Dot’s

Review by: Michael Stern

Dot’s is back and every bit as good as ever. After getting slammed by Hurricane Irene in 2011, it rebuilt and now offers river-view seating in a dining room adjoining the old diner. (It’s hard to imagine that the river far below ever flooded through the restaurant high above.)

Unchanged in attitude, Dot’s remains a good blue-plate lunch room with a menu of soups and sandwiches and hot plates of turkey, roast beef, meat loaf, and pork roast. While Southwest chiliheads wouldn’t recognize Dot’s chili as their beloved bowl of red, it is true Yankee chili, and it is terrific. The menu calls it “Jailhouse Chili,” but it’s most respectable. Thick with great clods of beef and just enough beans, it is lip-tingling spicy but not ferocious. It comes as a cup or bowl under a mantle of melted cheese.

Burgers are thick, hand-pattied beauties, served on high-quality buns, available with cheese and/or bacon and at one memorable recent lunch with cheese, bacon, and barbecue sauce. On the side you want a milk shake, scooped and blended the old-fashioned way. Dot’s shakes are so good that at breakfast a while back we noted a nearby couple getting vanilla shakes to go with their over-easy eggs and bacon.

In fact, breakfast just might be the great meal of the day, with a full menu of eggs, biscuits, muffins, French toast, and breakfast sandwiches. It’s the pancakes we adore. You can get them plain, studded with blueberries, apples, bananas, or a multi-berry mix known as berry berry. Berry berry batter contains an impossible number of blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries. Each one retains its individual flavor, and the bunch of them together, packed into Dot’s fluffy cakes, are a flapjack epiphany. With a spill of local maple syrup, they’re a must!

What To Eat

Chili

DISH
Berry-Berry Pancakes

DISH
Fish and Chips

DISH
Bacon Cheeseburger

DISH
Hot Turkey Sandwich

DISH
Layer Cake

DISH
Cherry Apple Crisp

DISH
Meat Loaf

DISH
Blueberry Pancakes

DISH
BBQ Bacon Cheeseburger

DISH
Corned Beef Hash

DISH
Hot Fudge Sundae

DISH

Dot’s Recipes

Discuss

What do you think of Dot’s?

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