Offbeat Eats

Welcome to another of Offbeat Eats’ Health Check reviews, where we re-visit old favorites and check out how they are doing. Late this summer, a visit to Lincoln Peak Vineyard to pick up our quarterly wine order nicely aligned with some of our Vermont Tiki friends going out for a group dinner at A Single Pebble. I’ve long thought that A Single Pebble is the best Chinese restaurant in Vermont, and realized that while I’ve been there a good dozen times since my 2013 review, I hadn’t been there since the Pandemic, so it was a good opportunity to see how A Single Pebble is doing.

There are few traditions more sacred in Northern New England in than going out for soft serve ice cream in the summer (in local parlance, a “Creemee”, although the spelling varies a bit). Indeed, most folks hold an extra special fondness for taking it to the next level by getting a maple creemee, and there’s more than a little discussion, often heated, around local water coolers about which place has the best creemees. I certainly have my regional favorites (my overall favorite is Mac’s Maple in Plainfield, NH, although I’ve got to give a good nod to Red Hen in in Middlesex, VT for having far and away the best waffle cone in the region), but it’s one of those treats I only sporadically indulge in due to my becoming lactose intolerant about 20 years ago. With that in mind, I was drawn to a spot in Winooski, VT, for two particular reasons. The first was that this ice cream stand uses 100% plant-based products, so I can indulge without the usual gastrointestinal unrest. The second was… the name. Offbeat Creemee. With a name like that, I had to give them a visit.

As I mentioned in my recent review of the Strawberry Festival at the Claremont Union Episcopal Church, I’ve been trying to visit more of the various community meals that spring up around the Upper Valley. Harvest suppers, Church dinners, and fundraisers. With that in mind, in late July Carol and I spotted such an opportunity in the local newspaper, the annual Pie Breakfast sponsored by the Wilmot Community Association in Wilmot, NH. Wilmot is one of the smaller towns in the area, located NE of New London, Wilmot is a cruciform-shaped town that was formed from bits of New London, the Kearsarge Gore (a bit of NH land previously unallocated to any town), and Hill, NH. Like a lot of these towns, it actually has multiple “downtown” areas: Wilmot Center and Wilmot Flat. The Wilmot Community Association (the WCA) hosts occasional community building events, and one of their well-respected annual events is their Pie Breakfast.

Returning home from the Adirondacks involves more driving time than you think, since most of the drive is meandering along US Route 4 as it passes through eastern New York and Vermont. Interestingly, part of this drive is four-lane divided highway (roughly between Fairhaven, VT and Rutland, VT, a byproduct of one of the original alignments of I-89 that never came to be, and briefly considered in the 1970s as a potential I-92), but mostly the drive bounces from one small town to the next until you get to New Hampshire. Between our Lake George trips and most of our westward voyages to upstate New York, I think I’ve done that drive a good hundred times, and it isn’t all that often that we notice a new place showing up. But as we were driving through Whitehall (one of several claimants to be the Birthplace of the US Navy), we had spied a relatively new Asian restaurant, Whitehall Red Panda, and decided to give it a try.

There’s one other annual dining tradition associated with our annual pilgrimage to Lake George’s Tiki Resort for our annual Ohana Luau at the Lake gathering. After the event has wrapped up, and we’ve cleaned up and restored the Tiki Resort to as-found condition, it is traditional for a bunch of us to go down the road to visit a long-time Lake George restaurant, the Log Jam.

One of my more established traditions of our annual trip to Lake George is getting up early one morning and hiking from downtown Lake George up to Prospect Mountain via the Prospect Mountain Trail that approximately follows the old incline railway route. After arriving back at the trailhead in late morning, we almost always follow it with another tradition: eating at Lake George’s The Breakfast Spot.

Downtown Lake George is fairly busy and touristy during the summer, but there actually is a reason for it; Lake George itself is actually a very nice, scenic lake with several nice beaches, with nice vista of the surrounding mostly-undeveloped Adirondack mountains. At the end of the day, it’s enjoyable to find a nice restaurant with a deck overlooking the Lake, and soak in the sunset over a light dinner and a beer. However, it’s actually a bit difficult to execute that vision, since the nature of downtown Lake George’s development resulted in a lot of long, narrow alleys perpendicular to the Lake, so a lot of places just don’t have the real estate for a nice deck. But a notable exception to this is Christie’s on the Lake.

I’ve previously noted in my Lake George area reviews that there are almost uncountably many places to get breakfast in Lake George, but the quality is hit and miss, the prices are tourist-level, and sometimes it’s just nice to get a fresh view. Luckily, the Glens Falls area, about 15 minutes south of Lake George, is a lot quieter than Lake George, but it’s got a lot going for it. A nice, fairly vibrant downtown. Two breweries. A decent art musuem. And a good number of cheap, affordable restaurants. One that we had been driving by a lot in the last few years, just down the street from Common Roots, is the Peppermill Family Restaurant.

As I’ve mentioned a few posts ago, this was our 6th year attending and volunteering at Ohana Luau at the Lake, and that gives us quite a few opportunities to explore some of the dining options around Lake George, especially when we need to grab a quick bite. The immediate answer for this is the A&W Root Beer next door (yes, Lake George is a time capsule, including a still-functioning A&W, albeit one without car hops). But usually we’re craving something a bit more exotic, and just a short distance down the road from the A&W is one of the area’s hidden gems: the Spice Gyro & Kabab, tacked onto the end of the Sunoco station.

In addition to my regular reviews, I occasionally like to avail myself of the various community meals that spring up around the Upper Valley. Harvest suppers. Fire department fund raisers. Non-profit fundraisers. And one of the best categories, the church basement supper. Many of the area churches host community suppers throughout the calendar year, especially clustered around harvest season and mid-winter (the ne plus ultra of church basement suppers, the Hartland Roast Beef Suppper, has gotten several visits from Offbeat Eats, for example). And in late June, we spied in the newspaper (yes, we actually still get a print newspaper) that one of the Community Suppers I had been keeping my eye on was back: the Union Episcopal Church Annual Strawberry Festival and Norwegian Meatball Dinner in Claremont, NH.