Offbeat Eats

One of the shortcomings of the greater Upper Valley area is that we’ve got a bit of a shortage of breakfast spots, especially if you are looking for something a bit more varied than “American Diner”. But in early 2025, we had a pretty big shift in White River Junction: the former Piecemeal Pies (which, after five years of business, shuttered abruptly in 2023 during bankruptcy proceedings) finally got remodeled and re-opened as a Turkish cafe: Cappadocia Cafe. Opened by Vural and Jackie Oktay, the owners of next door Tuckerbox (which has had its own interesting voyage transitioning from a Australian-owned coffee shop to a Turkish restaurant, but hey, variety is the spice of life) and Cappadocia Bistro in Burlington, VT, Cappadocia is primarily a breakfast- and lunch-based counterpart to the more formal dinner menu of Tuckerbox, offering an array of pastries, wood-fired flatbreads, and related lighter dishes.

A few years ago, there was a pop-up donut bakery, Farmer and the bell, that was making French-style cruller donuts in the back of the Angkor Wat Cambodian restaurant in Woodstock, VT each weekend. After getting quite a following (they’d regularly sell out after only a few hours), they first moved to doing a slightly larger bakery space in the Parker House in Quechee, VT, serving up donuts on weekends in 2022, and still selling out quickly. In 2023, as the owners were starting their family, they put the business on pause, raised capital, and leased a spot in east Woodstock where an old former gas station had been a perennial eyesore, and built their own store, opening in early October 2025. We’d been meaning to go for several weeks, but most times we were passing through Woodstock, their parking lot was completely full, and we figured we’d come another time. But during early January, we finally had a chance to stop by and check them out.

As I mentioned a while ago in my review of Claremont Union Episcopal Church’s Strawberry Harvest Supper, I’ve been trying 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 that sort of thing. As I find them, I like to work them into my schedule. This year, I noticed in the Kearsarge Shopper an announcement for Newport, NH’s Church of the Good Shepherd’s fall Roast Beef Dinner on November 1st (yes, this means I’m 9 weeks behind at the moment; working on it…).

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.

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.