Offbeat Eats

Like most springs, I spent a lot of my weekends volunteering at various FIRST Robotics competitions as a robotics judge, and that usually means I spend a lot of time staying at hotels in various smaller towns and cities around New England, but it also gives me a nice chance to try out a few places on my hit list. In this particular case, heading back home from a weekend in Salem, NH, this gave me a good opportunity to stop off and visit one particular Indian and Nepalese place in Manchester: Kathmandu Spice.

With many frequent trips to SE NH or Boston, we often find ourselves looking for dinner options around the greater Manchester, NH area. Manchester has a lot of great options, but a recent favorite of ours is actually brewery that’s been around a while, but only recently known as Candia Road Brewing Company.

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.

In June, before several of our planned hiking and backpacking trips, we decided to do a warmup hike up one of our favorites: Mt Equinox in Manchester, VT, which unlike the Green Mountains, is actually part of the more westerly Taconic Range. It has a nicely-maintained but steep trail, with just under 3000′ of vertical elevation, usually rewarded by panoramic view of the Green Mountains (Stratton and Bromley) to the East, and the rest of the Taconic Range to the South and West. Well, on most days, at least; our visit was a pleasant hike rewarded with half-mile visibility in moderate heavy clouds. After a hike back down involving more than a little of a scramble looking for a misplaced cell phone, we decided that it was time to call it a day and head out for an early dinner. Manchester has a lot of great dining opportunities, but most of them skew towards either high-end dining, which is not a great match with sweaty hikers. But just east of town, as you start to head up Route 9 towards Bromley, is one of my area favorites: Zoey’s Double Hex.

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.

Like many trips, upon arriving mid-day back in New Hampshire from our trip to Detroit, we used it as an opportunity to stop in Manchester on the way home for a light dinner. Depending on time of day and mood, there are a lot of good options on Manchester’s Elm Street or nearby, including some great authentic Mexican at El Rincon, funky fusion fare at Mint, or, one of my favorites, light bistro fare at Republic. However, I realized it had been a while since I had been to another bistro on Elm, Campo Enoteca.

Since I enjoyed my little speakeasy excursion in Nashua, on another recent trip down to the area, I decided to go with my coworker Jed to another of the area’s speakeasies, 815. Not as well disguised as CodeX, 815 (named after the address, 815 Elm) hides primarily just by having nothing apparent by the “entrance” other than a phone booth. Calling on the phone, you need a password to get in (I’ll leave to my readers to figure out that detail), although rumor is that really good knock-knock jokes or hula dances may work as well, your mileage may vary.

After 18 years of living in New Hampshire with regular visits to the Manchester area, I’m still occasionally finding some new neighborhoods to explore, along with a few places to eat. In this case, we were taking a shortcut around traffic and ended up getting off on the West Bank of Manchester (the French “Notre Dame” neighborhood). While that part of town has some great eats (like, say, Chez Vachon or Rita Mae’s, we decided to head south a bit and try a new-to-us place, Francoeur’s Cafe.

Manchester, NH is a funky little town. New Hampshire’s Queen City, it has a lot of character in some of its neighborhoods. Downtown is located in what used to be the mill district (indeed, most of the Millyard is still there, being converted into various offices, industrial lofts, and the like), and there are even a few ethnic neighborhoods. One of these is the West Side, where two of the larger neighborhoods (Notre Dame and Rimmon Heights) are actually Quebecois in heritage. The area had some tough years, with “urban renewal” between the 1960s and 1980s actually razing two decent neighborhoods and turning them into dismal strip malls, but the area has generally rebounded, diversified a bit, and, well, even gentrified a bit. But in addition to the notable large French Catholic Churches, the neighborhood still has a lot of Quebecois heritage, especially in the food scene. There’s probably no better place for this than Chez Vachon.

(Closed) I’ve always liked Manchester, the Queen City of New Hampshire. For such a modestly-sized city of ~100,000, it actually has a pretty good dining scene (you can see my other reviews here), and “ManchVegas” still holds a lot of surprises for me, especially in the culinary scene. One of these was over on the West Side of town across the Merrimack River, which I call “Little Quebec”, since the area has a very strong French Canadian heritage. It also has a number of Quebecois restaurants, such as the fairly well known Chez Vachon which has been serving up giant plates of poutine for years. But looking over the various dining options in West Manchester, I saw an interesting one called “Butter My Biscuit”, and we decided to check it out.