Tuesday in Nashua

Tonight I checked into my hotel around 5:30, so I had ample time to research a good place to eat. Despite what the details of my Chicago trip might lead you to believe, I am a big "when in Rome" diner. I try to avoid prominent chains when I'm in new places, and opt instead for local joints with a little bit of personality. However, in this particular situation, I was faced with a former love that was seemingly calling my name and asking me to break habit. I searched "All Food" in my GPS while in the hotel parking lot and saw "Ground Round" as an option.
http://www.groundround.com/

I have been to the Ground Round in Moon Township, PA approximately 415,000 times. I used to go after school with my mom. I used to go on weekends for "Pay what you weigh" day. I think I celebrated more than one birthday with Bingo the Clown and the rest of the Ground Round staff. I also hadn't been in probably six years. The Ground Round is not healthy. The Ground Round is a chain. But the Ground Round is also delicious, and it was nostalgic. So after I got to my room I fired up the computer, and saw there was no info on a Nashua, NH location for the Ground Round. Apparently, it has closed. I longingly looked at the menu online, and then decided to hit up Thousand Crane Chinese/ Japanese Restaurant. It looked affordable. It had good reviews online, and so I decided to take a drive into downtown Nashua to give it a try.
http://thousandcranerestaurant.com/

Downtown Nashua is actually a little cooler than I thought. It has a lot of different shops, bakeries, bars, and restaurants. It reminded me a little of a smaller, watered-down, lower-class Portland, Maine, and Portland is one of my favorite cities that I've visited, no question about it. Thousand Crane was right in the heart of the downtown Nashua area, just off a side street. I walked in solo, and took a seat at the sushi bar. There were oly four other people in the whole place, for a second I thought they were closed. But once seted, I was greeted by a friendly (albeit difficult to understand) sushi chef, a super-tiny glass of water (major pet peeve of mine), and a free order of edamame. The edamame were very good, not too salty, not too wet. I put them away pretty quickly as I watched the sushi chef go to work. The art of sushi rolling is pretty cool, and seeing it first-hand, also seems pretty easy. However, this guy was working with some heavier artillery than you usually see in sushi recipes. I ordered a shrimp tempura roll, and he brought out four full prawns, all the length of a chopstick and the diameter of golf ball. They were huge. They looked more like lobsters than they did shrimp as he laid them on the rice bed to start rolling. Once he rolled them up, while slightly difficult to eat, they were worth the effort, and definitely made to perfection.

I also tossed in an "Alaskan King Roll", which had shrimp tempura, crab meat, tobiko, scallion, spicy mayo, and eel sauce, and a Spicy Salmon Roll. These rolls were not as large as the online reviews or the first roll that he put together led me to believe, but I left the place feeling somewhat full and satisfied with a good meal.

However, I also left with a new appreciation for the people you randomly come across in life and the stories they each have. The sushi chef tonight was a super nice guy. He made me a free appetizer of white tuna tartare, which was really good, and proceeded to inform me of all the good watering holes in Nashua and where to go when in New Hampshire. He also told me that the sushi grade fish that they use is driven up every morning from Boston (about an hour) and only stays fresh/ good for 1-2 days max. The real doozy, though, was that this guy told me that he is the co-owner of the largest sushi restaurant in Southern China. He is a Chinese native who moved to America 6 years ago, lived in Boston for most of that time, and goes back to China for a week at a time once every two months. His brother runs the restaurant while he is in America, but he's contemplating a permanent move back home to run the restaurant at the end of the year. Why any of this is relevant, I'm not sure. And this guy also could have been lying through his teeth about everything, but even if he was, it was an interesting conversation that addedd another dimension to a normally hum-drum, quiet dinner.

I'd give the sushi at Thousand Crane about a 6.5, but with the individual attention and good conversation I had, we'll push them up to 7 Bearclaws. Good times tonight.

On my way out of the area, though, I saw a Brewery/ Restaurant called Martha's Exchange. It looked like a cool place to get a drink, so I stopped in and had a house brew. It was a pretty standard beer, and it was overshadowed by the bakery/ confectionary that adorned the corner of the restaurant near the exit. I stopped and got myself a chocolate-covered s'more there. Now I know I'm a chocoholic. However, this was only magnified and reaffirmed when I bit into the chocolate-covered s'more and there was no Hershey bar inside. Why they would cover chocolate in chocolate is beyond me, and the marshmallow and graham cracker by themselves were good, but I was still overcome with a slight sense of disappointment that a golden opportunity to really knock the chocolate levels out of the park went by the wayside. All in all, if you're ever in Nashua, although this place was kind of dead on a Tuesday night, with it's plentiful beers on tap, big menu, and apparently good happy hour deals, I still think Martha's Exchange could be a good place to go to kill some time and put a few back.