Offbeat Eats

Ever since I moved to the Upper Valley, I’ve had a handful of favorite diners in the area. For years, one of my favorites was The Fairlee Diner in Fairlee, VT, for some good pancakes, good Benedicts, and some well-above-average home fries. Really, it was a great spot. And it closed in April, 2022, a few months after my last review. But a few months later, with some minor renovation, the place reopened as “Jan’s Fairlee Diner”, and I finally had a chance earlier this summer to drop and and give the place a try.

The Upper Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire doesn’t get a lot of turnover in restaurants, and when it does, there’s often a lot of local buzz, even if it’s something as relatively pedestrian as a Jersey Mike’s. That’s definitely the case for Happy Dumpling, which opening in West Lebanon’s Powerhouse Plaza, in one of the storefronts freed up when the NH Liquor store moved to their new building on Route 12A. They announced the restaurant in May, with an opening later in the year, and we got several months of eager anticipation on various local discussions groups to follow. So yeah, there’s some pent up demand for something new.

When Carol and I moved to the Upper Valley way back in 2001, the fine dining scene was substantially different; there were fewer options for fine dining, and most of the stalwarts from that era, such as Hanover’s Cafe Bon Gustaio, have long since departed the landscape. And most of the remaining places that aren’t associated with hotels have moved on as well. But one particular fine dining restaurant has managed to stay in pretty much continual operation for over fifty years, and that’s Woodstock, VT’s The Prince and the Pauper.

Right before heading out of town for a week, we met up with our friends Liz and Wesley and headed over to Oakes & Evelyn for dinner. You might be thinking, “didn’t Rich write up Oakes & Evelyn fairly recently (I did, in 2023)?”, as it’s a semi-regular fine dining destination of ours. But in this case, we weren’t doing the hour and a quarter drive up to Montpelier, but instead, driving to Woodstock. A few months ago, Oakes & Evelyn announced that they were opening a second location, taking over the restaurant operations in Woodstock’s The Jackson inn. After several months of renovation and preparation, Oakes & Eveyln finally had their opening night at their new location, and we decided to give it a try.

In addition to my regular reviews, I occasionally like to avail myself of the various community meals that spring up around the Upper Valley. Harvest suppers. Fire department fund raisers. Non-profit fundraisers. And one of the best categories, the church basement supper. Many of the area churches host community suppers throughout the calendar year, especially clustered around harvest season and mid-winter (the ne plus ultra of church basement suppers, the Hartland Roast Beef Suppper, has gotten several visits from Offbeat Eats, for example). And in late June, we spied in the newspaper (yes, we actually still get a print newspaper) that one of the Community Suppers I had been keeping my eye on was back: the Union Episcopal Church Annual Strawberry Festival and Norwegian Meatball Dinner in Claremont, NH.

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.

(Closed) Every once in a while, I’ll revisit a favorite place around the Upper Valley and realize that I’ve never actually reviewed it here. Indeed, since moving to the Upper Valley in 2001, I think I’ve been to the Fairlee Diner at least two dozen times, and I was prepared to do one of my “health check” reviews where I check in on an old favorite that I’ve review before, only to find that I’ve not reviewed it (actually, looking at notes, that’s not completely true: I did review the Fairlee Diner for one of my Diner Day reviews for the long-defunct UVScene website… anyone remember that?). But it’s time to remedy that.

After our recent whirlwind trips to Michigan and Alaska, it was nice to be back at home in the Upper Valley for a bit. We used it as a good opportunity to meet up with friends and check out one of our local places we hadn’t visited in a while: Carpenter & Main, in downtown Norwich across from Dan and Whit’s.

In my 20 years of living in the Upper Valley, 3 Lebanon Street (the “Hanover Park” building) has had a succession of Chinese restaurants in the basement: when we first arrived, it was Panda Garden, and then after that it was Orient, and then in 2019 it changed to Han Fusion. I hadn’t been too much of a fan of either Panda Garden or Orient in general, since they mostly seemed to serve fairly generic Americanized Chinese food, and I originally hadn’t expected Han Fusion to be much better. However, I started to hear some good things about Han Fusion from several people in the Upper Valley who I actually trust with Chinese food (such as Chris Ng, who runs the local Upper Valley Foodie Group), and looking at their menu, found several menu items that I really like (soup dumplings, dry-fried chicken, and rice cakes). We had vowed to finally get out and try them… and then the Pandemic hit.

(Closed) “Sooner or later, everything old is new again.” – Stephen King If there’s an underlying theme to dining during the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s been that there’s generally no such thing as “business as usual”, and pretty much every restaurant has had to adapt, or close. It’s been brutal, with a lot of places closing forever, but during these times, we’ve also seen some encouraging change, like new restaurants opening, and quite a few restaurants getting quite creative to adapt to the current dining “new normal” of primarily takeout food, social distancing, and more stringent health requirements. I’ve seen a lot of really good creative problem solving, especially when it comes to creating outdoor dining space, new ordering methods, new concepts, and even revisiting old concepts. The last of these brings us to Revolutionary Burger in Lebanon, NH.