Offbeat Eats

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.

While a good chunk of the dining and cocktails we did in Fort Lauderdale happened at the Mai-Kai, I did want to make sure that on one of my relatively rare trips to Florida we used this as an opportunity to get another cuisine that we don’t often get to experience in Northern New England, and that’s Cuban food. While the epicenter of Cuban cuisine is Calle Ocho down in Miami, the Cuban presence is still pretty strong, and conveniently located fairly close to our hotel was a location of the Florida Cuban chain Las Vegas Cuban Cuisine.

As I mentioned a few years back in a review of Tiki Underground a few years ago, “Tiki” in the United States had an interesting history: starting in the early 20th century in California and Hawaii (e.g. Trader Vic’s and Don the Beachcomber), the nice cuisine grew in the 1940s through 1960s until most major metro areas had a handful of Polynesian-inspired (like Americanized Chinese Food, it bears only a casual relationship with it’s initial inspirations) restaurants and cocktail lounges. Unfortunately, while Tiki itself has recently had quite a revival (along with craft cocktails), this revival came too late, and entirely too many classic bits of Tiki Americana started to close (most of the Trader Vic’s locations, Ohio’s Kahiki Supper Club, and Chicopee, MA’s He Ke Lau have all closed). But some classic joints still remain. One of these, the Mai-Kai, in Oakland Park, Florida, remains one of the United States’ oldest still-operating Tiki establishments, serving up Tiki drinks and Polynesian shows since 1956.

After sending our hiker friends on their way, before heading home to New England we spent a few days hanging around with friends of ours in Redmond, generally having a relaxing time cooking, playing with the kids, and playing mini-golf. Afterwards, we decided to go wander around Redmond Town Center with the kids, and find spots for dinner and ice cream. Just off the central plaza at Redmond Town Center we came across a good-looking option, Kizuki Ramen & Izakaya.

After our visit to Piroshky Piroshky and some touristic wandering of Pike Place Market, we decided to continue our explorations of Seattle’s major tourist attractions with a visit to Chihuly Garden and Glass (which was still finishing construction on my last major visit to Seattle). After a short ride on the monorail (which is uniquely suited to this purpose, and few others), and a nice morning enjoying the gardens and glass art, we decided to grab a light lunch before everyone started to split up for their future travels. Turns out, we didn’t need to go anywhere, there’s a great spot right at Chihuly Garden and Glass: The Bar at Chihuly.

On our last day in Seattle before heading out to visit friends in Redmond, we hung out with our friends Julie and Howard, checking out a few of the tourist sites around downtown Seattle. One of our first destinations was, admittedly, one of the more touristy spots, adjacent to Pike Place market: Piroshky Piroshky.

“After the doing… there is the undoing.” We’ve had a long tradition of celebrating our longer backpacking trips by finding a good celebratory dinner spot, often a steakhouse when this is viable. So after we got back to Tacoma after a week backpacking in Mount Rainier National Park, we decided to find a spot suitable for a good celebration. A quick check of various reviews led us to a Brazilian steakhouse located near downtown Tacoma, El Gaucho.