Offbeat Eats

Back in December of 2023, Carol and I had a rather nice visit to Northampton, MA, including a fairly spontaneous visit to Homestead. (Review here), particularly enjoying the Focaccia and the house-made pasta. Our late October trip down to Connecticut to visit Hogpen Hill Farms Sculpture Garden had us returning home via Interstate 91, which ideally set us up for a stop in Northampton for some light shopping and dinner. Since it had been a while since our last visit we decided that a stop at Homestead. for an Offbeat Eats “Health Check” revisit was a great idea. (editorial note: “Homestead.” styles itself complete with the period at the end of its name, but it makes for some odd-looking sentences, so for the rest of this review I’ll simply call them “Homestead”).

Back when I started Offbeat Eats, I had a lot of business travel to both Edwards AFB and the LA area. During these visits, I got into a nice groove where, instead of fighting LA traffic on arrival, I’d instead take the short drive to nearby El Segundo or Manhattan Beach, have a nice relaxing meal, and then proceeding to my destination as the evening traffic started to abate. These visits have gotten a lot less frequent, but I still try to follow that basic procedure when I’ve got the time. This time, I chose El Segundo, with a visit to Jame in the downtown area.

After our hike up Mount Greylock, we headed off to Northampton for after-hike beers and dinner. As I’ve mentioned in a few other reviews, I really like Northampton as a destination that’s not too far from our home (it’s around an hour and forty if there isn’t traffic), so while it was a slight detour getting home, it’s worth it, getting a chance to revisit one of our favorite breweries (Progression), and look for dinner. There are a lot of great restaurant in town (including favorite Hungry Ghost), but this time, we wanted to revisit a previous spot, Homestead.

After three days of exploring Edinburgh, we boarded our train and headed down to London to spend a few days with family. One of the things I enjoy about London is that, being one of the world’s largest cities, there is never a shortage of new places to try. So I figured this would be another good opportunity to get together with Krista from Passport Delicious and try out a place that had been on her radar: Padella in Borough Market.

(Closed) I’ll be honest, we don’t make it down to Claremont, NH all that often, and a lot of restaurants tend to open and close there, especially since Claremont doesn’t exactly have the best reputation for food. But there is one place that’s been there over a year, and we continue to keep hearing good things about it: New Socials Bar and Grill. So when we found ourselves home on a Saturday with nothing in the fridge, we decided that finally gave us some motivation to go check them out.

(Closed) For our last dinner in the Cleveland area, we were looking for a lighter dinner (have you seen all hot dogs, steaks, and pork products I consumed in the last few entries?), and as a result, we decided to check out a relative newcomer on the Cleveland scene, D.C. Pasta Co. in Strongsville, OH. First of all, the D.C. Pasta Co. name comes not from our nation’s capital, but from the owners’ initials, D.C. is the combined effort of Ohio chef Dante Boccuzzi (primarily known for his “Dante” and “d.b.a” restaurants), and Carmela del Busso (known for “Oggi”), giving the place it’s initials. D.C., situated in a small strip mall complex in Strongsville, is designed to be a fairly casual Italian place featuring house made pasta.