Offbeat Eats

My third weekend in Saratoga Springs was supposed to be dedicated to helping re-supply the Northville-Placid Trail thru-hikers at their halfway point, but multiple complications ended up with everyone on the trip leaving the trail that week, so my schedule instead shifted to getting up a bit early on Saturday, having breakfast in Saratoga Springs, and heading up to Lake George to transfer some of the leftover gear from the trip. I’d already experienced Country Corner Café the previous weekend, so I decided to check out the other breakfast diner near my friends’ condo: Shirley’s Diner.

Like my previous review of Big Apple Diner, driving between Saratoga Springs and New Hampshire four different times in September also had me passing by another entry on my perennial “I should check that place out” list. In this case, it was a place in Hudson Falls on US-4 as you are heading from Fort Ann into Glens Falls/Queensbury, Sally’s Hen House.

As I mentioned back in my review of Frazer’s Place, 2024 has ended up being one of those years that’s given me a lot of opportunities to finally visit some of those places I’ve driven by dozens of times and thought to myself “I should stop there.” One of these is the Big Apple Diner, located on Route-4 just over the border from Vermont (across from the former infamous Finius T. Flubberbuster’s Roadhouse). Pretty much every trip of ours to the Adirondack’s has driven past the Big Apple Diner, and coming back from one of my weekend trips in the Adirondacks, I finally managed to stop by and check it out.

I love it when you pass by cozy little cafés and can immediately tell that the place is popular with the locals and has its set of “regulars”. That was the case with a small little cafe located just about two short blocks from my friends’ condo in Saratoga Springs: the Country Corner Café.

2024 has definitely been a year where I’ve finally had a chance to visit a lot of places that I’ve driven by a gazillion times, thinking “I should check that place out.” In this case, a trip down south had us swinging through Windsor, VT. The location has a long history, way back in 1962 it was an A&W Root Beer. It closed in the early 1980s, reopening in 1988 as Stub and Laura’s, run by the late, colorful A.W. “Stub” Aldrich until 2008. It had at least one other interim name and owner that I’ve forgotten, but in 2013 it opened in its current incarnation, Frazer’s Place, serving up breakfast, lunch, dinner, and ice cream, with both outdoor seating and a limited amount of indoor dining. And while it’s had a lot of good word of mouth, I never had a good opportunity to stop in until we few weeks ago, when we passed by right at breakfast. So we decided we just had to stop in.

As Summer started to turn to Fall, we wanted to make sure we hit a few of the hikes that had remained on our to-do list. We had tried to hike Mt Chocorua last year, but poor weather forced us to turn around most of the way up. This time, the weather was looking a lot more promising, and since we wanted to get an early start, we needed a breakfast spot enroute to the trailhead. We’ve found several nice places over the years in Bristol, but this time we decided we wanted to try a diner, so we headed out to the Bristol Diner, located just south of downtown.

One of my more established traditions of our annual trip to Lake George is getting up early one morning and hiking from downtown Lake George up to Prospect Mountain via the Prospect Mountain Trail that approximately follows the old incline railway route. After arriving back at the trailhead in late morning, we almost always follow it with another tradition: eating at Lake George’s The Breakfast Spot.

On many of our trips to either Boston or Rhode Island, we’re usually looking to stop for breakfast on the way, but a lot of the places we used to frequent along I-89 (such as The Footfills or School House Cafe in Warner, both of which closed permanently during the pandemic) closed, so we much more frequently find ourselves looking for new breakfast joints around Concord or Manchester. While Purple Finch in Bedford remains one of our favorites, we occasionally take the time to check around town for other options, and a recent favorite of ours has been The Breakfast Club.

One of the more venerable dining institutions of the Upper Valley is the Four Aces Diner in West Lebanon. You can read about their fairly complicated history in my previous review way back in 2011, but in the last 14 years since the owners, the Shorey family, resumed management and daily operations of the diner, it has been a consistent spot for classic American diner fare for lunch and dinner. Unfortunately, however, with the passage of time the Shorey family is again looking towards retirement, and since late November 2022, the diner is once again for sale, so when we recently were heading down south for a weekend, we decided that it was time to get another visit in while they are still running at full strength, check out our favorites and give everyone an update on how the place is going.

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 the Hartland Diner back in 2015 when they were a relatively new breakfast spot, having taking over from the previous incarnation in that location, Stella’s. In our 2015 visit, we both had a rather good experience, myself with a hash Benedict (probably one of my standard orders these days), and Carol with a similar order of a hash omelet. We both enjoyed our visit; the staff was pleasant, the food good, and the prices reasonable for the quality. With that in mind, we stopped off at the Hartland Diner on a trip down to MA to check them out again.