Offbeat Eats

After a very successful Friday of BBQing and food-trucking, day two of the Central TX BBQ Run started with a trip to Snow’s BBQ in Lexington, TX. Snow’s is a modest little BBQ joint, but got catapulted to fame back in 2008 when Texas Monthly gave it a Best BBQ in Texas award. It’s been popular ever since, and their 300 pounds a day BBQ soon found itself surprisingly popular, and increasing their production four-fold. So it was only natural that a group such as ours would go seek out Snow’s. However, going to Snow’s is a bit of a logistical issue, since they only serve from 8 until noon on Saturday (they are closed the rest of the week), and they frequently run out of food, sometimes as early as 9:30. That means that if you aren’t taking it home, that means barbecue for breakfast!

After getting our fill on South Lamar, we moved downtown to West Sixth Street to search out some more food carts. Our primary stop was The Peached Tortilla (which labels itself “Austin’s Fusion Taco Truck”), which sports a very expansive menu of tacos, primarily using Asian-inspired dishes and ingredients. Highlights include pad thai, banh mi, chicken satay, catfish, szechuan veggies, and more, as well as a healthy assortment of sliders (including crab cakes!).

Well, after our wonderful meal from Odd Duck, the trailer court on South Lamar still had more to offer. Next door to Odd Duck is a shiny Streamline trailer sporting a logo for “Gourdough’s Big Fat Donuts”. Gourdough’s is well-respected in the in Austin area as a donut vendor (500+ reviews on Yelp, average rating 4.5!), serving up some deliciously crispy and fresh donuts with some very intriguing toppings and fillings.

While the primary reason we came to Austin was the wide variety of excellent barbecue joints, it’s important to note that Austin has a very healthy and vibrant non-barbecue food scene as well. In particular, Austin is ahead of the curve with the current food cart trend, with all sorts of energetic chefs piling cooking equipment and refrigerators into all sorts of food carts, converted airstream trailers, vans, and the like. They are pretty much everywhere in central Austin now, it seems that a large fraction of vacant lots, parking lots, sidewalks, and curbsides now host food carts. Heck, most of them now feature groups of carts. Pretty much every fare that can be sold from a truck is sold from a truck, from burgers, to organic meat, to vegan wraps, to chicken n’ waffles, to tacos (where the whole food cart craze really took hold), to, well, just about anything…

Sometimes, you just gotta have some barbecue. But sometimes, that’s easier said than done. Unfortunately, living in Northern New England means that we’re so far outside the good barbecue belt that most of the attempts to do “barbecue” up here are woefully misguided, with some sort of ketchupy sauce slathered onto some grilled meat and called “good enough”. Sure, there are a few exceptions (go consult the fine guide over at PigTrip, but, in general, the state of affairs is dismal enough I’m surprised that the phrase “New England Barbecue” hasn’t already caused some sort of Civil-War-like incident…

Turns out some things are becoming traditions. Based upon the success of last year’s St Patrick’s Day Dinner hosted by Umpleby’s Bakery and the Upper Valley Beer Society, and the resounding success of The Beefsteak last fall, we decided that this year we’d again host another St Patrick’s Day celebration and stout tasting.

Third time’s the charm? Recently, Carol and I read in the paper that West Lebanon’s Four Aces Diner had reopened. The Four Aces has had a bit of a rough history. A genuine Worcester Diner (#837), it originally was located downtown, but after a fire was relocated to its current location at 23 Bridge St (and is now enclosed by a surrounding building). Since I moved to the area, in 2001, it’s been through a couple owners. After closing up shop in 2008, it reopened as a “more upscale eatery” in 2009, but I wasn’t impressed (for my meal, “upscale” apparently mean “benedict with cold deli ham, broken sauce, and runny eggs”) and didn’t go back. After a bit more than a year that owner packed it in as well, and the Four Aces went on the market…

(Closed) After I left Natick, I had another meeting at MIT. This time it was a morning meeting, and this time the Gods of Boston traffic were smiling on me, so I got there with surprisingly little in the way of traffic delays. As a result, I had a chance to grab breakfast, and walking around near the MIT/Kendall Square station, I happened across The Friendly Toast. The Friendly Toast is a breakfast diner, with locations in Portsmouth, NH (their original location) and Cambridge, MA (Kendall Square, just north of MIT and Draper Labs). I’ve happened across the Portsmouth location several times while visiting there, and it has remained on my chronic “I should try that place out” hit list…

This week, several different client meeting in Massachusetts resulting in my having a free evening in Natick. Natick is an interesting little town, there’s an old-style downtown that has a few decent restaurants, and then there is the Rt 9 strip. There’s no shortage of places to eat on the strip, but it’s mostly major chains. Oga’s Japanese Cuisine is the sort of place you drive by a lot of times and don’t think of checking out, since it looks little different than, say, a low-grade Chinese place or an office supply sort, at the end of a somewhat dismal strip mall with one of those annoyingly small one-way parking lots. But several online sources gave the place good reviews, and I’ve been in a mood for Japanese food, so I decided to check it out…

There are a lot of New England traditions I really enjoy this time of year. Snowshoeing. Winter Carnivals. Maple Sugaring. And community suppers. Almost every weekend in late winter, harvest, and game season, there are a wide variety of community breakfasts and dinners, sponsored by a wide variety of local organization, churches, fire departments, and clubs, all of which provide a good way to meet a good cross-section of local society, as well as have a good hearty meal. While there are many such local dinners, however, quality really can run the gamut from “cheap spaghetti dinner” up to “homemade top-notch feast”. And the Hartland Congregational Church (known locally as “The Brick Church” to distinguish it from the white painted church down the road) hosts a top-notch example of the later: the Hartland “Famous” Roast Beef Supper.