Offbeat Eats

My recent travels to Portland, Maine, during one of the less-popular times of the reason (New England’s “Mud Season” between Winter and Spring), turned out to be rather fortuitous in that, despite my visit falling during Maine Restaurant Week, many of the places that are usually teeming with both locals and tourists were actually relatively calm, which gave me a good opportunity to visit one of my favorite spots that’s usually got a waiting list: Eventide Oyster Co.

As our regular readers know, approximately every two years we do a group trip up to Montreal, rendezvous with friends, and head out to the surprisingly rural outskirts of the Montreal area (St. Benoît de Mirabel) for Au Pied de Cochon annual Cabane à Sucre maple celebration. You can read up on previous visits of ours in 2014, 2017, or 2024, or their similar fall harvest dinner in Fall 2019. The basic formula remains the same: a sumptuous feast featuring maple and seasonal dishes, served up in an unending serious of generously-portioned family-style courses. Over the years, the actual meal varies a bit (some years are more traditional, some more experimental, and some have been tightly themed, like 2017’s Japanese-theme), but it remains one of the Montreal-area’s more difficult reservations to get (usually setting an alarm for when ticket sales start in December for the winter Cabane). This year’s culinary Olympic feast was for myself and 9 colleagueswas in mid-March, during a brief recurrence of winter during the spring thaw.

A recent weekend spent judging a high school FIRST Robotics competition had me driving over to Falmouth, ME for the weekend. An unfortunately fact of life of western NH living is that there isn’t any terribly good way to get to the Maine Coast: you’ve either got to go way out of your way and pay multiple tolls to get their via the interstates, or you’ve got to go on a long cross-country jaunt, much of it at 35 mph, taking a more direct route. I usually opt for the latter, since while slightly slower, it’s more fuel efficient, more relaxing, and there are better options for stopping. In this case, I found myself looking at options for lunch in and around Somersworth, NH, which is where I encountered Tasya’s Kitchen.

As I mentioned in my review of Cedar Street Café, since the hotel we were staying in didn’t have on-site breakfast, it was a good excuse to go check out some of the local establishments, despite the relatively heavy snow. Our college Doc Tesla had given a hearty endorsement to a relatively new spot he had found just a few miles west in Sturbridge’s Fiskdale village, The Little Rest Stop, so we decided to go over and check it out.

While we were staying at the Sturbridge Host hotel for a few days (whose on-site restaurants, weren’t, at least for the winter, open), we decided each morning to venture forth and try various local breakfast spots for breakfast. The first we tried was Cedar Street Café, which is just down the street from the hotel, although confusingly, not actually on Cedar Street (it’s sister restaurant Cedar Street Grille is, and the parking lot entrance is across from the Grille, although depending on which mapping service you are using, you may get some odd directions). Another of the local restaurants owned by Table3 (same owners as The Duck), the Café focuses on coffee, breakfast, and light lunch.

In early February, we gathered with a bunch of our friends for Nor’Easter Island, which is a wintertime event put on by the Greater Boston Vintage Society where we gather at the Sturbridge Host hotel in Sturbridge, MA for several days of vintage vending, swing dancing, and tropical drinks (all communities with more than a little overlap). However, in the middle of the winter, the Sturbridge Host is more than a bit of a ghost town, with no on-site dining, so when it came time for dinner, a bunch of us all decided to meet up at an old standby dining spot in Sturbridge’s downtown: The Duck.

One of the shortcomings of the greater Upper Valley area is that we’ve got a bit of a shortage of breakfast spots, especially if you are looking for something a bit more varied than “American Diner”. But in early 2025, we had a pretty big shift in White River Junction: the former Piecemeal Pies (which, after five years of business, shuttered abruptly in 2023 during bankruptcy proceedings) finally got remodeled and re-opened as a Turkish cafe: Cappadocia Cafe. Opened by Vural and Jackie Oktay, the owners of next door Tuckerbox (which has had its own interesting voyage transitioning from a Australian-owned coffee shop to a Turkish restaurant, but hey, variety is the spice of life) and Cappadocia Bistro in Burlington, VT, Cappadocia is primarily a breakfast- and lunch-based counterpart to the more formal dinner menu of Tuckerbox, offering an array of pastries, wood-fired flatbreads, and related lighter dishes.

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.

When we’re visiting relatives in Livonia, I like to use it as an opportunity to visit an old favorite of mine, Bates Hamburgers. You see, in one of those odd sort of time capsule manners, the Detroit area still has a strong presence of locally-owned hamburger joints, a good number of them selling “sliders”. Yeah, those sliders, the small hamburgers cooked over onions and served on small greasy buns. Yeah, those. While in most of the country the few proper sliders (vs just small sandwiches with that name) come from either White Castle (northern latitudes) or Krystal (southern latitudes), but in Detroit, various independent operators and small chains are still the reigning kings of classic sliders. Bates Hamburgers is one of my favorites, and I try to visit it every time I’m in town. I last reviewed Bates back in… wow, 2006, in one of the oldest reviews here on Offbeat Eats (yes, I’ve been doing this for over 20 years now…), and I figured that this, time, camera and French fry-craving nieces in tow, that we’d head on over to Bates for lunch and do one of Offbeat Eats’ patented “Health Check” re-visits.

During our visit to the Detroit area, I was craving some Mexican food. Normally this would involve a trip down to Detroit’s Mexicantown neighborhood, but for most of the trip we were up in the northwestern Detroit suburb of Livonia. But Carol’s extended family had a favorite Mexican place nearby that they really liked, so we headed off to a strip mall on 6 mile road to visit The Taco Factory.