Offbeat Eats

The Upper Valley region doesn’t have many “fine dining” restaurants, especially once you get out of the core. Since we moved to the area in 2001, the New London Inn has been one of the area’s few “dinner date” restaurants, but the actual restaurant has had a lot of iterations, ranging from the “New London Inn” which we found a bit stodgy, the Coach House (which we rather liked), and most recently, it’s now operated as “The Elms” by the same team as the Oak Roam at the Inn at Pleasant Lake. Celebrating our anniversary in October (well, the anniversary is in late September, but September was a crazy-busy month) gave us a good reason to go over and check out The Elms and see how the new ownership was doing.

(Closed) In a recent celebration of the 20th anniversary of our first date, Carol and I decided it was a nice opportunity to check out a local restaurant that has been perennially near the top of our hit list: Oak and Grain. Oak and Grain is the in-house restaurant at The Inn at Pleasant Lake, a small lakefront hotel overlooking Pleasant Lake that specializes in weekend getaways and appears to have quite the nice barn rental for weddings as well.

Sometimes it can be nice to break a curse. We all know them, those “cursed” restaurant locations that, for one reason or another, seem to consistently fail to thrive as a restaurant for one restaurateur after another, until finally either a restaurant manages to break the curse, or the building owner gives up and converts the space to something other than a restaurant. Well, recently I was heading back home from SE New Hampshire, and decided to meet Carol for dinner in New London at Little Brother’s Burger Company for dinner. Looking up the address, 420 Main St (an, ahem, memorable address), I immediately recognized it as New London’s cursed spot. In my 18 years living in the region, that same address has had one failed restaurant after another. Most recently, it was Cataleya’s Caribbean Grill. Before that, the Hole in the Fence Cafe. A tavern before that, and several other places that have since faded into memory (Snyder’s Tavern, College Cafe, …). The track record for places opening here is, quite frankly, dismal. But hey, a new owner, some new ideas, maybe something will catch this time?