Offbeat Eats

Before heading out on our 50+ mile backpacking trip mid-day, we decided to do one more walking tour of downtown Little Rock and get breakfast. Downtown Little Rock’s Main Street has been through a few economic downturns, but a good stretch of it has been nicely reinvigorated as a restaurant row, with the 300 block in particular hosting a half dozen restaurants. One of these was our destination, Big Bad Breakfast.

One of the nice things about visiting my childhood home in Mesa, AZ is that there almost uncountably many good places with a 10 minute drive to score a really good Mexican breakfast (you can see my previous reviews of Amada’s in Mesa and Salazar Bros. in Tempe, for example). But I really like to mix it up and try new places when I can, so when we recently found ourselves heading down to downtown Chandler for a trip to Peixoto, we decided to check out another place on my potential breakfast burrito hit list: Taqueria Mi Casita.

As I mentioned in last Fall’s review of The Dinner Table in Swanzey, NH, we’re often traveling down I-91 to southern VT, western MA, or CT for some of our hiking. While a scenic drive, much of I-91 in Vermont isn’t that rich in dining options, especially around breakfast, but we’ve been trying to branch out a bit and try a few more places. A recent trip to hike Mount Holyoke in Hadley, MA led us to stopping off in Westminster, VT (a small town just south of the better-known Bellows Falls) to check out Father’s Restaurant.

I recently had a short business trip that involved both dropping equipment off in Haverhill, MA and then driving up for a tour of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS) Space Science Center at University of New Hampshire (which was excellent). This ended up having me driving through parts of New Hampshire’s Seacoast region at breakfast time, which is quite unusual for my travels. Looking at the various dining options, I decided I’d take a back route to Durham via the small town of Greenland, NH, and stop in and check out one of the area’s breakfast spots: Country View Restaurant.

As I mentioned in my review of Jame, having aerospace clients generally means a lot of trips to El Segundo, CA, and nearby Manhattan Beach. While these trips come in waves (I’ll find myself going 4x a year some years, and not at all others), it’s still given me a chance to come up with a few favorites, like Uncle Bill’s Pancake House, which I originally reviewed way back in 2008. This trip I had a nice, free morning, so after a nice 6 miles hike down the coastline, I met up with my friend Tanya to revisit my favorite breakfast spot in the area.

Welcome to another of Offbeat Eats’ Health Check reviews, where we re-visit old favorites and check out how they are doing. In this case, a recent trip to visit the Wentworth Greenhouse Farmers Market, which actually had us passing through north Concord’s “Fisherville” neighborhood. This gave us a great opportunity to check up on an old favorite, The Post.

One of the shortcomings of rural New Hampshire living is that we don’t have a lot of a great breakfast options. There are some breakfast gems both locally (like Lou’s in Hanover) or regionally (like Polly’s in Sugar Hill), but when I’m really craving a good, solid breakfast, I’m generally craving something Southwestern, and we don’t have a lot of good options that way. But I travel a lot, and I recently found myself in Tucson, Arizona, craving some sort of Southwestern breakfast, and also wanting to have breakfast at 6:30 in the morning. And there was one place in Tucson I know would meet these requirements: Baja Cafe.

A few weekends ago, the snow hadn’t really fallen yet, and I used it as an opportunity to go on a short hike with my friend Alex. Looking for a relatively modest hike that still had some good views and was reasonably positioned between Alex’s place in CT and mine in NH, we settled on Wantastiquet Mountain, located in Hinsdale across the river from Brattleboro. It’s a relatively short drive for me, around an hour and change, but I’ve driven I-91 so many times recently I decided to take the NH route, going down through Keene, NH, and stopping for breakfast. Unfortunately, I don’t know any great breakfast spots in Keene proper (if I have Keene readers, I’d love to hear options). But just over the border in the adjacent town of Swanzey, right next to the Keene Airport, is a little joint called The Dinner Table.

In early August, I got to try out one of the more welcome additions to the Upper Valley’s breakfast scene. Every since the Pandemic started and The Lebanon Diner closed, most of the Upper Valley’s breakfast joints have been overwhelmed with demand, so it was very welcome that Taste started serving traditional breakfast and lunch at the north end of the West Lebanon Strip.

After my conference wrapped up, we spent another few nights on the Big Island, moving up the coast to the Royal Kona Resort, which originally was built as the Hilton Kona Resort. It’s a surprisingly well-maintained old resort that has much of the 1960s charm to it, but it currently doesn’t have a lot of dining action, and I quite frankly wasn’t impressed with the limited breakfast options. So we headed down Ali‘i Drive to see what we could find. As I mentioned in my review of The Fish Hopper, Ali‘i Drive is basically ground-central for the central Kona coast tourist trade, with any number of restaurants vying for tourist dollars. My eye caught a rather low-key outdoor dining spot almost immediately adjacent to The Fish Hopper called Kalikala Cuisine, and after talking with a man (who I found out was the owner) on the bench out front with a nice dog, we decided to give the place a try.