Offbeat Eats

On our last full day visiting with our friends in Saratoga Springs, we decided to drive down to nearby Ballston Spa in order to do some thrift store shopping. Oh, I’m already well-stocked, but our friends managed to score quite a few items for their new condo, including a most-awesome, mint-condition vintage 1960s waffle iron from ReShop, identical to the one that my parents still use to this day (“don’t try to clean that, the seasoning is over 50 years old!”). After a few other choice finds, including some vintage FiestaWare, we retired to the nearby Speckled Pig Brewing Company for some lunch.

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

My second night staying in El Segundo, I took the short drive down to Manhattan Beach for dinner. The next town south from El Segundo, it’s got a decent downtown, a nice beach and wharf, and a good cross-section of restaurants from fine dining all the way down to dive bar. In fact, that’s what brought me to Manhattan Beach, I wanted to revisit an old favorite from previous visits: Ercole’s.

One of my annual traditions that I’ve finally been able to resume after several years’ pandemic-related interruption is judging student-built robots for FIRST Robotics, which usually has me traveling a few weekends at the end of each winter to various events in the district. This year, I was judging in Salem, NH, and staying in a relatively nice DoubleTree Hotel over in Andover, MA across the board. While Andover is no culinary slouch (see, for example, my 2019 review of 15SX, which unfortunately burnt down in November 2022), when I’m in the area I’m usually drawn to nearby Lowell, which has a very good selection of restaurants, particularly Southeast Asian ones and old-school American ones (like The Owl. But this time one particular establishment had drawn my attention: The Keep.

Wusong Road Those that know me well, know that I rather love the combination of good cocktails and the occasional Americanized Asian food, and that usually means one thing: a Tiki Bar. However, doing this well is challenging. Even a few years ago, Massachusetts had quite a few hold-outs from the mid-20th century Polynesian Pop craze, including Chicopee’s Hu Ke Lau, Cambridge’s Aku-Aku, and Saugus’s Kowloon. In their day, they were popular, often packed every night of the week, and they survived for decades even as the Polynesian Pop craze faded, although the drinks often got watered down and the food a bit more mass-produced. Starting in the 2010s there’s been a noticeable resurgence in Tiki culture. A few places still hang on (like the abovementioned Kowloon, although they are supposed to close and rebuild as a smaller restaurant), and the occasional new place has started to open (like Tiki Rock in Boston, but despite the resurgence, there have been a lot more closures than openings. It’s actually a bit hard to find a place to go with friends for some quality cocktails and good (Americanized) Asian food food at the same time, but in November 2021, the regional Tiki bar scene got noticeably better with the opening of Wusong Road in Cambridge.

As I mentioned back in the review of Manory’s, while I’m often traveling through Troy for both work and pleasure, I almost always seem to drive through town in either mid-morning or mid-afternoon, neither of which is ideal for mealtimes. And, being only about 2 hours from our house, if we’re heading home, it’s usually easier for us to continue on home. But our driving schedule on our last day of vacation actually had us arriving in Troy slightly later than usual, around 3:45 pm, and after a short hike checking out one of the waterfalls in town, it was 4pm, which was pretty reasonable for dropping by another perennial entry on Offbeat Eat’s “should visit” list: The Ruck, in downtown Troy.

After a splendid four day weekend in Lake George, we ended up taking a slightly roundabout route home in order to do a bit of tourism. Normally we’d head back east on Route 4 through Rutland, but this time we ended up going north to the very north end of Lake George to check out Fort Ticonderoga, and then meander our way back home by crossing the scenic Lake Champlain Bridge and heading home through mid-Vermont, stopping off in Middlebury for dinner. Middlebury has always been a pretty good food town, with options like a location of American Flatbread, or even one of the few remaining A&W Root Beer drive-ins (with Lake George being one of the others), but while we smelled some rather splendid smells coming from Taste of India, we were in a bit of a burger mood, and decided to check out Two Brothers Tavern.

It’s someone fitting that a few days after a write a tribute to Anthony Bourdain, I find myself writing up a spot that I first learned about watching his second show, No Reservations. Bourdain was actually quite a fan of Detroit, loving the people and the food. One of his quotes was “I’d love to be able to say that I came from Detroit. That would be like the coolest thing I could ever say,” and you could tell by watching his shows that he enjoyed his visits. And one of the places he visited and enjoyed was a quirky spot on the east side of town: Cadieux Cafe.

My work has had me traveling a lot to Daytona Beach to meet with a collaborator at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, and it’s always a bit enjoyable traveling down there (usually via Orlando), since while I’m not always the biggest fan of large metro areas, the greater Orlando area has a lot of things going for it. First of all, it’s a distinctly different climate (half of the year, that’s an advantage). Second, it has a relatively good selection of ethnic restaurants, especially for things like Cuban food and Southern food that aren’t really around in NH. And, on this trip, it was also a good opportunity to meet up with fellow traveler, in this case Leslie from My Adventure Bucket. While she’s often away touring the world in the way only a retired funeral home director with a random number generator can, for our visit, she was still in town prepping for an extended trip to Sri Lanka. So, after arriving in the early evening, we decided to meet with Leslie at a nearby joint: The Gnarly Barley.

Those that have been following a while know that every year I try to go someplace interesting, somewhat obscure, and rather, well, offbeat for at least one vacation, like La Reunion or Iceland. Well, after a few years’ incubation, this summer we were finally able to work out the details and have a trip to the Faroe Islands (stay tuned for some reviews). But like a good number of the obscure travel destinations I’ve done, one doesn’t simply hop on a plane from Boston to Vagar (the airport of the Faroes). Only a few places (primarily Norway, Scotland, Denmark, and Iceland) even have flights to the Faroe Islands, so it’s necessary to take an intermediate stop. In our case, this meant a return trip to Reykjavik for an extended layover. Since our visit in 2012, the formerly obscure vacation destination of Iceland continues to be more popular, and as a result, Reykjavik’s tourist, and dining, scene, continues to evolve. Back when I wrote up my reviews in 2012, I was pretty much the English-language source of reviews for Iceland (and I still get a lot of traffic), but it’s definitely shown up on the radar for adventurous tourists. With that in mind, that’s how we found ourselves having beers and dining in a converted biscuit factory on the north side of Reykjavik: KEX.