areas. This year’s first Fitpacking trip back in March took me back to an old favorite, the Superstition Wilderness Area (you can see a nice photo album over on Flickr) for 50 miles of hiking through some of my favorite canyons. As you could read over on the Fitpacking review, the food on Fitpacking is actually quite good, but I’d be kidding you if said that you don’t have the occasional cravings, and at some point on Day 4 of our hike, someone brought up “Cheeseburgers” as a topic, and I immediately found myself craving a specific item: a green chile cheeseburger (and, once the topic of “green chile” came up, I also found myself craving a green chile beer as well to go with it). While the southern Superstitions are generally no place to score a cheeseburger (although they’ve got a decent chile cheesburger up at Tortilla Flat if you’re by Canyon Lake), I knew just the place we needed to go when we got back into town. It was Fate. Fate Brewing Company, to be specific.

We’ve talked more than a little about “Pizza Cognition Theory” here at Offbeat Eats: the theory that the first pizza you are exposed to sets your expectations and preferences for pizza, and it’s something I definitely believe in. But it also applies to other cuisines, in particular, Americanized Chinese food. As I discussed a fair bit in some other reviews, like Rhode Island’s House of Wu, Chinese food’s more than a century-long experience in America morphed it into it’s own sort of cuisine; it’s definitely not “authentic” Chinese anymore, but it’s got it’s own particular culinary multicultural heritage, and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying it in its own right. And when it comes to Americanize Chinese cuisine, Cognitition theory comes into play here as well, since the general flavor and textural profiles I expect if I’m going out for generic “Chinese” food is mostly sculpted by the spot where I got most of my Chinese food as a child, Golden Gate Chinese Restaurant in Mesa, AZ.

One of my annual traditions that I’ve finally been able to resume after several years’ pandemic-related interruption is judging student-built robots for FIRST Robotics, which usually has me traveling a few weekends at the end of each winter to various events in the district. This year, I was judging in Salem, NH, and staying in a relatively nice DoubleTree Hotel over in Andover, MA across the board. While Andover is no culinary slouch (see, for example, my 2019 review of 15SX, which unfortunately burnt down in November 2022), when I’m in the area I’m usually drawn to nearby Lowell, which has a very good selection of restaurants, particularly Southeast Asian ones and old-school American ones (like The Owl. But this time one particular establishment had drawn my attention: The Keep.

On many of our trips to either Boston or Rhode Island, we’re usually looking to stop for breakfast on the way, but a lot of the places we used to frequent along I-89 (such as The Footfills or School House Cafe in Warner, both of which closed permanently during the pandemic) closed, so we much more frequently find ourselves looking for new breakfast joints around Concord or Manchester. While Purple Finch in Bedford remains one of our favorites, we occasionally take the time to check around town for other options, and a recent favorite of ours has been The Breakfast Club.