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Ever green

Young Dubliners perform in Concord

It’s been 35 years since the Young Dubliners debuted. With rocked-up songs that owed as much to Thin Lizzy as any trad band with a fiddle and bodhran, they were the West Coast counterparts to New York City’s Black 47.

“At the time, the term ‘Celtic rock’ didn’t exist,” band founder Keith Roberts said in a recent phone interview. “It was just … blending Irish music with other forms of music.”

Roberts, the last original member, seems bemused by his band’s longevity.

“The name tells you right away I didn’t plan it,” he said. “There’s no way when I was 22 that I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, Young Dubliners. That’s really gonna work when I’m 58.’ But it is what it is; I’m stuck with it. So, I have to pretend to be the Peter Pan of Celtic rock.”

The singer, songwriter and guitarist originally moved from Ireland to L.A. to chase a career in journalism. He buttressed an interesting but low-paying job doing research for NPR with odd jobs like driving an airport shuttle, which led to sound work on movie sets. One day, he bought an Irish bar in Santa Monica, mainly so the band he’d started could escape the pay-to-play gigs then dominating SoCal.

“I’d never intended on going on the road, I just wanted to own the pub and be the band on Saturday night,” he said. Weekend shows consisted of a headliner, the Young Dubliners and a band that later became Flogging Molly. “We got signed first and a year later they got signed, then Gaelic Storm…. It’s an interesting, fluky chain of events.”

They’ve solidified into a standard-bearer for the genre, playing all over the world, topping the bill on cruises, and every 18 months or so heading back to Ireland with over 100 Americans in tow. When Roberts was first approached with the idea of touring with a group of fans, “I couldn’t think of anything worse,” he recalled. “I eventually said, ‘Look, if I do this, I want it to be a normal tour.’”

So a plan was hatched that offers a balance of sightseeing and shows like an unplugged hotel lobby gig and a concert in a castle, with a sleepover.

“The Americans will have two days to just enjoy it like they are in Downton Abbey or something,” Roberts said, laughing. “Nobody wants to go to Ireland and see us play every single night…. This isn’t the Bruce Springsteen farewell tour. They’ve already seen us in America; they want to come and see Ireland with us.”

The Young Dubliners have made nine records and are close to finishing their 10th. The new album doesn’t have a title, but it’s shaping into an introspective effort. “Drive” was inspired by Roberts’ worry that he might not perform again, a thought shared by many musicians as the pandemic stretched on.

“My lyrics are all over the place and they definitely represent a lot of what happened,” he said. “We all sort of reinvented ourselves with skills we never knew we had during Covid, building furniture, making bread; I turned an old band trailer into a camper. The song is sort of uplifting about what would happen [and it] resonates now playing it to an audience.”

Another new song, “Look to the Stars,” pays homage to one of Roberts’ primary influences. “It’s absolutely got the Big Country riffs at the beginning, and I love them. They were probably the biggest — them and the Waterboys’ Fisherman’s Blues were probably what really pushed me out of just being a straight rock band and embracing the Irish stuff.”

Their current concert is a mix of old and new that begins with “a historical musical journey of the Young Dubs and how we wrote all our own stuff along the way,” Roberts said, followed by a portion “dedicated to the Irish Sessions album, where we did all the covers.” That trad-rich album included the bracing “Rocky Road to Dublin” and a lilting take of the Pogues’ “Pair of Brown Eyes.”

From there the music moves emphatically forward, Roberts continued. “If you only stay for the first half of the show, you’re going to miss out on a whole other part of our life,” he said. “I was joking about it the other day, saying if I was doing a farewell tour, this would probably be a pretty close set to what we would do.”

Young Dubliners w/ Rebel Collective
When: Sunday, July 23, 8 p.m.
Where: Bank of NH Stage, 44 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $35.75 at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Young Dubliners. Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 23/07/20

Local music news & events

• Striking strings: A regional ensemble with a world music approach, Acoustic Nomads includes Maurizio Fiore Salas, a composer, guitar player and Venezuelan cuatrist who’s done workshops for Concord Community Music School, where his group will perform Around The World in a free early evening concert. The show is a celebration of the diversity offered in American music along with “the common threads that bind us together as people.” Thursday, July 20, 6:30 p.m., Concord Community Music School, 23 Wall St., Concord, ccmusicschool.org.

• Lakeside music: Appearing in a renovated horse stable that dates to Lake Sunapee’s steamboat era, Ari Hest is a singer, guitarist and songwriter who marked two decades as a working musician in late 2021 with the release I Remember When: The Retrospective. In the recent past, he collaborated with Judy Collins on the Grammy-nominated album Silver Skies Blue; a bit of a pinch me moment for Hest, as his parents danced to Collins’ song “Since You Asked” at their wedding. Friday, July 21, 7:30 p.m., The Livery, 58 Main St., Sunapee Harbor, $20 at thelivery.org.

• Sans singing: A free concert has While My Guitar Gently Weeps, a local trio playing instrumental versions of Beatles songs. Paring the Fab Four down to three and stripping away vocals is a unique take in a world where seemingly every tribute variation already exists. The group includes Berklee-trained guitarist Neil Santos, who’s authored two guitar instructional books, bass player Edwin Huff and drummer Bill Kuriger. Sunday, July 23, 2 p.m., Benson’s Park, 19 Kimball Hill Road, Hudson. See whilemyguitargentlyweeps.band.

• Voice double: Fronted by American Idol alum Tristan McIntosh, The Linda Ronstadt Experience is a convincing recreation of the singer’s prime era. Reminding audiences of Ronstadt’s unparalleled stature as a song interpreter, along with looking the part quite well, McIntosh re-recreates hits like Warren Zevon’s “Poor Poor Pitiful Me,” Jackson Browne’s “Rock Me on the Water” and The Everly Brothers’ “When Will I Be Loved.” Wednesday, July 26, 7 p.m., Town Common, 265 Mammoth Road, Londonderry. More at londonderryartscouncil.org.

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One (PG-13)

Tom Cruise parachutes off a mountain to land on a moving train, engages in sleek spy-vs-spy action in an airport and gets in a car chase in Rome in a teeny tiny Fiat in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.

There’s a plot if you need it, something about an algorithm AI thing that goes rogue (not unlike the Impossible Mission Force agent Ethan Hunt in all these movies) and may destroy the world — it was bound to happen, says Benji (Simon Pegg), one of Ethan Hunt’s (Cruise) longtime team members. Along with Luther (Ving Rhames) and sometimes Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson), Benji and Ethan rack up the miles traveling to European and Middle Eastern locales to find two parts of a key that when snapped together can unlock a thing inside a Russian submarine that contains the source code for (and thus the means of destroying) the Entity, which is the AI algorithm thing. The Entity “eats truth,” someone explains in one of our “let’s slow things down to do some exposition” scenes, and can destabilize all international systems and make anyone believe everything with video and audio “proof” that it manufactures (and I feel like we can all be forgiven for thinking “so, it’s just the internet”).

Basically, it’s a bad thing and our heroes have to stop it — and, we’re told, they have to stop and destroy it while at the same time all the major countries of the world are trying to get the key for themselves so they can control the Entity and use it for their own ends (air-tight plan, major countries of the world).

Along the way, the gang crosses paths with Grace (Haley Atwell), a thief who was charged with stealing one of the key pieces. She becomes an unwilling member of Team Impossible, helping with “we have to go to this party to meet this bad guy”-type missions and eventually even wearing one of those nifty IMF masks (which in this case turns Atwell into Vanessa Kirby).

The movie has some fun with those masks, especially when some of the people chasing Ethan’s team think they’ve come across somebody wearing one. There are times when the bare bones plot to Dead Reckoning, which is indeed very Part One despite being nearly three hours, can start to feel kinda goofy. Or when you might think “sigh, movie” with the way it seems to make all of its badass female characters notably less cool as the movie goes on. Or when you look at your watch and think “and there’s still an hour and a half more?” But overall, Dead Reckoning seems fairly dedicated to the idea that it must be first and foremost fun. The set-piece action sequences — and there are maybe half a dozen or so of them — are built for maximum good times. There is not just spectacle but a cleverness and humor with how, for example, the car chase stretch is filmed and all the little beats that give it texture. And with how the sequences related to the aforementioned train are all well thought out and well-executed.

Cruise is, of course, part of why these scenes work. He is able to make Ethan Hunt’s various feats look difficult, look like something that someone might get hurt doing. But he also accomplishes the tasks — climb this thing, jump off that thing, fight this guy while hanging on to the side of a train — with finesse. I really did get pulled into the choreography and evident skill of the action in a way that I don’t always in big CGI smashy movies where unkillable guy fights immortal other guy.

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is, like all of these Mission: Impossible movies, a good time in the moment with a completely forgettable story providing enough scaffolding to support some really awe-inspiring stunts. B

Rated PG-13 for maximum audience — I mean, for intense sequences of violence and action, and for some language and suggestive material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Christopher McQuarrie and written by Erik Jendresen and Christopher McQuarrie, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is two hours and 43 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Paramount Pictures.

Featured photo: Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One

After the Funeral and Other Stories, by Tessa Hadley

After the Funeral and Other Stories, by Tessa Hadley (Knopf, 240 pages)

The essayist Lorrie Moore once said that a short story is a love affair, compared to a novel, which is more like a marriage. That’s one way to put it. I’ve always thought of short stories as an amputation, with some vital part of the tale rudely cut off just as it’s getting good. If I’m invested in a character enough to read 5,000 words, I’d appreciate another 70,000 or so.

That said, contemporary short stories are perfect for summer reading, when the attention span is as short as the days are long. And if you can forgive her the depressing title, the new collection by acclaimed British novelist Tessa Hadley provides a summer smorgasbord of family drama that might be comically or tragically familiar.

Many of these pieces have been published in The New Yorker, including one of the best, “The Bunty Club,” which revolves around three middle-aged sisters who have returned to their childhood home as their mother lies near death in the hospital.

Hadley’s imagery is lush. She writes of one sister, getting into bed mid-afternoon to read a George Elliot novel: “She couldn’t remember the last time she had laid down to read during the day — it was like being a teenager, time stretching out voluptuously in all directions.”

On a man and a woman interacting in a cafe: “[She] felt the old tide of flirtation rising between them, promising to lift her from where she was stranded.”

Here’s how she describes one sister: “She had an aura that was just as significant as if she were a celebrity, improbably washed up at the seaside, having shaken off her entourage of admirers or detractors, thirsting to be left alone with her luxuriant inner life.”

“The Bunty Club” was the secret society the sisters had in their childhood when they met in a shed and swore to each other “not to do good and never to help people.” It was in danger of being forgotten forever until one sister came across an old box with their meeting minutes (they were exceptionally organized as girls), badges and “lists of enemies and bad deeds.” Again, I would gladly read 60,000 on that.

The other stories in the collection follow the pattern of familial angst and intimacy, often in the context of ineffectual men and mothers.

In “My Mother’s Wedding,” the narrator reflects on her relationship with her mother, who is about to marry a much younger man she met “when both reached for a paper sack of muesli base at the same time” at a natural food store. An intellectual who had “never properly come up against life in its full form before,” the groom-to-be seems as uncertain about the wedding as the bride’s daughters, who have their own ways of coping (or not) with their mother’s unconventional lifestyle.

In the titular story, a family that is basically run by two precocious girls deals with the death of the father, an airline pilot who hadn’t been all that involved in their lives. In “Funny Little Snake,” a stepmother unhappily tasked with returning a child to her mother is forced to rethink the reality of her own marriage and choices.

Hadley has a gift for parsing the difficulties of family life, particularly that of adult children and aging parents. In “Coda,” set in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the narrator explains that when temporarily living with her elderly mother, she shuns the handicapped-accessible bathroom downstairs in part because of the irrational sense that “if I used it, I’d be contaminated with suffering, with old age.” She goes on, “The truth was that every so often I just needed to be alone for a few minutes, not making any effort, or being filled up with anyone else’s idea of what I was.”

In this story, as in several others, the narrator has grown up relatively plain in the shadow of a beautiful mother. Also as in others, the narrator is a sophisticated reader: “For the moment, Madame Bovary was my inner life, stirred like rich jam into the blandness of my days.”

The 12 stories in this collection are achingly beautiful at times, and painful in places. Like much contemporary short fiction, a few may leave readers scratching their heads over the conclusion, or wishing for CliffsNotes, and readers unfamiliar with the U.K. may not recognize the places Hadley writes about. But women, in particular, will recognize the family dynamics for sure. A

Album Reviews 23/07/20

Fay Victor, Blackity Black Black Is Beautiful (Northern Spy Records)

This record is definitely in the same church if not the same pew as most slam poetry, and while I’m at this, if you’ve had the slightest interest in the ongoing saga involving my attending a Slam Free Or Die slam poetry event here in Manchester, I’m happy to say that the show’s organizer, Christopher Clauss, contacted me the other day and I’m hoping to get to their next show on Aug. 3, which will feature Chicago veteran slam poet Billy Tuggle. As for this album, it’s the Brooklyn-based composer’s first solo record in a thus-far 30-year career whose highlights have included distinguished prize awards, lots of performances in museums, jazz festivals and the like. Her trip is layering her own spoken word poetry and melodic soul/gospel vocalizations over techno, glitch, acid jazz, more glitch and various other beats, her lyrics intended to raise awareness about the things and public figures she holds dear (“Governorship/Senate” is dedicated to Stacey Abrams; the spooky-bizarre “Trust The Universe” to Sun Ra). Fascinating urban art piece, all told. A

Bloodstrings, Heartache Radio (Dackelton Records)

This one had me at “horror psychobilly” but even more so when I noticed they’re Germans. If anyone knows how to conjure drunken, boneheaded American-style punk aggression, it’s Europeans, especially when they’re from countries that aren’t France. This lot have been around since 2009 and mostly did a lusty Ramones-goth thing until the present, which finds the poor dears feeling reflective after losing a few friends to depression and such, which is always horrible, and so, instead of singing about cartoonish fantasy demons, the demons examined in this record are the real ones, for instance the demons of addiction in “The Bottle Talking,” a great little punker that sounds like No Doubt-era Gwen Stefani fronting Hole. The production here is absolutely sparkling, totally pro level, which makes the deranged thrasher “Colorblind” sound like the Runaways on a Green Day budget. Not a lot of punkabilly here, just nicely rendered hardcore for the most part, but there’s nothing wrong with that of course. A

Playlist

• Ack, I hate it, look, the next CD-release Friday is July 21, summer’s already more than half gone, where’s my confounded snowshoes? Ack, but it’s even worse, because look fam, it’s depleted-soil Led Zeppelin wannabes Greta Van Fleet, with their latest album of Zeppelin IV ripoff songs, Starcatcher! I saw a recent YouTube “reaction-style” video where some 20-year-old dude was, he swore, listening to Zep’s “Whole Lotta Love” for the first time, and he was surprised at how much he liked it. Like all olds, it’s impossible for me to believe that someone’s never heard that boring old tune before, but remember, fellow olds, these kids today aren’t listening to 50-year-old songs when they make out in their moms’ Toyota Camrys, they’ve got all kinds of commercial hip-hop and K-pop and Weeknd and Kings Of Leon songs on little thumb drives, and because of that, they don’t tune mom’s car radio away from NPR’s Marketplace or Sirius’s 80s On 8, and because of that, mom has no idea how vacuous and wimpy and empty their preferred music is, and that’s good, because you know what that is? It’s teenage rebellion, folks, kids exercising their right not to listen to Led Zeppelin and Def Leppard until they’re older, saving up all that “good stuff” until they’re old enough to appreciate it, so they can make reaction YouTubes and then immediately go back to listening to their Bruno Mars and Lorde “oldies records” and never have to listen to that old blues-metal nonsense again. See, kids today are smart; they know that Led Zeppelin is actual devil music, direct from H-E-double-toothpicks, and if they’re not careful, they’ll get sucked into the same Evil Dead time-space vortex that the guys in Greta Van Fleet did, which caused those dummies to try to rewrite Zep’s “Black Dog” every album until they get it sounding better than the original, which they obviously can’t, but look how hard they try! Anyway meanwhile, back at the column, the Fleets have graced us with a new song called “Meeting The Master,” and it’s basically Zep’s “The Rain Song” turned inside out and made into a quirky hat. I have no more time to discuss this, thank goodness.

• Ack, wait what, not a new Guided by Voices album, this cannot be, will Robert Pollard ever take a break from writing five boring new songs every 10 minutes and insisting on recording them? Ever see the end of the 1970s version of Planet Of The Apes, when Charlton Heston is pounding sand and cursing at the sky? Well, that’s me every 15 minutes, when I read that a new GBV album is coming out in time for mention in this column. If you’re keeping count, we’re now at eight GBV albums in three years, and this one’s titled Welshpool Frillies. The single, “Seedling,” is like an angular art-rock version of Yardbirds. It’s not totally bad, but you can tell Pollard wrote it on the potty in 10 minutes, like all his other songs. What-ever.

• Nils Lofgren is in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, which isn’t necessarily a reason to hate him. In between making Bruuuce albums he makes his own albums, like the forthcoming new Mountains, which is on the way to your pirate music feeds as we speak. In the leadoff single, “Nothin’s Easy (For Amy),” Nils sings like a cross between Willie Nelson and Neil Young, and the refried Americana-bluegrass underneath his voice is even worse. Enjoy, fans of Bruuuce!

• We’ll end the week with not particularly funny comedian/musician Jaboukie Young-White’s new album, All Who Can’t Hear Must Feel, featuring the single “Goner,” whose haunted-house-meets-industrial beat is, I must admit, pretty gosh-darn above-average.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Drinking the blues

We had just come home from a long trip, and I’ll admit that I was a little out of it. Jet lag and a week of over-indulgence had definitely taken a toll on me. And yet I made a surprisingly good decision — there was still time to go to my usual exercise class at the gym and try to clear some of the fog from my brain.

A less good decision was eating two bowls of coleslaw before I left the house.

An hour later found me tripping over my feet and frustrating one of my workout friends.“You are really out of it tonight,” he said, not unkindly. “What’s the problem?”

“Six time zones and a bellyful of coleslaw,” I told him, which stopped us both in our tracks, because that is probably the best title for a blues album ever: Six Time Zones and a Belly Full of Coleslaw

Our theme this week is the blues.

Blueberry Syrup

1¾ cups (250 grams) frozen wild blueberries, the kind you have in your freezer to use for smoothies.
1¾ cups (250 grams) sugar
Juice of half a lemon

In a small saucepan, heat the blueberries and sugar over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the mixture comes to a boil. Let it boil for a few seconds, to make sure that the sugar has thoroughly dissolved. Because the blueberries started out frozen — Well, they didn’t start out that way. They were young once, and had hope and joy in their hearts, napping in the dappled sunshine, listening to birdsong. — At any rate, because the wild blueberries started today frozen, their cell walls have been pierced by large ice crystals, and they will give up a surprising amount of juice. During this syrup-making process, if you wanted to help things along with a potato masher, who could blame you?

Remove the blueberry pot from the heat, and place a fine-meshed strainer on top of it. Squeeze half a lemon into the mixture. You could use a hand-held, nut-cracker-looking juicer, or one of those reamers that look like a primitive medical device, or even the ends of some kitchen tongs to get all the juice out of the lemon. Because you remembered to put a strainer on top of the pot, you don’t have to worry about getting seeds or pulp into your blueberry mixture. Stir the lemon juice into the blueberry sauce.

Use your strainer to separate the cooked berries from the syrup. Squash the pile of berries with the back of a spoon — a little, a lot — it’s up to you. (Don’t throw them out, though. You have just made very nice blueberry compote to have on toast or stirred into yogurt.) After 15 minutes or so, transfer the syrup to a bottle. It will keep in your refrigerator for several weeks.

Blueberry Margarita

2 ounces blanco tequila – I’ve become very fond of Siete Miserios, lately.
1 ounce blueberry syrup – see above
¾ ounce fresh squeezed lime juice

Combine all three ingredients over ice in a cocktail shaker, then shake until very cold. At this time of year, it will be ready when a thin layer of frost forms on the shaker.

Strain into a cocktail or margarita glass. If you wanted even more ice, the Margarita Police would not stop you.

Sip, sitting in your garden or on your deck (or surreptitiously on a bench in the park), listening to Carlos Santana, who, unlike Life, never disappoints.

Unless you’re a purist, this is everything you want in a margarita at this time of year. It is sweet and sour and slightly smoky and utterly refreshing. Blueberries play extremely well with sour citrus fruit. We tend to pair them with lemons, but they are more than happy to dance with limes. Tequila too, has an affinity for citrus. Even the concept of this drink is refreshing.

Salud.

Featured photo: Blueberry Margarita. Photo by John Fladd.

In the kitchen with Charley Moore

With 26 years of experience, Charley Moore is the executive chef at 603 Brewery in Londonderry. He started in the industry as a dishwasher at Yo Mommas in Nashua before working as a cook at Villa Blanca for 12 years, which is where he met his wife. Originally from Florida, Moore has always been passionate about food. He and his family moved to New Hampshire when he was around 8 or 9 years old for new opportunities. His grandmother would cook family meals and his mother enjoyed experimenting in the kitchen. Following in their footsteps, Moore enjoys cooking at the brewery and at home for his family.

What is your must-have kitchen item?

Well, like any chef, your chef’s knife is one of the most important things you have in your tool kit, so that’s a big go-to for me. I am very mindful of my knives … I take care of my knives personally. I sharpen them all, so my chef knife’s my most important tool.

What would you have for your last meal?

I think I’d probably keep it something simple. I’m originally from Florida [and] one of my family’s favorite go-to meals is fried chicken, potato salad, corn on the cob. The feeling of home is probably more important than something else, so homestyle cooking.

What is your favorite local eatery?

One of the places my wife and I love to go to is the Hanover Street Chophouse. I was definitely gifted to go work there for a while, which was a great opportunity

Name a celebrity you would like to see eating in your restaurant?

There would probably be two I’d really like to see as far as culinary goes. I’d like the late Anthony Bourdain … [and] Guy Fieri would be a cool one for me to cook for. I think he’d really enjoy it.

What is your favorite thing on your menu?

Our top [seller] is our chicken sandwich. I think that’s probably one of the best things on our menu because it’s so versatile you can make it however you want. … It can go as crazy as your imagination.

What is the biggest food trend in NH right now?

Korean barbecue style food is really popular right now. I know New Hampshire is getting more into the smoked-style food, which is really cool because we’re definitely picking up on that trend.

What is your favorite thing to cook at home?

Being a chef you get asked this question a lot. … The things I like to cook the most are what make everybody happy. … Making desserts is really satisfying … I love making desserts. My kids would probably tell you chocolate mousse because that’s what they ask for almost every birthday, but I also make a chocolate lava cake that’s really good that my family also loves to eat on a regular basis.

–Mya Blanchard

Featured photo: Charley Moore. Courtesy photo.

Let’s spice things up

NE Hot Sauce Fest comes to Hampton

By Maya Puma
food@hippopress.com

Hot sauce companies from across the Northeast will come together for the second annual New England Hot Sauce Fest, happening at Smuttynose Brewery in Hampton on Saturday, July 29. The event is organized by Gabe DiSaverio, owner of his own hot sauce company, Spicy Shark.

“I wanted to put New England on the map as a spicy region and bring this unique event that has never been done before in New England,” DiSaverio said.

DiSaverio opened the Spicy Shark six years ago and travels across the country to different hot sauce festivals to sell his product.

“There were so many people that helped us early on to get exposure … and I was able to get our sauce out to a lot of different places,” he said. “I really wanted to provide that for Northeast hot sauce companies.”

The event is bigger this year with an addition of nine new hot sauce vendors, bringing the total number to 35. Some vendors include Angry Goat Pepper Co., Butterfly Bakery, High River Sauce and Bodacious Heat. Each vendor will be giving attendees free samples of their products. There will also be 10 food trucks, including Seacoast Street Eats, the Big Bad, Wing-itz, Tacos & More, Chubba Wubba’s, Sweeties, Bees and Thank You, Palms to Pines Empanadas and Kona Ice of the Seacoast. Smuttynose Brewery will also be serving beer.

Festivities begin at 11 a.m. with the first spicy eating contest, the Jalapeño Contest, at noon, where local participants compete to see who can eat the most jalapeños in 10 minutes. The next event of the day will be the SAGES family-friendly magic show. Another spicy eating contest will follow at 1:30 p.m., where contestants are challenged to eat progressively hotter chicken wings. According to DiSaverio, this contest is inspired by the celebrity interview show Hot Ones and features sauces with five levels of spiciness, beginning with Spicy Shark’s hottest sauce. Each contestant must eat two wings with each sauce. Those who make it to the fifth level will compete in a challenge of who can eat the wings the fastest. The super hot contest is next, at 2:30 p.m., and participants will eat progressively hotter hot peppers, beginning with a jalapeno and ending with a California reaper. According to DiSaverio, the California reaper was crossbred by Ed Curry from PuckerButt Pepper Co., and it is widely known as the hottest pepper. Curry recently created a new pepper called Pepper X which is only available through PuckerButt hot sauces and their Duel Chips.

“Picture a potato chip that’s completely covered in Pepper X powder,” DiSaverio said. “One of those would destroy a regular human being.”

“[This] has never been done before, a Pepper X chip challenge,” DiSaverio continued. “These six people are going to be on stage to see who can eat the most pepper and chips in an hour, but also, maybe, [to see] if one of them can break the all-time record of most Pepper X chips eaten.”

The Duel Chip challenge will take place at 3:30 p.m. and is a new addition to the festival.

Back from last year are MCs Bella and Dark from YouTube channel “Heat 101,” and there will be a DJ playing ’80s music all day.

The majority of the festival’s proceeds will go to two nonprofits, the Seacoast Science Center and the Blue Ocean.

“The Spicy Shark [got its name] because I’m a scuba diver and very passionate about shark conservation, so when I put together the festival, I wanted that to be a piece of it,” DiSaverio said.

According to Jen Kennedy from The Blue Ocean, the funds will support ocean research and education programs in the Seacoast region.

Karen Provazza, chief communications officer at Seacoast Science Center, said, “We are so grateful to be part of this festival and will use the funds to expand our education program.”

2nd Annual New England Hot Sauce Festival
When: Saturday, July 29, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. (opens at 10 a.m. for VIP ticketholders)
Where: Smuttynose Brewery, 105 Towle Farm Road, Hampton
Cost: $11 general admission and $15 for VIPs
Visit: newenglandhotsaucefest.com

Featured photo: New England Hot Sauce Fest. Courtesy photo.

Meet me at The Spot

Breakfast and lunch restaurant to open in Hooksett

By Mya Blanchard
mblanchard@hippopress.com

Your potential new favorite place to grab breakfast or lunch is set to open in August in Hooksett. The Spot Eatery will serve coffee, espresso, smoothies and juices, pastries, breakfast and lunch sandwiches as well as scrambler bowls and salads, Monday through Saturday from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. They will have seating as well as a grab-and-go section.

“It’s definitely been a lot of work,” said Sarah Lucas, owner of The Spot Eatery. “There’s been a lot of setbacks … and we didn’t realize how not up to code everything was [in] the place we took over, so it’s taken a little longer than we hoped for, but it’s also been kind of fun at the same time to be able to create something from scratch.”

Lucas comes from a family with lots of restaurant experience, and will be running The Spot with her mother, Jill Lucas.

“My entire family has always been in the business,” Sarah said. “My parents have owned a couple different places around New Hampshire, Vermont and … Pennsylvania.”

Her family eventually settled down in Hooksett, where Sarah was born and raised. She went on to graduate from Keene State College with a bachelor’s degree in business management.

“I [didn’t really] have much of an idea of what I wanted to do,” Sarah said.

When the owners of Bavaria, the restaurant where Jill worked, retired in September 2022, Jill Lucas started her own online business, Nana’s Cookie Jar. It was a month or two later when Sarah Lucas got the idea to also start something of her own that would also serve as a physical location for her mother’s cookie business.

“They decided to retire, so we decided it [was] time to do something for ourselves, and then decided to open The Spot,” Sarah Lucas said. “My parents have always wanted to do a breakfast [and] lunch spot.”

The original idea was to set up shop in the former space of Bavaria, but upon noticing an open space below that was smaller and would require less work, Sarah decided this would be the best fit. She felt the location on Hooksett Road near a daycare and a bus stop would see a good amount of traffic to bring in business, especially with people passing through on their way up north, while being far enough away from the main area of town to be an option for people on the outskirts and in surrounding areas.

“I wanted it to be a spot [where] people can come and just kind of hang out [or] do some work,” Sarah Lucas said. “The college kids from SNHU can come and do homework and group projects and stuff like that, … so I thought, like, ‘Oh, just go to The Spot,’ like it’s just a spot that everyone goes to.”

The Spot Eatery
Where: 1461 Hooksett Road, Hooksett
Opening: August
Hours: Monday through Saturday, 6 a.m. to 2 p.m.
More info: thespoteatery.com

Featured photo: Photo courtesy of the Spot Eatery.

Rain or shine, the ribs go on

The Great American Ribfest returns

By Delaney Beaudoin
food@hippopress.com

The Great American Ribfest and Food Truck Festival will be returning, rain or shine, to Merrimack from Friday, July 21, to Sunday, July 23. Hosted at The Biergarten, the festival will feature a plethora of food and beverage trucks, hours of live music, and numerous goods and vendors.

Concerts will be held all three nights of the festival, with performances from Ben Cote Band and Slaughterhouse on Friday, FirstBourne, Lexi James and the New Hampshire Army National Guard Rock Band on Saturday and American Idol finalist Alex Preston on Sunday.

Food truck options cover a wide variety, including lobster rolls, fried dough, shaved ice, poutine, french fries, gyro, crepes, kettlecorn, street tacos, cannolis and more. Additionally, vendors will be selling goods and services such as CBD oils and salves, beef jerky, travel services, clothing, hot sauces, condiments and rubs, jewelry, sunglasses, home improvement products and more.

There will also be a 5-mile run taking place Sunday morning, which participants can register for online. The run will take place in person, with the option of participating virtually. Additionally, runners under 8 years old can register for the Stonyfield Lil’ Piglet Run.

The event will be hosted for the third time since 2019 by the Rotary Club of Merrimack, and proceeds from the event will benefit the club.

“[The Great American Ribfest] is something that the Rotary Club does for a number of reasons, partially to have an event that the community can come to and gather around and enjoy each other’s company and celebrate a little bit, but also we do raise funds with it and the funds help us to do things both in our community and internationally,” said Bob Best, a Rotarian in the club. Traditionally, the Rotary Club has utilized fundraising efforts to create thousands of dollars in scholarships locally, invest in the improvement of local parks and facilities, and a number of other community service projects both locally and internationally.

New additions for the 2023 festival include an expanded kids area consisting of a mobile base camp, several bouncy houses, a mobile video game trailer, ax throwing, face painting and more. New features for 2023 also include the addition of several food trucks including 603 Smok’n Que, Northeast Smokehouse, Travelin Bones and the offering of an exclusive People’s Choice Rib Sampler. The sampler allows participants to sample two ribs from five different barbecue vendors. According to Best, there are a number of new activities this year that had previously been taken away due to Covid-19 restrictions,

“There’s been different things that have been added and taken away over time,” Best said. “There had traditionally been a lot of things for kids to do … and when Covid came, there was no real way to keep those clean and sanitary, so they had to go away,” Best said. As we’re able to find partners that can do those things, you add them back in and so there should be a lot for the families to do. It’s not just coming for a few ribs and then leaving — you can listen to music all day and the kids can play and do a bunch of different kid activities.”

Ribfest
Where: The Biergarten, Anheuser-Busch, 221 Daniel Webster Hwy., Merrimack
When: Friday, July 21, from 4 to 8 p.m.; Saturday, July 22, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Sunday, July 23, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Tickets: Tickets can be purchased in advance for a lesser fee, or bought at the gate if available. Tickets will be available for pre-purchase until 11:59 p.m. on July 20. Ticket prices vary depending on day, age, and level of ticket purchased. Friday tickets start at $32.50 for pre-purchase general admission for adults; kids age 10 to 16 get in for $14.50 prepaid, and kids under 10 get in free alongside a paid adult. Saturday and Sunday ticket prices start at $12 for adults (ages 16 to 59) prepaid while kids under 16 enter free with a paid adult. Parking will be offered on site for $20 a day, or offsite 3/4 mile away for $10 a day. The final 90 minutes of the festival on Saturday and Sunday offer free admittance.
More info: Attendees are permitted to bring folding/lawn chairs, blankets for sitting on the ground, and one bottle of sealed water per person. Items prohibited include outside food or beverage (including alcohol), coolers, tents, scooters, wagons and carts, as well as pets. For more details visit greatamericanribfest.com.

Featured photo: Great American Ribfest.

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