Urbanspoon is my favorite app to use while traveling.
It uses your location to help you find local restaurants. You can refine your search, too. I usually narrow my choices down to “vegetarian friendly,” so I can find places off the beaten path that I wouldn’t normally see from the interstate.
You can check each restaurant out by looking at its hours, menu, special features, etc. You can also read user reviews and find photos of some of the food.
It’s so helpful! As a non-meat-eater, it can be tough to find Katie-friendly food while on the road. I used to be grateful for any Subway sandwich shop, or even Burger King for its veggie burger. Now, however, Urbanspoon helps me find cute little places just minutes from the highway. However did I survive without a smart phone in the past?
On Friday, just a couple hours from New York, we found ourselves hankering for a little dinner. A quick Urbanspoon search took us to Fire & Spice, an Ital restaurant in Hartford, Connecticut. Ital is food of the Rastafari movement, a Christian sect that originated in Jamaica in the 1930s by the descendants of slaves. Ital (pronounced eye-tal) is a vegetarian- mostly vegan- cuisine that emphasizes the connection between man and nature.
Fire & Spice is an intimate spot that makes you feel as though you’re right in someone’s dining room. You choose from several buffet items to put together a warm plate of home-cooked food.
Together, B and I tried almost everything. I ordered barbeque tofu, southern greens, and yellow rice with pumpkin.
B tried curried lentils, seitan stew, okra and sweet potatoes, coconut-cooked pinto beans, and yellow rice.
To drink, we tried a couple specialty juices: cucumber-mint and hibiscus.
Don’t think we forgot dessert! We bought two cupcakes (chocolate apricot and lemon poppy) for the car.
We continued our drive to southeast New Hampshire, where we spent the night at a friend of B’s cabin.
It was much chillier than it’s been in New York; we built a fire outside and huddled around it with a glass of wine. I’m not the most outdoorsy person, so I let B take over the whole fire-building thing.
The next morning, we headed out to our next destination… to be continued!
Do you like “The Great Outdoors”? Would you consider yourself an “outdoorsy” person?