Offbeat Eats

In a converted railroad depot in Bethel, Vermont, right next to Cockadoodle Pizza Café sits one of central Vermont’s more interesting little spots, Babes Bar. It’s a bit of a rarity for the area, since it’s one of the few freestanding bars out there (versus, say, nearby Crossroads Bar and Grill or Worthy Burger, which are indeed “bars”, but with substantial food menus as well. Opened by a married couple, Jesse Plotsky and Owen Daniel-McCarter, who moved to Vermont from Chicago a few years ago to move to the simpler life in Vermont, Babes is an interesting place. If there’s a single word that describes Babes, it is “welcoming”. This is a bar for locals. This is a bar for groups riding through. This is a bar for leaf-peeping tourists. And it’s a queer-owned bar that goes out of its way to be welcoming and inclusive to the LBGTQ community as well.

As I mentioned a few years back in a review of Tiki Underground a few years ago, “Tiki” in the United States had an interesting history: starting in the early 20th century in California and Hawaii (e.g. Trader Vic’s and Don the Beachcomber), the nice cuisine grew in the 1940s through 1960s until most major metro areas had a handful of Polynesian-inspired (like Americanized Chinese Food, it bears only a casual relationship with it’s initial inspirations) restaurants and cocktail lounges. Unfortunately, while Tiki itself has recently had quite a revival (along with craft cocktails), this revival came too late, and entirely too many classic bits of Tiki Americana started to close (most of the Trader Vic’s locations, Ohio’s Kahiki Supper Club, and Chicopee, MA’s He Ke Lau have all closed). But some classic joints still remain. One of these, the Mai-Kai, in Oakland Park, Florida, remains one of the United States’ oldest still-operating Tiki establishments, serving up Tiki drinks and Polynesian shows since 1956.

After our visit to Piroshky Piroshky and some touristic wandering of Pike Place Market, we decided to continue our explorations of Seattle’s major tourist attractions with a visit to Chihuly Garden and Glass (which was still finishing construction on my last major visit to Seattle). After a short ride on the monorail (which is uniquely suited to this purpose, and few others), and a nice morning enjoying the gardens and glass art, we decided to grab a light lunch before everyone started to split up for their future travels. Turns out, we didn’t need to go anywhere, there’s a great spot right at Chihuly Garden and Glass: The Bar at Chihuly.

One of the things we’ve committed to here at Offbeat Eats is to take several of those places we’re always driving by, saying to ourselves “I should check out that place sometime”, and actually stopping to check it out. In this case, we regularly drive through Hopkinton, NH when taking the “back way” to Bedford, Manchester, or a lot of Northeast Massachusetts; it’s a nicer drive than the interstate, it’s more fuel efficient, it passes right by Flight Coffee in Bedford, and it saves the toll. The back way takes us right through downtown Hopkinton, NH, and just east of downtown, on the shore of Kimball Pond, is the Lakehouse Tavern. We finally decided to stop in for dinner after a day of errands in Manchester.

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.