Connecticut Food Guide: Breakfast & Take-Out

In my last post, I ranked the best burger bars in the Hartford area. This post will address restaurants east of Hartford. After much searching, Casey and I have cultivated a small stable of restaurants that fill certain food niches. This post will highlight breakfast and take-out places.

Track Nine Diner: The Track Nine sits just across the Willington border from Tolland. It serves an expansive breakfast and lunch menu of pancakes, eggs, and every kind of breakfast food that would your cardiologist weep. Casey and I have never eaten there for lunch. When we go to the Track Nine (not as often as in the past), we gorge on pancakes, French toast, and home fries. The we usually skip lunch. The Track Nine is the quintessential breakfast spot, featuring the same regulars, staff, and tricky to navigate parking lot.

Gerry’s Donuts: Gerry’s, located in Ellington, features absurdly delicious and cheap doughnuts. A dozen doughnuts cost five dollars. Gerry’s represents one of those local coffee and doughnut places that proliferated around the Northeast before the rise of Dunkin Donuts. After eating Gerry’s, there is no going back to Dunkin’s processed garbage. Gerry’s opens at 6 A.M. and they only make one batch of doughnuts. So you have to get there early. If you can’t get there by 8 A.M. you will have missed your chance at your favorite doughnuts (chocolate glazed for me). It’s a commitment to go there, but well worth the effort.

Willington Pizza and Willington Pizza Too: This local restaurant and its offshoot (only five minutes from our house) offer a menu of Greek style pizzas, subs, and other pizza restaurant staples. For those unfamiliar with Greek style, this particular type of pizza features a thicker and fluffier crust than New York style and is cooked in a shallow pan. Our favorite dishes at Willington include their white pizza, buffalo chicken pizza, and their spinach and artichoke dip.

Camille’s Pizza: Camille’s, a newly opened pizza restaurant in the Big Y Plaza in Tolland, features a menu of smaller, designer pizzas cooked in a wood fire oven. Since it opened last month, Casey and I have ordered from there once. The prosciutto pizza we ordered was tasty although we had to apply the toppings ourselves. While the prosciutto would dry out in the wood fire oven, having the customer apply the toppings seems a bit odd (it makes me question what I just paid for if I have to assemble it myself). We plan on ordering from there again to try their other offerings.

Dog Lane Café: The Dog Lane, located in the newly opened Storrs Center, serves a wide range of breakfast foods, soups, salads, and sandwiches. They rely on locally sourced ingredients at a reasonable price point. Casey and I have eaten there several times and have found the food filling and delicious. The casual atmosphere suits the area and allows for the diner to eat a relaxing meal or gobble their food down quickly and get back to campus. The owners of Dog Lane also operate the Vanilla Bean Café in Pomfret and 85 Main in Putnam. 

Ranking Connecticut's Burger Bars

I have lived in Connecticut for over a little over a year. Before that, I split time between Connecticut and Delaware. I liked Connecticut better in every way, except for the food. Any decent restaurant, apart from Willington Pizza required, at minimum, a fifteen minute drive on I-84. Manchester, the nearest city of any notable size, is a haven of chain restaurant dreck.  Over the past few years, my wife, Casey, and I have found some really good restaurants in the area, but this has required significant trial and error. So in the past year, we expanded our range of restaurants to the communities south and west of Hartford. Our view of the Connecticut restaurant scene has improved immeasurably. In our culinary travels, we discovered one of the things that the Greater Hartford restaurant scene does really well: burgers. There are a number of high quality burger bars that offer a range of delicious options.

1. Plan B Burger Bar: http://www.planbburger.com/

Plan B is a small Connecticut area burger chain with five locations in Connecticut and one in Massachusetts. Plan B keeps its focus on the burgers, offering twenty-two different varieties. They include a range of proteins including lobster (Casey’s favorite) Salmon, Portobello mushrooms, chicken, turkey, and pork.  Plan B also offers salads and a few other entrees, but the burgers shine through. I am especially fond of the Pretzel Burger, with spicy mustard, lettuce, pickles, and cheddar cheese.  Plan B steak fries are especially delicious, thick cut and with a crunchy exterior. Casey eschews the fries altogether and orders their Tater Tots. They also have an impressive list of beers and bourbons available. The B Cup dessert, a flourless double chocolate cake filled with white chocolate mousse dipped in chocolate ganache, made me laugh when it came to the table as it looks exactly like a Hostess Cupcake and tastes like a grown-up version of it. The service at Plan B is organized, friendly, and efficient.  Plan B earns the top spot because if you told me I could only go to one of these places ever again, I would chose Plan B without any hesitation.

2. Max Burger Bar: http://www.maxrestaurantgroup.com/burger/

Max Burger is the burger outpost of the Hartford area Max Restaurant Group. We have only eaten at Max Fish (although Casey and I are planning to visit Max Oyster Bar soon) and enjoyed it greatly. Max Burger serves as a quality entry in the Connecticut burger scene. It has a lively atmosphere and friendly and attentive service. Burgers are not quite the center of focus like at Plan B. Instead Max Burger offers a broader menu of sandwiches, starters, salads, and entrees. I was especially pleased with my Miss Daisy burger featuring brie cheese, applewood smoked bacon, apple honey Dijonaise, lettuce, tomato, on toasted brioche bread. I also enjoyed the French fries at Max Burger (I stole some of Casey’s—I do that often). The homemade whoopie pies were delightful. The filling was fluffy and the cookie part was crispy on the outside and flaky and cake-like on the inside. It was one of the best whoopie pies I have eaten in a long time. I would readily drive through Hartford again and again to eat at Max Burger.

3. Corey’s Catsup and Mustard: http://catsupandmustard.com/

Corey’s is one of the few places worth eating at in Manchester. Located in downtown Manchester, Corey’s features a menu of burgers, sandwiches, apps, and salads. Its burger menu offers an inventive takes on classic dishes. My personal favorite is the Auntie Laurie’s Burger featuring house made mustard, horseradish cheddar, a pretzel bun (I like burgers on pretzel buns), bacon, lettuce, and tomato. The burger combines three classic pairings: a BLT, pretzels and mustard, and a burger and cheese. The combination results in a juicy, flavorful, and filling burger. Corey’s offers a variety of crunchy and delicious French fries wonderfully showered in salt.

While Corey’s is the closest to where Casey and I live, we have two issues with it: first it was featured on Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, a nearly unforgivable sin. Second the restaurant itself is much too small. This results in a minimum wait of 45 minutes at any normal dining hour (unless you want to cram into the bar) and the front of the house seems unable to turn the tables over quickly. Casey and I have watched on numerous occasions, including once with friends whom we had promised a delicious meal, as empty tables remained un-cleared or empty for ten minutes or more. For a small burger bar, it would seem that turning over tables quickly would be essential to business.

Next time, I will list some of local restaurants that Casey and I have uncovered. 

Revisiting Star Wars: A New Hope

            I have seen the original Star Wars films many, many times. I once watched all six movies in one day, from Episode I to Episode VI. Having endured four plus hours of pod racing and a lovesick teenage boy with mommy issues in the first two films, the other four movies breezed quickly by. This past weekend my wife and I decided to watch A New Hope and I realized I hadn’t watched the movie from beginning to end in several years. Considering how often I had watched the film as a child, I wondered how it would hold up after several years.*

*Note, I watched the original theatrical cut of the film that was briefly made available on DVD several years ago. I refuse to watch any other version of the film. No Greedo shooting first, no Han Solo talking to Jabba, no altered dialogue or effects.

            The cast represents one of the film’s greatest strengths. In his non-Indiana Jones iconic role, Ford plays the roguish Han Solo with the right balance of confidence, cockiness, and cunning. These traits shine through in the Cantina scene with Greedo. Greedo holds a blaster on Han the entire time. Yet Solo never betrays any concern over the situation. He calmly talks to Greedo while preparing to draw his weapon—confident in his ability to talk or blast his way out of the situation. When the conversation goes south, Solo demonstrates command over the situation by drawing first and killing Greedo. Ford’s nonchalant delivery of the “Sorry about the mess” line provides some darkly humorous closure to the scene. Mark Hamill successfully portrays Luke’s youthful angst and wonderment at the larger world. Even though the viewer has no idea what he is talking about, Hammil’s exasperated “But I was going into Tosche Station to pick up some power converters!” highlights the world weary attitude unique to moody and sullen teenagers. I imagine the world of Star Wars must have confounded and frustrated Alec Guinness. Guinness won an Academy Award for The Bridge on the River Kwai, starred in Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, and the BBC adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. A veteran Shakespearean actor, Guinness provided much of the exposition that drove the plot and made the fantasy world of Star Wars believable. Rewatching the film reminded me that Lucas served his female characters well. While Princess Leia spends much of the film a prisoner, her character never succumbs to the cliché of a damsel in distress. Carrie Fisher’s chemistry with Harrison Ford becomes apparent in their first scenes together. Leia sarcastically berates Luke’s foolhardy plan of breaking her out her cell without a plan to get out of the detention block. Fisher plays Leia with a commanding and defiant air that serves her well opposite Luke’s naiveté and Han’s brashness.

            Lucas’s clunky dialogue—especially in the later prequel trilogy—presents the biggest problem in the film. He frequently causes the actors to nearly swallow their own tongues with his difficult to parse sentences. Darth Vader’s warning, “Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed” may read well on the page, but speaking it and listening to it are another matter.  The hard tongue sounds required to tie the alliteration of “technological terror” together ruins the flow of the sentence. There is a similar problem with Luke’s description of his home planet, “If there's a bright center to the universe, you're on the planet that it's farthest from.” The real problem is the subordinate clause, “that it’s the farthest from.” It is not immediately clear that the “it’s” refers back to the planet, and the “universe” is the unstated object of the preposition “from.” Dialogue should not require this much literary deconstruction. 

            The climactic Battle of Yavin IV, where the Rebels attack the Death Star, demonstrates the best that Lucas has to offer as a filmmaker. The visual effects remain believable even thirty five years later. Filming much of the battle within the cockpits of the X and Y Wing fighters gives the viewer an intimate view of the battle and as the beleaguered pilots die off, the battle becomes even more contained and personal. Eventually Luke and Darth Vader square off as Luke races to destroy the Death Star. Lucas paces the battle scenes well, shifting between the battle raging in space and the Rebel and Imperial command centers as the Death Star nears closer to its firing possession. The ticking clock provides increasing tension as the Rebels launch their bombing runs. Lucas takes the viewer right to the edge as Vader seems set to destroy Luke’s X-Wing before the triumphant return of Han Solo and the Rebels snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

            While it has been parodied and copied a million times over, A New Hope remains a delightful and eminently re-watchable film, even thirty five years later. 

NFL Ephemera

These are some thoughts and predictions regarding the upcoming NFL season. 

            The New Orleans Saints will reach double digit wins. Sean Payton’s return to the sideline will be a marked improvement over last years’ revolving door of head coaches. Plus Payton has had a year off to rest from the day-to-day grind of NFL coaching. Under new defensive coordinator, Rob “Werewolf” Ryan, the Saints defense should improve from its historically bad performance last season.  I don’t think it will be a good defense, but an improvement to below average should be worth a win or two.

            The Pittsburgh Steelers will not make the playoffs. They only scored 336 points last year, finishing 22^nd in the league in scoring between Buffalo and Tennessee. Ben Roethlisberger is always hurt, has only two 4,000 yard passing seasons in his career, and his career high in TD passes is 26.The Steelers running back situation is in flux with Le’Veon Bell’s injury. The Bengals and Browns have improved their teams since last season and despite Baltimore’s crushing loss to Denver, the Ravens will contend for a playoff spot.  

            Jacksonville, Tennessee, and Indianapolis will all finish with double digit losses. Jacksonville continues its futile struggle for .500 football. Tennessee will start Jake Locker and Ryan Fitzpatrick at QB, and Indianapolis will regress after last year’s 11-5 season. The Colts were the only team in NFL history to have an 11-5 record, but post a negative point differential (the Colts allowed 387 points, but only scored 357). The AFC South teams also have to play the teams of the NFC West. At best, the Jaguars, Titans, and Colts will beat Arizona, but not Seattle, San Francisco, or even St. Louis.

            Matthew Stafford will throw for 5,000 yards and 30 TDs. He is entering his 5^th NFL season, and while he has had significant injury concerns, Stafford has started 31 of 32 games in the past two seasons. He is also only just 25. He is younger than both third year quarterbacks Colin Kaepernick and Andy Dalton. He is also younger than Josh Freeman and Sam Bradford. He throws to the best wide receiver in the game in Calvin Johnson and Reggie Bush will be an improvement at running back.

            Jim Schwartz, Ron Rivera, Mike Munchak, and Rex Ryan all enter this season on the hot seat. Schwartz’s teams are comically undisciplined. Rivera’s in game managing is atrocious. Rex Ryan believes that the only way to coach a team is to make increasingly absurd claims about the greatness of his players and the team. By raising the stakes again and again, Ryan’s proclamations about Super Bowl wins, “incredible off-seasons,” and how pundits “don’t know our team” become more absurd the Jets shuffle mediocre quarterbacks, have no offensive weapons, and struggle to 5 wins. I would bet on Munchak as the first coached fired.  The Titans have bad quarterbacks, a defense that hired Gregg “Blitz, Blitz, and Blitz somemore” Williams to aid the defense, and they haven’t shown any signs of being good for years.

Playoff Picks:

AFC East: New England  

AFC North: Cincinnati

AFC South: Houston

AFC West: Denver

AFC Wildcards: Chiefs, Ravens

NFC East: New York Giants

NFC North: Green Bay

NFC South: New Orleans

NFC West: San Francisco

NFC Wildcards: Seattle, Atlanta

*http://espn.go.com/new-york/nfl/story/_/id/9642086/rex-ryan-calls-negative-talk-surrounding-new-york-jets-pretty-comical

NFL Head Coach Rankings

In anticipation of the NFL season beginning on Thursday, I decided to rank all of the head coaches in the NFL. I have no way to rank the first time head coaches, so they will appear at the end of the list. The remaining coaches are organized in and within tiers.   

The Hall of Famers 

1. Bill Belichick

2. Jim Harbaugh

3. Sean Payton

4. Tom Coughlin

5. John Harbaugh 

In 13 years as the Patriots head coach, Belichick has won 72.6% of his games, 3 Super Bowls, been to 2 others. The Patriots have had 1 losing season—his first. In two years, Jim Harbaugh transformed the roster that Mike Singletary ran into the ground into a Super Bowl team. He has demonstrated smart and aggressive play calling and turned Alex Smith into a competent QB. Payton’s aggressive offenses consistently rank among the league’s best. The Saints have won 13, 11, and 13 games in Payton’s last three seasons as the head coach. With Payton back on the sidelines this year, the Saints should return to double digit wins. Coughlin has led the Giants to two Super Bowl wins over the Patriots. Yet every year the New York media speculates that the Giants will fire Coughlin because the players “quit” on him.* Yet every year the Giants remain in the playoff hunt. John Harbaugh has led the Ravens to the playoffs in all five seasons as head coach, culminating in winning last year’s Super Bowl. 

The Very Good

6. John Fox

7. Mike Tomlin

8. Mike Smith

9. Gary Kubiak

John Fox reached the Super Bowl with the Panthers and rearranged his offense in Denver to accommodate Tim Tebow’s QB skills (or lack thereof). He remains one of the better coaches in the NFL. Tomlin has won a Super Bowl, been to a second one, and has won 63 games in 6 seasons. This will be an important year for Steelers to see if they can rebound after last year’s 8-8 campaign. Smith has won 56 games in 5 years. His conservative in-game strategy has hurt the Falcons in the playoffs. Kubiak took over the Houston Texans and led them to a string of 8-8 seasons before winning 10 and 12 games in the past two seasons. His zone blocking scheme has made the Texans one of the best running teams in the league every year. 

The Tenured 

10. Mike McCarthy

11. Andy Reid

12. Jeff Fisher

13. Mike Shanahan 

14. Marvin Lewis

These are coaches who have coached good, sometimes great teams for a long time, or have won a Super Bowl, but have lingering questions. McCarthy won Super Bowl XLV, but has a number of early playoff exits and has demonstrated Andy Reid-esque game management. I think we all know who Andy Reid is at this point. A very good coach who prepares his teams well, but fourteen year old Madden players manage the play clock and timeouts better than Reid. Fisher coached the Titans to a Super Bowl and for what seemed like decades afterwards.  His teams are never atrocious, but never that great either. Mike Shanahan won two Super Bowls in the 1990s with Terrell Davis and an aged John Elway, but hasn’t done much since. Marvin Lewis is a good coach, but not one that you sense is actively working, like a Belichick, Payton, or Harbaugh, to be ahead of the NFL curve.  

The Wait and See

15. Leslie Frazier

16. Greg Schiano

17. Joe Philbin

In his second full season as head coach, Frazier coached the 10-6 Vikings to a surprise playoff bid last season. The Vikings are due some regression after making a seven win improvement from 2011-2012. Philbin and Schiano enter their second seasons as NFL head coaches and did not leave enough of an impression to land definitively somewhere on this list. 

The Wild Cards

18. Pete Carroll

19. Rex Ryan

20. Jim Schwartz

Carroll’s career has had some of the biggest peaks and valleys out of any other NFL coach. After a disastrous year as coach of the Jets and a tumultuous tenure in New England, Carroll transformed USC into a BCS powerhouse before returning to the NFL.   He led the resurgent Seahawks to the playoffs last year, but only has a career .518 winning percentage. Ryan coached up the Jets defense to two AFC title games, dragging Mark Sanchez along the way. Ryan’s oversized personality and a ravenous New York media have contributed to circus like atmosphere that doomed the Jets last season. If the Jets management doesn’t think Ryan is their head coach for the future, they should have moved on at the end of last season. Leaving Ryan and Sanchez as lame ducks has fueled the media circus in a rebuilding year. Schwartz’s Lions’ teams have won 2, 4, 10, and 6 games. His Lions’ teams are most famous for their “toughness” and a proclivity for penalties, especially for unnecessary roughness. 

Counting Down the Weeks

21. Jason Garrett

22. Mike Munchak

23. Ron Rivera 

The farce that is the Dallas Cowboys and Garrett’s suspect game management will probably result in Dallas firing him by the end of the year. Firing Jerry Jones would be a better move. I can’t tell you much about Munchak, other than that the Titans are mediocre and have been for a long time. In a divisional game against Atlanta last season, Rivera’s Panthers had a 28-27 lead with 1:44 left in the game. They faced a fourth and 1 on the Atlanta 45 yard line. Despite having the best running quarterback in the league under center and two highly compensated running backs in the backfield**, Rivera punted the ball back to the Falcons, who promptly drove down the field and won the game. Get the one yard (with a running QB) and win the game or punt and give the Falcons a chance to drive for the winning field goal? 

The New Guys (no particular order)

24. Marc Trestman

25. Gus Bradley

26. Chuck Pagano (incomplete from last year)

27. Mike McCoy

28. Dennis Allen

29. Bruce Arians

30. Doug Marrone

31. Chip Kelly

32. Rob Chudzinski

*See http://www.grantland.com/blog/the-triangle/post/_/id/11144/the-annual-pursuit-of-quitting-on-tom-coughlin

** As Football Outsider’s Aaron Schatz pointed out, the outcome of the game was a failure of process and result. http://deadspin.com/5947937/was-the-panthers-fourth+down-decision-dumb-enough-to-change-the-nfls-punt+to+win-philosophy

Daisuke All-Stars: Part IV Pacific Coast Lineup

Starting Lineup

C J.R. Towles

1B Mike Jacobs

2B Russ Adams

SS Ruben Tejeda

3B Ian Stewart

LF Ben Francisco

CF Tony Gwynn Jr.

RF Juan Rivera

DH Xavier Nady

            Towles, a catcher for the Astros from 2007-2011, is a quintessential backup catcher: decent defense and no bat. According to his Wikipedia page, Mike Jacobs “in 2003, after a successful year with the Double-A Binghamton Mets, won an award.” Jacobs has a bit of power, but not enough to keep him in the majors as fulltime starter at 1B. The Blue Jays took Adams 14^th overall in the 2002 draft ahead of players like Joey Votto, Matt Cain, Cole Hamels, and Nick Swisher. He reached the majors in 2004 and spent 2005 as a starter. From then on, he served as a utility infielder. Ruben Tejeda, while only 23, has over 1300 plate appearances in the majors. As evidenced by his .261/.326/.321 batting line, he possesses little power and relies on his contact ability to reach base consistently. Following the 2004 season, Baseball America named Ian Stewart the fourth best prospect in all of baseball. While Stewart has displayed power in the majors, hitting 25 home runs in 2009, he also has a career K rate of 27.3%. Ben Francisco has played for the Indians, Phillies, Blue Jays, Astros, Rays, and Yankees. Francisco has been traded four times in his career, most famously to Philadelphia along with Cliff Lee in 2009. With a little bit of power, Francisco’s value comes as a fourth outfielder. The son of Hall of Famer, Tony Gwynn Sr., Tony Jr. has carved out a career as a defensive speedster. His .244/.312/.318 career batting line speaks to his lack of power and on-base skills. One of the few remaining ex-Expos in the major leagues, Rivera premiered in 2001 for the New York Yankees. Anyone who has played fantasy baseball has owned Rivera at some point expecting a very good or great hitter. Instead Rivera has been, at his best, good with a little bit of power, but mostly just league average. Xavier Nady has an awesome first name. He was also the Padres best prospect in 2002 according to Baseball America. In 3199 plate appearances, Nady has an adjusted OPS 100—meaning that his numbers in those 3199 PA are exactly league average.

Bench

C Eli Whiteside

BE Ben Broussard

BE Reid Brignac

BE Brad Snyder 

            Whiteside has played for the Orioles, Rangers, and Giants. In 2010, he caught fellow Daisuke All-Star Jonathan Sanchez’s no-hitter. Like Towles, Whiteside’s catching ability rather than his bat has kept him playing professionally. Broussard played first base and leftfield for the Indians, Mariners, and Rangers. Broussard has a particularly noticeable platoon split. He hit .270/.331/.462 against RHP, while only batting .225/.288/.393 against LHP. Brignac has only produced a .221/.262/.311 batting line but his excellent defense has led him to bounce around from the Rays to the Rockies and Yankees. The 18^th overall pick in the 2003 MLB draft, Snyder  appeared 20 games in 2010 and 2011. The quintessential Quad-A player, Snyder has a .285/.358/.490 in 4767 minor league plate appearances.