Offbeat Eats

Last month, we were looking for a good place to go to celebrate Carol’s birthday, and realized we hadn’t been to one of our area favorites for a while: Windsor Station in Windsor, VT. As you might suspect from the name, Windsor Station is in the former railroad station, and it’s one of the area’s best fine-dining options.

In early December I flew out to the Phoenix area as part of a trip to go backpacking in the Grand Canyon, but had a few days before and after the trip to visit with friends and family in the Phoenix area. Like many of my Arizona trips, I met up with my friend Allyson for lunch, and this time we decided to go to Old Town Scottsdale. Old Town Scottsdale is mostly “fake Old West” and “fake Native American Trading Post” shops on the tackier-end of the scale, but there are a few gems hiding amongst the various “Trading Posts”. One of the them is The Frybread Lounge, an Indigenous-owned restaurant serving up Indigenous staples, primarily focusing on frybread.

When I lived in the Twin Cities, an occasional outing for me was Tavern on Grand, a somewhat divey tavern on St Paul’s Grand Avenue that was well known for the giant “Famous for Walleye” sign and a big neon walleye outline. I didn’t go there often (I’ve got a mild seafood allergy, although I’m quite tolerant to walleye), but it was always enjoyable, and the walleye was indeed quite good (they sold enough of it that they were probably one of the larger sellers of it). But after a run of almost 35 years, Tavern on Grand closed in the spring of 2024. After some renovation, the location re-opened as Russell’s, named after the building owner, Todd Russell

(Closed) Due to a decrease in various airlines’ service to Manchester, more of my travel these days has been out of Boston, but our recent combined trip to Arizona and Arkansas actually had us scheduled through Manchester (as luck had it, weather resulted in us getting rerouted through Boston, but that’s another story…), so we decided to do one of those Park/Sleep/Fly deals, driving down the night before our trip. That gave us a good opportunity to check out Manchester’s dining scene, and we decided to try out a place that had been on our hit list for a bit: The Birch on Elm.

Before the Covid pandemic hit, we had a handful of favorite restaurants around the small Town of Warner, NH. Halfway between the Upper Valley and the Concord area, this made it a nice place to either take a break from the drive, or for meeting up if Carol and I were on separate itineraries. Two of our favorites were The Foothills and

Oakes & Evelyn in Montpelier has been my favorite Vermont restaurant for the last few years. They were our first “real” post-pandemic fine dining experience back in May of 2021 shortly after they opened, and we had several visits there in 2022 and 2023. It had basically become our go-to for special occasions, well-worth the hour and change drive from our house in Grantham, and we really got to enjoy Chef Justin Dain’s crudos, tartares, and roasted meats.

As our regular readers know, here at Offbeat Eats, every once in a while we do a “health check”, revisiting one of our favorite spots and see how things are doing. We first visited Oakes & Evelyn in Montpelier back in May 2021 when they were a brand-new restaurant and the dining scene was still re-emerging from it’s long Covid-19 slumber. As you can read in that review, we were really impressed by that visit, and vowed to return for future trips. So in 2022 when we were looking for a place to celebrate our anniversary, we ended up choosing a revisit to Oakes & Evelyn, and even returned in December to celebrate my birthday (both of these visits had pretty similar Fall menus, so this review will cover both visits).

As our vacation drive to Minnesota continued, we headed across western Ohio, Indiana (with stops at both Bare Hands Brewery and the Indiana Dunes State Park) and southeastern Illinois, ending up meeting up with some of our Chicago-area friends for drinks at Brother Chimp Brewing with dinner following at The Turf Room.

As a celebration after completing our Washington, DC Death March (10 hours walking, 22.9 miles), we decided that a celebratory brunch was in order the next morning. It’s not particularly easy to score brunch reservations for a large party, but one of our Marchers, Jeff, recommended LIA’s in Chevy Chase. Part of the Chef Geoff group of restaurants, LIA’s is one of the places focusing on “Posh American” cuisine: American classic dishes done up with quality ingredients and with interesting twists. But, most importantly, they were easily able to hand a group of 12 with last minute reservations, so we found ourselves traveling up to Chevy Chase for brunch.

(Closed) For the first night of our trip, we decided to stay near LAX and head east the next day. From many, many previous work trips to the area, I’m pretty familiar with the El Segundo area, and I rather like the area. Due to an odd historical/geographical quirk, El Segundo is somewhat isolated from the surrounding LA area (the Northern border is LAX, the Southern border is a giant Chevron refinery), and it still has a classic downtown that feels like it’s left over from a former era, with all sorts of small businesses, restaurants, and the like. Several of the restaurants are quite good, and this time we decided to check out Farm Stand.