Offbeat Eats

A many of my regular readers know, I’ve got a regular tradition of going on an annual “Death March”, in which I and a bunch of friends pick some random large US city (New York, San Francisco, and Chicago in previous years), pick a nice walking route through it (usually around 20 miles), and spend a day walking and eating our way through the city (you don’t feel too guilty about stopping for a hot dog, pizza slice, or taco if you’ve been walking 20 miles!). One of the challenges is that many large cities, particularly in business areas, can have large stretches that don’t have a lot of takeout food, or if they do, the places require some advanced scouting. So this last weekend, we did an exploratory trip looking for more stops on next month’s Boston Death March. So that’s how we found ourselves wandering around Berkeley Street in Boston’s South End, stumbling upon El Triunfo.

I had to do some major retooling of the website (the perfect activity when stuck home with a kidney stone). This site makes intensive use of the Google Maps API, and until recently used version 2 of the API, which is getting deprecated in May. In order to keep your Offbeat Eats coming to you without interruption, I had to migrate the site to use the newer Version 3 API. And it’s not simple, since I’m often mapping hundreds of points, with use of bounding boxes, autoscaling, and map clustering. Mostly, this will be an improvement. Mapping should be faster, with more options. But a few things will work a little differently. And I’m sure a few things will need tweaking. But please let me know if you find anything that’s not working how you think it should.

Subtitled: Kidney Stones Are Rather A Nuisance. You’ve probably noticed by now that my normal at-least-weekly posting rate has dwindled to nearly nothing. The reason is two fold. The minor reason is that I haven’t been traveling much (aside from a bunch of repeat trips to Boxborough, MA), so I haven’t encountered my usual number of new places to try. But that’s not much of an excuse, since I’ve still got a good half dozen local places that are still overdue for a review. The other is that three weeks ago I was diagnosed with a kidney stone. It started as a minor inconvenience, but then as the weeks of discomfort, pain, and nausea (especially the nausea), last Tuesday the docs took one look at my x-ray and decided that action was required: in this case a stent (to stabilize the kidney, the stone is still in there). I’ve discovered that while kidney stones are a huge amount of, well, un-fun, the stent isn’t much better. So until this situation rides itself out and I’m given a clean bill of health, I’m on a regimen of bed rest, painkillers, and non-confrontational food. So, in the meantime, enjoy the rest of the blog, stay healthy yourselves (drink lots of water!), and I hope to talk with you soon.

(Closed) I knew that eventually the concept of the “pop-up restaurant” was going to hit the area. For those that aren’t familiar with the pop-up concept, it’s basically a temporary restaurant, where a chef or kitchen team opens up in a temporary space or borrows another restaurant’s space for a night, serving their food and menu instead of the normal fare. It’s a good way for chefs to test out concepts or run limited restaurants, and they’ve been all the buzz the last few years. Indeed, one place I’ve reviewed here, Dock Kitchen in London, started as a pop-up. And like most any culinary fad, eventually it finds its way here to northern New England. In this case, the pop-up restaurant is a sushi place, Himitsu Sushi.

Well, it’s been a while since my last update. I haven’t been traveling much, mostly hitting up local favorites like Worthy Burger. But some recent projects at work have caused me to spend a lot of time testing, and as a result, I’ve spent a rather large amount of time in Massachusetts at a subcontractor around Fort Devens and Boxborough. Like a lot of my work destinations, the area is pleasant enough, but it’s not an area with a lot of notable food options. Indeed, it takes a bit of research to find anything other than the restaurant associated with the hotel… if you know otherwise, please let me know! But when looking at various local reviews, there was one place nearby that did get consistently good reviews: Woo Jung.

Coming back home to New Hampshire from Cleveland requires a rather lengthy drive across New York State, with two options: the Thruway, or the slightly longer route taking the Southern Tier. Due to some rather heavy snow coming off of the lake, we opted for the Southern Tier route, which resulted in us passing through Corning, NY around lunch time. We decided to stop there, since the location was convenient, and I’ve got a soft spot for Corning since I was born there. Like most of our visits there, we ended up on Market Street downtown, this time giving Atlas Brick Oven Pizzeria a try.

(Closed) For our last dinner in the Cleveland area, we were looking for a lighter dinner (have you seen all hot dogs, steaks, and pork products I consumed in the last few entries?), and as a result, we decided to check out a relative newcomer on the Cleveland scene, D.C. Pasta Co. in Strongsville, OH. First of all, the D.C. Pasta Co. name comes not from our nation’s capital, but from the owners’ initials, D.C. is the combined effort of Ohio chef Dante Boccuzzi (primarily known for his “Dante” and “d.b.a” restaurants), and Carmela del Busso (known for “Oggi”), giving the place it’s initials. D.C., situated in a small strip mall complex in Strongsville, is designed to be a fairly casual Italian place featuring house made pasta.

After we did the Cleveland Museum of Art, it was time for a late lunch. We wanted something interesting, but not something that was going to be heavy enough that we wouldn’t be hungry come dinner. After a little bit of discussion, we decided that it was time to check out Happy Dog on the West Side, known known for their wide variety of hot dog toppings. Okay, I can already feel the skeptical vibe coming from some of my readers. The world has a lot of hot dog places, what makes a place like Happy Dog worth some of your precious stomach sapce? And I’ll be the first to admit, hot dogs as a menu item are often a high-risk item: while there are a lot of really great hot dog places out there (Indeed, I’ve reviewed about 20 on this site), there are a lot of dubious ones as well, and for every lovingly-assembled Gold Coast Chicago Dog, or pepper-relished-covered Blackie’s hot dog I’ve had, I’ve also been served up more than my share of Oscar Mayer 10 per lb hot dogs slapped onto a stale bun with ketchup and mustard to know that hot dogs generally aren’t the sort of thing I get without doing some research first. But I’ll tell you that from my visit, Happy Dog isn’t one of those places, instead, they are a great dive-ish joint that’s serving up some really great hot dogs with some good toppings.

On our last full day in Cleveland, we wanted to get some breakfast before doing our daily exploring, and, quite frankly, we wanted donuts. The problem is, it’s rather hard to find good donuts these days… sure, there’s a Dunkin’ Donuts on damn near ever corner, but those aren’t really good donuts (especially since the vast majority of DD locations don’t bake on-site anymore, just truck in their donuts from a regional bakery). I actually remember a time when there were a lot of independent donut shops selling donuts and coffee, but these days you usually have to do a little bit of research to find the few remaining ones. One of those is Becker’s Donuts.

(Closed) One of the reasons that we decided to stop over in Cleveland on the way home is that it’s a surprisingly good food destination in itself. In addition to one of the better public markets in the US (their famous West Side Market) and a surprisingly vibrant Asian community, Cleveland has a rather impressive assortment of top-notch dining establishments (including such places as AMP 150, Greenhouse Tavern, and Lola). But one chef I’ve been particularly interested in following is Mike Nowak. I first met Mike via a mutual friend when he was a chef at Bar Cento, and more recently enjoyed some of his work at Market Garden, and continue to enjoy both of those establishments (indeed, I visited both on this trip). So when I heard earlier this year that he was opening up his own restaurant, Black Pig, down the block (in the spot previously occupied by Dragonfly, which I had been to in the past), I was intrigued and made it a point to visit next time I was in town.