Offbeat Eats

One of the odd details of NH that you don’t really appreciate until living here is that we only have two major interstates (I-89 and I-93), and if you aren’t driving between Manchester and Vermont (I-89), or heading to the Whites from Boston, there’s a good chance the ideal route for your travel isn’t highways, but a lot of 35 mph driving through some of NH’s quieter towns. Particularly, for us the optimal routes to Maine or Lake Winnipesaukee regions end up passing through either Franklin or Bristol NH, both fairly quiet former mill towns. Bristol, in particular, is a surprisingly nice little town, just south of Newfound Lake, with a nice little downtown. The downtownalready punches about its weight with at least three breakfast diners (The Bristol Diner, Gina’s Place, and Gilly’s), a good Mexican place (Cielito), and a brewpub (Shackett’s), but I repeatedly found myself driving by a place that opened a few years ago, Odysea.

After a weekend of robotics judging in Burlington, activities wrapped up around 7:30pm. The I-89 route back to my home in New Hampshire isn’t exactly heavily populated with dining establishments, and many of the few options start closing at 8pm, so I consulted my list of places in the Burlington area that I wanted to check out, and decided to check out Zaytoona for some Middle Eastern food before heading home.

Like my trip to Portland in March, early April had me spending several days in Burlington, VT at the University of Vermont (UVM) campus, volunteering as a robotics competition judge. Like usual, this involves rather early mornings and a good 12–14 hour day of volunteering, and then usually my evenings are my own for going on a long walk and finding some new places to enjoy. In this case, I decided to check out more of Burlington’s “Old North End” (which I occasionally visit, see our 2017 review” of The Shopping Bag, one of the neighborhood’s burger spots). But this time, I decided I wanted Mexican, so I had another destination in mind: Taco Gordo.

Our second day in Montreal involved a pleasant outing to the McCord-Stewart Museum (which had an excellent Offbeat-eats relevant exhibit, On the Menu, featuring menus and other paraphernalia from various Montreal eating establishments), a quick trip out to Verdun for Cabane Panache (the annual Montreal maple festival), and then off to Snowbird in La Petite-Patrie for Tiki drinks. After enjoying our drinks at Snowbird, we wanted to find an interesting place to dine, and found one right across the street: Restaurant Abouda, serving up Tunisian food.

During our March trip to Montreal, prior to our outing to the 2026 Pied de Cochon Cabane à Sucre, several of us arrived two evenings before the event, and decided to go out for a light dinner. Since our hotel (our long standby Hôtel Château de l’Argoat) is in Montreal’s Le Village area, we decided to explore more of Rue Ontario Est’s restaurants. After looking in the window and seeing a rather impressive set of grilled chickens, we decided that Sardine Rose, a small Portuguese restaurant, was just the ticket.

For my third morning in Portland, instead of having another hotel breakfast, or doing a repeat trip to the excellent Becky’s Diner, I decided I needed to try something a little more, well, Offbeat. And due to my schedule, a place that opened fairly early (7am). This led me to a little spot in Portland’s west end, in a little building that used to be one of those small neighborhood grocery stores: Ugly Duckling.

At the edge of Portland’s Eastside is an old dive bar, Tomaso’s Canteen. For decades, this was a legendary dive bar, Sangillo’s Tavern, known for its 8am opening, cheap beer, and rough crowds, and it was a well-known hangout for those coming off a night shift. Unfortunately, various events at Sangillo’s drew the notice of first the police, and then the liquor board, and Sangillo’s lost its liquor license, permanently closing on February 14, 2015. A few months later it opened as Tomaso’s Canteen. Shorter hours (11am opening now), bar food, and a better tap list, it’s still a dive bar, but on the less-divey end.

My robotics judging in Falmouth required me to get up fairly early in the morning, before most every decent breakfast joint in Portland is open. But since Portland remains, to this day, an active fishing port, there are a handful of places that are open early in the morning, and right down the street from my waterfront hotel was one old school stalwart, Becky’s Diner, which opens at 5am.

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.