Well, that was a great weekend! The view from our room was … prettttty good.
The view from the top of Mount Washington was … less good.
That’s how it goes with Mount Washington, it’s just a shame it went that way on my wife’s first visit.
As far as food: it turned out that the way our schedule worked, we weren’t hungry enough to stop anywhere on the way up, so I have no Concord visits to report. We drove straight to Super Secret Ice Cream, and went back the next day. Between the two visits we tried six flavors, all great:
My cup of Strawberry Shortcake and Cantaloupe Sorbet. The strawberry one has crunchy bits like the Good Humor bars were coated in—“strawberry milk crumb with sumac,” per their Facebook page. The sumac (which I love) is barely perceptible, but it’s a great ice cream.
The cantaloupe sorbet is an exceptional one. A couple birthdays ago, I gave in to the temptation to order a serving of that expensive Japanese melon as dessert at Uni, and this reminded me of it: it’s like the most flavorful melon you’ve had, but in ice cream (well, sorbet) form. Just great.
Mrs C got the Cold Brew Coffee and Sweetberry Honeysuckle in her cone:
The coffee is probably the strongest-flavored coffee ice cream I’ve had that I didn’t make myself. As good as Toscanini’s. The Sweetberry Honeysuckle is made with foraged haskap berries, and has a sort of deep purple berry flavor. They compare it to currant, but it’s not that deep or that tart, at least in ice cream form. It’s good, and a rare opportunity to try haskap anything, but not mind-blowing.
On our second visit, I had to get the coffee for myself. I had missed their batch of corn ice cream by a couple days, but for one day only, they had corn cob and honey ice cream (replacing the strawberry, so my timing worked well on both days). Nice corn flavor! Mrs C thought it was too honey-forward. My only complaint as that I think corn ice creams work much better with berries than they do plain, so it would’ve gone better with the haskap, or with berries added to the ice cream. I could’ve got strawberry topping, of course.
Mrs C had to get the cantaloupe for herself, and then tried the toasted coconut, which was extremely creamy and extremely coconutty. The coconut didn’t seem like dessicated sweetened coconut. I don’t know if they toast frozen coconut shreds, or just soak the toasted coconut so that it’s moister.
I also tried a sample of the Mount Cabot Maple ice cream, because it’s sweetened only with maple, which is rare in my part of the state. Very good, and if we’d had a third visit, I would’ve had a full scoop of it. We nearly got a root beer float with a scoop of it, just didn’t have the appetites.
All in all, I’d say Super Secret is playing in the same league as Toscanini’s, Morgenstern’s in NYC, and Jeni’s in their heyday, with the asterisk that they have far fewer flavors. It looks like they have 12 flavors (plus ice cream sandwiches and ice cream pops) on any given day, of which I think 7 or 8 are year-round and the others are seasonal or limited. The flavors are thoughtful—the vanilla isn’t just vanilla, it’s vanilla with creme fraiche; etc—but you don’t face the same kind of paralysis as at one of the other places where you’re not sure if you want a scoop of cherimoya chamoy and malted milk jam, or a sundae with key lime blondie and razzleberry dressing. I go back and forth on whether this is a flaw, or if it’s nice that you can actually try everything you’re interested in.
Day two we had a late breakfast at Polly’s Pancake Parlor in Sugar Hill, which sounds like a setting for an Amy Sherman-Palladino show or a cozy Canadian show from the 80s. The waits can be long there, but we only had to wait about thirty minutes (I suppose you could also say “we had to wait thirty minutes even though it was the post-breakfast pre-lunch zone on a weekday”)—and despite the popularity with tourists, the meal came to about $40 for two people, and we were full enough that we weren’t able to order that root beer float five hours later. Seemed a good deal.
PPP has several different pancake batters and a few add-ins, so if you order a sampler as I did, you can mix and match. There’s also a pancake of the day every day. That day’s was lemon poppyseed, so I got that, a gingerbread pancake with coconut, and a cornmeal pancake with blueberries. They’re small, but I had a side of corned beef hash, so no complaints here. The pancakes themselves are great—good texture, especially the cornmeal, which crisped up really well. Real maple syrup, maple sugar, and maple cream are all compl*mentary both E and I, as it should be but often isn’t. I’m a fan. My dad lives nearby in Lancaster, so I expect to go back a few times.
Mrs C ordered … I don’t like saying “a Benedict,” but I guess that’s the usage we’ve slipped into with these things. An Irish Benedict. Poached egg, hollandaise, and corned beef hash, on potato pancakes instead of an English muffin, as an upcharge. The potato pancake was a great call. They were well-seasoned and noticeably oniony. I keep bringing them up, because my potato pancakes aren’t this good.
After pancakes we poked around in North Conway a bit (where I succeeded in accosting none of the teenagers who were complaining about how bad Moxie tastes, at Zeb’s General Store, a pretty great display of willpower). We stopped by the Saphouse Meadery tasting room, which I had no idea was there—we’ve been to their Ossipee location many times—and saw that they now do soft serve ice cream, including a corn creamee!
(We did not buy mead this time, although I love the cascara mead that they’ve done in the past, and the spruce tips one.)
Saturday for lunch we went to Baltic Kitchen, a new-ish place in Littleton that I strongly recommend to anyone in the area. It’s a small menu of Polish food, including a quickly rotating selection of pierogi. If we’d had any way to get them home, I would’ve brought lots of frozen ones back with us: some of the flavors among the frozen ones that I spotted included chili cheese dog, hot chicken, and mushroom and cheese. We each got a sampler plate for lunch, which comes with two pierogi (I got cheese and potato and pulled pork with candied jalapeno, which was very good and not noticeably sweet), a stuffed cabbage roll, a bit of kielbasa and whole-grain mustard, and your choice of cucumber salad or cabbage-kielbasa-kraut stew. Mrs C also got a side of condiments, which came with some very good sliced pickles, sauerkraut, and a Polish mustard that was smooth and slightly sweet. All of it really hit the spot; it’s number two or three on our “gotta go again” list for a return trip.
Dining at the Mount Washington Hotel:
I know there’s not much in the immediate area, but it was interesting to me that there’s nothing on Doordash. Maybe there’s something on Grubhub or Uber Eats, or you can get delivery direct from one of the pizza chains, I don’t know. We ate at each of the hotel restaurants once, with mixed results. The common feature of all of them is the prices, of course—well over $100 for dinner for two each time. If you go in just expecting that and accepting that you’re overpaying because there aren’t other options, two of the meals were good: 1902 (aka “the main dining room”), where Mrs C’s “New England summer” was a plate of a fried polenta log and well-prepared scallops, lobster, and corn, and I got a “side” of lobster mac and cheese that was five whole claws, assorted other bits of lobster, and pasta in a vat of cheese sauce. The blueberry creme brulee was also very good. I’m still always so happy when a creme brulee has a really solid burnt sugar crust, because my introduction to it was this too-brief-lived prepared food store Foodie’s in New Orleans, where they sold dishes from various local restaurants in the late 90s (I have had a LOT of Commander’s Palace gumbo as a result). Because the creme brulee sat in the cooler there all day, the burnt sugar had mostly softened by the time you got it.
Stickney’s is the hotel steakhouse, so I got what turned out to be a very good strip steak bathing in a pool of compound butter (“everything spice” butter I think they said, but mainly tasting like well-salted garlic butter) and mashed potatoes. $70, so like I said … you pay a little more for everything than it’s worth, but if you’re going to enjoy the meal, you just have to accept that up front and … well, maybe it’s worth pointing out that Mrs C paid for everything we charged to the room, since I’d paid for the room itself. So it wasn’t my $70!
The Rosebrook Bar is, first of all, the most annoyingly-named of all the Mount Washington restaurants, because there is both a Rosebrook Bar and a Rosebrook Lounge. The Rosebrook Lounge is not a restaurant. It is a building accessible to guests only by gondola, which requires a reservation but does not guarantee a seat at the restaurant that is there, which is called the Switchback Grille. The Rosebook Bar is in the Mount Washington Hotel, is not accessible by gondola, does not require a reservation. The food … is adequate. I will say that when we ordered the chips and dip—because if a restaurant makes their own potato chips and dip, I will almost always order it—we got a quantity that I genuinely think was as generous as a full family-size bag of potato chips. It was the amount you put out for the guys when they come over to watch a game. They were good, but I almost felt like going around to other tables and offering them chips. The two dips included were an okay onion dip (waaaay too heavy on the mayo instead of sour cream) and a salsa that went surprisingly well with potato chips.
For entrees, Mrs C got a grilled vegetable pizza that was fine, but I’m always a little annoyed when a pizza is an undeclared white pizza. Especially if it’s not at a pizza place that loudly, noticeably, visibly has non-red pizzas. If you’re sitting on a hotel veranda buried in a pile of potato chips and see pizza on the menu, you assume tomato sauce. For me, I got a burger that I said was fine but … in most respects it was comparable to what you get from a snack bar near a pool or beach, you know? It was sustenance.
Yesterday we met my father for lunch at the Polish Princess Bakery in Lancaster. I don’t know if I have a sense of what they’re really like, because the Polish Princess herself is out of the country at the moment, so the hours and menu are shortened. But the volkornbrot bread I brought home looks great, the sandwiches were very good, and I had a “blueberry croissant” this morning that was very good. (The quotes are because it wasn’t a croissant with a blueberry filling but a square of croissant dough subsequently topped with custard and fresh blueberries. If you’d told me it was a blueberry danish I think I would’ve accepted it without question.) I am reeeeeally spoiled when it comes to croissants, because Cremeux is 15 minutes from us and is one of the best French bakeries I’ve ever been to. But there was nothing to complain about with this one.
We took the lonnnnng way home, following route 5 down through Vermont because it’s scenic as fuck, and detoured over to Woodstock VT to get maple creamees at Woodstock Scoop. Really picturesque little town! This was the best maple creamee I’ve had—a black raspberry maple twist, pronouncedly maple—but I should say it’s also the only one I’ve had in Vermont.
(That is a really interesting thing I’ve noticed since moving back to New England: the regional cuisines have been smeared around. When I was a kid it was impossible to find a hot buttered lobster roll in New Hampshire—I know, because my mother’s from Connecticut and was always looking for one—and I’d never heard of North Shore roast beef, Rhode Island clamcakes, or maple creamees. Now you can get those everywhere, although the steak bomb—the region’s real contribution, and my lunch today—doesn’t seem to have spread beyond its initial confines much. And you can get whoopie pies at the supermarket! Which, I mean … that’s good, because I don’t have kids and have no real reason to go to an elementary school bake sale and far less reason to go trick or treating, but what the fuck.)
