As of late we’ve been riding around looking for sweet new breakfast spots to haunt and today was no different other than the fact we got a very late start and most places don’t serve breakfast in the afternoon. No matter! Google insisted this place did.
It’s weird, Narragansett isn’t far from my RI base in Newport and yet we hadn’t poked around there until today, specifically to find this little Mardi Gras/Southern themed plaza cafe. By now we’d just slipped in half an hour before closing. Most of the chairs were already on the tables. Still they were friendly and welcoming so we sat down.
The art hanging in this place was wild. A poster hung on the wall with several crayfish pinching towards the sky, reading above something about being boiled alive. The menu was no less eyebrow raising. Today’s special was a crunchy blueberry pancake with granola. I almost went for that but was too intrigued by the butter pecan pancakes. Meanwhile the rest of the menu had a bit of creole and Cajun flair. Even some of the breakfast items showed a spicy side. My companion went with the chicken and waffles which came with a side of beans. He said the chicken was fresh (and not pre-made or frozen as some of these establishments use) and that the beans were really good. I did a mandatory tasting of the beans to make sure and he was right! My pancakes were great too. They came out covered in chopped pecans, made with a fluffy and somewhat creamy batter. A short stack was more than I could eat.
A woman came in after us and made the cut 5 minutes before the kitchen closed. Having been told this she tried to leave but the staff insisted it was fine so she came in, ordered one hell of a BLT and enjoyed the music with us, happily singing along to Queen and smiling. I love Queen but to be honest it was hearing the Muppet’s Phenomina song that made me smile ear to ear. Can’t say I’ve ever heard it played in public!
There was enough on the menu here to want to come back and try something else. I think we found a winner.
This week was another amazing food find. We were on the road searching for a birthday present (which proved stupidly hard to find) when we decided to stop at a new place for a late breakfast. This place said it served breakfast until 3pm. That’s my kinda eatery.
A day earlier my companion was teasing me because I said I rarely crave sweets but my usual choices for breakfasts suggested otherwise. I protested these were not cravings but whims. And despite the fact this place had a slew of more reasonable options I couldn’t help to go glassy-eyed with wonder when our waitress started rattling off their breakfast specials from the day. I couldn’t keep any of them straight but they sounded like the most whimsically deranged breakfast themed dessert cart one could dream up. Oreos were mentioned as were chocolate chips, a variety of sticky sweet syrups, and even cinnobuns. My resolve was tested and it suffered a resounding failure as I ordered the stuffed Cinnabon French toast. My companion on the other hand chose a more savory option, the Hamilton Kitchen Sink which came out looking like a garbage plate (and I say that with love, not judgement.) It was a pancake, bacon, sausage, eggs, a biscuit, and a truck load of home fries smothered in white gravy. We’re both very chosey with homefries but I’m happy to note I tried one with gravy and it was goddamn delicious to the both of us.
Meanwhile my plate was a war crime to diabetes but ahhhhhh, it was so good! The cinnobuns were made into French toast, stuffed with cream cheese and jam and topped with a truly indecent amount of whipped cream. I didn’t even have to put any syrup on it.
Our waitress joked it could be made better with chocolate chips. If I had only had a tiny white flag to wave back at her. I ate most my meal, was stuffed to the gills and couldn’t take on the last few bites but wow. Do I regret my heart challenging option? Nah, no other place has made me want to yell ‘you only live once’ like this place! I have learned nothing.
What better way to follow up a visit to the pirate museum than to find ourselves a rocking grilled cheese joint?
It was a gorgeous summer day but there was an alarming lack of tourists around. I suppose a sign of the times. Even so I parked in a super easy parallel parking spot in front of the JFK museum having no idea the next half a mile had oodles of parking spots. Oh well, can’t complain too much about getting a little exercise, especially when the stoner-friendly sandwiches we were after were probably about a billion calories each. On this day I did not care.
When we finally arrived we found a vendor and an outdoor cafe space. A woman was already at the window waiting for her order when we ambled up to look at the menu. She turned around to tell us, “Everything is great here! You’re going to love it!” High praise, we both laughed and thanked her for the unsolicited review.
I wanted fries with my sandwhich so we decided to split a poutine and each get a different weird sandwhich. Pretty sure my companion got the Country Boy and myself the Veggie Daddy. The cashier on this day was having a day, for sure. He was straight from a wedding in Florida and clearly very tired. He couldn’t remember the order and asked my companion to repeat Veggie Daddy until it was uncomfortable but luckily we were both laughing at this because it was hot, we were being a pain in the ass taking forever to decide, and we could empathize with a little brain fog. Our reward for being a sport about this was being able to sample their home made hibiscus ice tea and lavendar lemonade. Both were really good but the tea was amazing so the pitch worked!
We sat at one of the tables and waited, our server clearly as entertained by us as we were of him, yelling, “I’m going to take care of you!” And he did. Even drew smiley faces in our dipping sauce. It was fucking adorable.
And the sandwiches… oh my god. Totally worth the fact they probably went straight to the arteries! The dipping sauce was another fun touch. They were SO MESSY and sooo good. I got it all over my shirt and sighed. Can’t bring me anywhere.
I was so full by this point. Even so my server came back out to offer a refill on my ice tea as we were cleaning up. I was tempted but then I’d have to carry an open cup to the car. Instead I thanked my server and smiled. He said, “You guys are great!” Before returning.
After our visit to the Yale University Art Gallery we hopped back into the car and tried to find somewhere to eat. After a minute we found a place only a block or so away so we stopped teasing the people looking for a parking space and hopped out of the car. I wasn’t going to parallel park again if we could walk!
Sure enough, a short amble away, past some lovely murals, we found an empty sandwhich parlor and wandered in.
The art on the walls were iconic images of mostly famous people with brightly colored sandwiches pasted into the scene. I chuckled.
The menu here was pretty extensive and a little wild. They had some unique and creative takes on sandwiches up there. We were both torn between two or three separate options each. I eventually settled on their pretzel coated chicken cutlet and my companion got the Chicken Bahn Mi. His was far prettier than mine but mine was a comfort food extravaganza and I bit into that thing like a rabbid werewolf. The dressing was a spicy mustard which I honestly don’t usually appreciate horse radish but it seemed to pair well with the pretzel.
My companion slipped me a pickled radish from his Bahn Mi. I’m an idiot so with little investigation I popped it into my mouth and immediately regretted every decision that brought me to this point in my life.
“It tastes like feet!” I mean I’ve never eaten feet but I feel like this is what a chalky callused ill-washed foot would taste like. I tried to swallow it to be polite but it was so gross I couldn’t get it to the back of my mouth. A quick drought of soda only proved to wash this foul flavor around my mouth even more. I was reduced to shoving french fries in pie hole like a starved raccoon trying to replace the aforementioned taste with glorious fried potatoes. This worked, thank God.
I am so happy I ordered my sandwhich, which was goddamn amazing and not whatever the hell my companion just haplessly consumed. This is NOT me complaining about the food, this entire experience was really just me being way over sensitive to how repulsive pickled things are and too dumb to remember my intense hatred of fermented foods.
So yeah, if you’re hungry and looking for something both familiar and a little adventurous check this place out! It’s a gem.
After a long day of poking at a lot of weird and wonderful things it was time to find something to eat to gain my strength for the long drive home. We returned to the car after leaving the always bizarre Evens & Oddities and started looking things up on the phone.
However we’d had a LONG day and the thought of finding yet another parallel parking spot was starting to overwelm me. So I pitched eating at the super shady looking place we were already parked in front of. It looked worn down, seriously worn down, the sort of thing you see in the background of apocalypse films. Inside was even worse. It looked as if someone really had put a lot of time, energy, and money into making this place a success… thirty years ago.
A glass counter up front was covered, two convenience store ice cream freezers gathered several inches of dust behind the tables, a regular fridge was parked in the middle of the dining area and looked just as old. The bathroom was literally in a supply closet and had a sign reading, “No feet on the seat please!” In all my years of toilet usage I’ve never been tempted to stand or squat on the seat….
With that all being said I’m a big fan of finding “hidden gems,” places that scream, “We could be in Detroit” but taste like heaven.
We’d had two VERY long days of driving and exploring and I’d reached a point of exhaustion that had turned my brain into pudding. Looking at the vast choices of sauces/styles on their menu I chose the three piece chicken and asked my travel companion to pick a sauce for me as I was overwelmed by the choices. He picked a teriyaki BBQ sauce combination for me and ordered “pteredactyl wings” for himself which were spicy wings of some sort. We shared cheese fries and he also inhaled some sort of sandwhich I didn’t get a chance to identify.
When it was time to get our meal there seemed to be great confusion that we were staying there to eat and not getting take out. Indeed I think we may have been the first to do so in a number of years. As such we were served in take out boxes.
My meal came with a salad. A salad that came in a small dessert carton and consisted of 6 pieces of very wet iceberg lettuce, a single piece of bell pepper, and the very end piece of a cucumber. Later I’d find two juiliens of carrot and one of celery in the take away box. Was this the other half of the salad or the “vegetable” served with dinner? Who knows.
I moved onto the macaroni salad which I didn’t know came with this. It was… mostly dry macaroni noodles with the tiniest hint of mayonnaise and dill. Was this the price of not wanting to parallel park again?
Across the table my companion had swallowed his sandwhich whole and was currently tearing through the wings like a starving street urchin. At least his dinner was good. I turned to my chicken which made up for everything else. The four pieces were huge, like a whole goddamn chicken, and fucking delicious. I stabbed it with my fork and ate it by biting chunks off. My companion then told me I had a knife hidden under my box but I didn’t care. Too late for that now, I was committing. Nom nom nom. I stopped only to shove stolen cheese fries into my gullet from across the table. I had fries too but they weren’t drowning in nacho cheese and the cheese fry side order was a meal in itself anyway.
So yeah… that was that. I felt much better after food and luckily we weren’t serial killed. Always a plus.
Sadly, I have fallen WAY behind on writing these entries. This was 15 of 17 I had let pile up and as such I don’t remember why I was here. All I remember is it was a hot day and we’d already done our adventuring and were looking for good grub before driving home. So, I did the usual dance of trying to find parallel parking (BOO!) and then walking half a block to see what we had chosen.
This place… it was a trip. You would not be wrong in thinking it was closed based on the fact there was no light in this place, not via windows or electricity. Did we just walk into a swinger’s club? I couldn’t be certain. The only lights were fairy lights and I…. am not a bat. So, even though the menu was on the wall in huge font I was still having a hard time reading it! Though I admit I was deeply amused that one of the options was a grilled Fluffernutter. How very New England! I was overheating at the time so I knew my stomach was going to reject basically anything I tried putting in it. A Fluffernutter would have ended up painting the walls if I tried it. None the less I got The Tomboy which was loaded grilled cheese with heaps of fried chicken thrown in. Funny, this was the first autistically coded menu I’d come across but I’d bet money based on the fact this choice was named after gender variance and contained a pile of common “safe” foods that whoever it was named after was most likely autistic. We have an obscene amount of gender variance and love of over processed food in the community. It made it an easy decision. We also ordered fries as potatoes are my “safe” food (something I won’t hurl up even when my stomach’s being an ass, like today.)
We wandered into the back room and sat down. It had this delightful 20-watt chandelier which I wanted to bring home with me. And the music? It was wild. Literally anything that had been popular in the last hundred years would play at random. Ella Fitzgerald followed by some random 90’s garage band? Check. Also some Bob Dylan which luckily didn’t trigger me like the last time I’d heard a Bob Dylan song by surprise. Nothing quite like sobbing alone at a Panera! (To be fair it was a BAD point in my life and I think it was triggering because it reminded me of all the parts of myself I’d lost while in long term relationship with a narcissist including listening to 60’s folk all the time like I did in my teens. It’s a story as old as time and I wish so many women [and others] didn’t have to go through it.) This time I found myself singing along to Tangled Up in Blue and thinking to myself, “Jesus Christ, that’s insane, it makes me happy I’m not still 20.” Funny how things hit differently when you age..
This is when the food came out and I ate it quietly in the dark. Actually, the dark was very calming after having spent a few hours being active in the outside world. My autistic ass thrives in the dark, even if my eyes no longer adjust to it. And the grub was good! Perfect stoner food if that’s your thing, the sort of faire that goes straight from your mouth to your arteries. Good times.
You know what’s a great way to end a day after adventuring? Some good grub! That’s how we ended up at the Pig Rig devouring a tender pile of pulled pork, mac and cheese, potato salad, and corn bread.
It was a weird time to be eating so there weren’t any other patrons there but this place looked popular. All the walls were covered with rock posters. They had posters from all the five origional British Invasion bands except the Kinks. Why no Kinks?? They’re awesome!
There was also a display case full of random retro rock memorabilia. Kinda fun. So was their assortment of sauces for the pulled pork. Dear God they were delicious. This place knew what people want. One food coma later and we were on our way.
So after our two days trekking through Vermont it was time to go back to Rhode Island but first there was an issue at hand – we needed something in our bellies. My companion was insistent on noodles but as much as I also could go for a steaming bowl of Ramon I knew Vermont was not going to have such faire. Noodle bars haven’t even really made it into rural areas, they’re basically just found in cities and some college towns at this moment in time.
My phone seemed to agree. There were no noodle bars showing up anywhere in Vermont but there was one vaguelly on the route home in Northampton Massachusetts which is both a city and a college town, hosting one of the US’s most esteemed all female universities – Smith’s University. We actually drove by the campus and I was hilariously caught off guard because I honestly had no idea what town it was in.
But anyway, we found a place to eat simply called Noodles. You know with a title that straight to the point you were going to get what’s advertised.
As usual it was a small space clearly run by immigrants gifting their delicious food to this country. It was FULL but they were nice enough to set up another spot to sit next to the bathroom. Interestingly the bathroom door had a note asking customers to use hand sanitizer before going into it.
The menu was fairly simple and allowed for a choice of several types of noodles or a plate of rice with the toppings of your choice. To my joy they had little peppers 🌶 next to the spicy items on the menu which means I didn’t have to ask! Woohoo!
I ordered some sort of seafood special served with udon noodles which I was trying for the first time. My companion picked a less adventurous option but both were delicious! Granted I had no idea udon have the same basic shape and feel as wet earth worms which… is really not my thing. But hey at least now I know! The sea food was nice though. We got to play “what is it?” With one particular item that was sliced up in a pretty grid pattern. I thought it was some sort of vegetable and popped the whole thing in my mouth. Oh no… not a vegetable. Chewy. Mildly fishy. I think it was probably squid. Today was not a great day for texture surprises! But I regained my composure and ate it. I actually do like calamari… just… not so much surprise calamari. All jokes aside it was piping hot and delicious with very large chunks of crab meat and mystery seafood. It was totally worth the five hours it took me to figure out chop sticks which I’m as bad at as parallel parking. Fortunately I’ve found going rogue and stabbing things with the aforementioned sticks usually suffice when fine motor skills are lacking. We both had literally a whole meal worth of noodles to bring home as leftovers. This was definitely worth the detour.
There’s been an absolute avalanche of chaos and confusion going on in my corner of the world so it took me a whole week to get back to writing part two of my Vermont adventures but here we are!
We had already had an awesome day of a completely overwhelming amount of antiquing. We were lacking in sleep, my companion had come down with something, and on top of that a number of negative complications from personal life were butting in our free wheeling. Also we were both getting hangry- that lovely point when you’re so hungry you’re either yelling or crying for no reason. And this was the point in our travels that everything also started to go wrong.
You see Vermont is very mountainous and rural and cell phone coverage and internet connection here can be… unreliable at best. So there we were, hungry, in the middle of the goddamn mountains in an unfamiliar town having no idea where to find some good grub.
I sucked in a good breath, tested my own patience, and said, “Well… we could just follow the signs to Rutland which I know is a city and would have both coverage and a place to eat…” We agreed this was best and set off back the roads from whence we came, over some bear-sized potholes, until we arrived in Ludlow. You might recognize Ludlow is not Rutland but it’s Ludlow where our internet started working again and it seemed decently populated, enough so to have a place to eat. So instead of continuing another half an hour or so we decided to pull over in a gas station and see what there was for good grub rather than risk losing connection again.
I nearly lost an axel pulling into this gas station over a pothole that may as well been a crater. CLUNK CLUNK!
Cars in this town were 100% unforgiving of anyone who didn’t know where they were going or going slower than 10-15 miles over the speed limit so I also had another car close to rear ending me as I drove over the aforementioned crater. My companion is in charge of picking places to eat so he found a place and we headed off. It wasn’t far away but it was unbeknownst to us in a ski lodge that was filled to capacity and despite being in the middle of the woods was swarmed with people. Restaurant parking was full and I wasn’t about to figure out how much ski lodge parking cost so annoyed we turned around and made our way back to town but before getting there I had some jack ass laying on his horn telling me I needed to turn and turn NOW. Only one problem with that, another giant jack ass pick up had pulled up beside me and was halfway into the intersection completely blocking my view. So I was patiently waiting rather than playing Russian roulette with oncoming traffic in a goddamn Prius. Mind you the Prius gets honked at A LOT, almost always from pick up trucks who think they’re God’s gift to the roads. I’m used to it but on this day that was the straw that broke the camel’s back and I just started screaming back at the fucker and his privileged ski bunny ass.
We found a taco place down the road and turned out it but it was bizarrely a pick-up only restaurant. A pizza parlor was next door but there was no parking and by now we were both intensely agitated and yelling.
“That’s not a parking space!”
“I KNOW! I’M TRYING TO TURN AROUND!”
The pizza place was Goodman’s American Pie. We weren’t looking for pizza but we needed something so I parked nearby and we walked back not realizing this place was also an arcade filled with unsupervised children, some of them joyfully screaming. We may have been holding back visible twitches at this point as we ordered and looked to see if there was anywhere to sit.
The only table they had left open was a tiny bar stool table next to the pool table where three children were playing something, though I can’t say it was entirely pool, more a chaotic mix of pool, bowling, fishing, and water polo, you know all the big ones. Though our table was above their little heads they still managed to repeatedly whack it with the ass end of the pool sticks.
My companion took this moment to go to the bathroom, probably in part to supress any growing homicidal thoughts regarding the situation.
Meanwhile another overly privileged asshole could be heard making an order on the phone as the poor kid taking the call asked his boss, “Uhhh… can we make 45 pizzas in an hour?” One employee, 45 pizzas, and this SOB wanted the whole order in an hour.
I wad SHOCKED to see my own pizza served to our table only moments later. That is the quickest service I have EVER gotten in any restaurant. It seemed to defy physics. The brick oven pizza was basically lava but I was halfway done horking down my first slice before my companion returned.
We ate in silence and with the ferver of rabbid raccoons before stopping at the end and stating, “I needed that.” YEAH, we both did. And that’s how we managed to stop yelling at each other for no reason and retired for the day. And for all it’s worth although neither one of us ever want to return to Ludlow that was still a damn good pizza.
You know whap happens when my usual travel companion has a week off? He gets kidnapped and dragged into the mountains! But first there was the matter of food. It’s rare I bring him back to mine and I wasn’t about to make the same mistake I made last time – eating breakfast at the place in town I knew was… not great.
We had planned to go to Vermont that morning anyway so why not stop just short of the border in Keene and get something delicious for breakfast? And if that didn’t work just give up and go to the candy or fudge shops just around the corner?
My companion picked a place and we parked and started walking towards it when he spotted Lindy’s, the cute little tin diner. I said I’d never heard anything bad about Lindy’s and it’s been there forever so we immediately made new plans. To Lindy’s!
It was a good choice. We ate there two mornings in a row, getting a good selection off their breakfast menu. The first morning I had strawberry stuffed waffles because I was having a sugar craving. It delivered on this! Waffles are generally supposed to taste like butter – because that’s basically all they are with just enough flour to keep a shape – but these 100% tasted like cake. Yellow cake to be exact. I was BUZZING. The next morning I behaved myself and had eggs and home fries with some rye toast. All simple but delicious traditional diner food. Couldn’t be happier. My companion was also happy with the hollandaise sauce, which to be fair he’s a bit fussy about. Twas sad to hear the other patrons saying this place was in the process of being sold, probably to be carted somewhere else. I adore tin diners but they never seem to last in the area.
This was a good choice to begin both our trips across state lines into Vermont.
