Offbeat Eats

While I mostly focus on the truly offbeat eats here, every once in while I encounter a chain restaurant that is notable for its quality, its novelty (especially chains in regions outside my normal travels), or both. One chain that I’ve enjoyed for many years for many trips to London is Wagamama. For those note familiar with it, Wagamama has been around since the early 90s, primarily in London, and is based upon a somewhat loose interpretation of the Japanese Ramen Bar concept: serving up fresh bowls of noodles or rice on long bench tables to customers, focusing on quick but good food.

For the last several years, I’ve bee an active member of The Upper Valley Beer Society, which is primarily a homebrew club, although we also have visiting brewers, go on the occasional brewery/cidery tours, and host the occssional special event, such as last March’s St Patricks Corned Beef dinner in conjuction with Umpleby’s Bakery in Hanover. Back in April, Charles, the owner of Umpleby’s, distributed an essay about the history of the Beefsteak, a New York area traditional that is a lengthy food event featuring profound quantities of beef (and a few other meats), beer, and little else (tradition also mandates that one wear their “second best suit”). We found the tradition compelling, and given our easy access to amazing local beef and beer up here, decided to throw one of our own.

(Closed) As frequent readers of my blog are aware, one of my major clients is NASA Glenn Research Center, so I travel fairly frequently to the Cleveland area. As several of my other reviews, such as Greenhouse Tavern and Wonton Gourmet indicate, Cleveland is quite the food destination, and I’ve so far only touched the tip of the iceberg (with such recommended establishments as AMP150, Lola, Lolita, B-spot, and several others remaining on my hit list for reviewing). However, most of these places (with the noticeable exception of AMP 150) are downtown or other places not easily accessible to GRC (which is by the airport, well west of downtown), so for years the question of “Where shall we go for lunch?” was typically answered with “well, thte food court at the mall isn’t too bad…” Indeed, that’s where we’ve eaten, more times than I could count.

(Closed) A few weeks ago, we found ourselves driving through Hillsborough and Peterborouh in southern NH. Looking for a snack, we had recalled that several years earlier we had passed some sort of German bakery, but couldn’t recall details. This time, armed with GPS and 3G wireless, we found the place: German John’s Bakery in Hillsborough. A modest storefront in a building shared with an ice cream parlor (which appears to be run by the same folks), it’s a cozy little bakery with a several racks of baked goods, a chalkboard listing available sausages, some shelves of German groceries, and a few tables. We opted for a few classic soft pretzels, and went outside to the tables out front.

For the nth year in a row, Carol and I went to the Vermont Brewers’ Festival in Burlington, VT. Every year we like to attend on Saturday, enjoy the festival, and then explore downtown Burlington a bit, and then find a new place to try to eat. This year, we settled on Pho Hong. I’ve always loved Vietnamese food, but it’s one of the hardest cuisines for me to indulge in. From my house in Grantham, I can draw an approximate 60 mile radius circle without enclosing a single Vietnamese place. The nearest is in Manchester (Golden Bowl, which I’ve reviewed here). But I’m always looking for new places, and sometime in 2008 Pho Hong appeared, making it the third Vietnamese place in the Burlington area, and (I believe) the first in the actual city.

Two weekends ago my parents came to visit, and since we rarely get down to the seacoast (despite NH being a small state, the coast is ~2 hours from here), we decided that would be a good day trip, with some driving, seeing Strawbery Banke, and wandering around Portsmouth. Afterward, we wanted a late lunch, so we ended up heading down to New Castle to the Wentworth-by-the-sea resort so we could indulge in the classic New England summertime treat: the Lobster Roll.

On Memorial Day, we decided to drive up to Burlington, Vermont, and go bike riding on the Island Line bike trail. Afterward, we then headed into downtown Burlington for some dinner, ending up at American Flatbread after stops at Three Needs for some beer and Hong’s Chinese Dumplings for a quick snack. We’ve long been fans of American Flatbread. Being first introduced to them via their frozen pizzas (which have outstanding quality, unlike most frozen pizza), we then visited their main bakery in Waitsfield, VT back in 2001. That place is an experience; they’ve taken an old barn, and 4-5 days a week they produce the frozen pizzas there, and for the weekends they put away the assembly line, rolls out tables with red-checked tableclothes, and run a very informal restaurant and bar. It’s quite the experience, and one I recommend (I’d write it up here, but I still don’t have photos from there), since it is about as “Vermont” as things get around here. In 2005, American Flatbread opened up a location in downtown Burlington, which brings a good part of the Flatbread experience to town.

While I’ve previously blogged about Umpleby’s Bakery and Cafe in Hanover, they’ve recently made a menu change that made it worth revisiting my review. In short, they’ve partly entered the world of burgers. Several minor happenings combined to make this happen. First, Umpleby’s has had a good relationship with Back Beyond Farm in Chelsea, VT for several years (if I recall correctly, that’s who supplies the sausage for their excellent sausage rolls). Charles Umpleby also read an article in New York Magazine about Pat La Frieda’s wholesale meat business that sells well-regarded hamburger meat to many pubs and restaurants in the city (you can read more about Pat La Frieda’s in a tour done by Nick Solares over at AHT) and wanted to try something similar. Finally, he’s already running a successful bakery and cafe that includes sandwiches, so it wasn’t a stretch to add a burger: the Umpleburger (great name, by the way).

Last week I had to have a quick trip down to MIT for work, and have been craving a good burger. Luckily, Cambridge sports several burger joints that all have a good following, including Mr Bartley’s Burger Cottage (near Harvard, still on my hit list), Cambridge Common, Flat Patties, Four Burgers (which I almost went to this time), Craigie on Main, and Miracle of Science. I opted on the last of these, since the location is close to MIT (in the shadow of the Tootsie Roll factory, and kitty-corner from Toscanin’s Ice Cream).

As I’ve mentioned a few times before, a lot of people believe that (to quote my former coworker Marc), “A hot dog is a hot dog.” I don’t concur, I’ve eaten enough hot dogs, from Sonoran Hot Dogs, to Chicago Dogs, to DC half-smokes, to New York papaya dogs, to Dodger dogs, that this clearly isn’t the case. It’s also important to note that it’s not just serving styles that vary, but also the dog itself. The Sabrett’s beef hot dog is what give those New York dogs their flavor. Similarly, a Chicago dog isn’t really right unless it’s a Vienna Beef dog hiding under all that stuff. And in the case of Connecticut, there’s quite a bit of variety hiding in this little state, with several regional butchers producing the hallmark style of that state: beef and pork blend, spiced similar to New York dog with lots of garlic and paprika notes. One of my favorite hot dogs is one of these from Hummel Bros. in New Haven, CT, making a good natural casing hot dog with a serious spiciness to it. And one of the best places to get a Connecticut-style dog is Blackie’s in Cheshire, CT.