“GOOD FOOD HERE,” read the worn sandwich board standing in the grass on the side of Vermont Route 100. I almost sped past it. My wife, Jean, and I were driving back to Brooklyn from Stowe, where we’d spent the past several days hiking, and it was, once again, lunchtime. We were taking the scenic route, decorated by fields burning orange and yellow with late-summer wildflowers and, beyond them, the thickly forested and aptly named Green Mountains. If we were up in those mountains, no doubt we’d be picnicking on summer sausage, Cheddy Topper cheese, Sungold tomatoes, and truffle-flavored BjornQorn¹. But we were down here, moving swiftly, without reliable cell service to check Google Maps and fully research our options. So, where to eat?

I hit the brake. I’d had a feeling. The place — the Old Hancock Hotel, in Hancock, Vermont — just looked right. A clearly historic building, its wooden slats were painted a faded red, and its wide porch fronted a jungly spray of goldenrod and a neatly trimmed lawn. It stood at one corner of the main intersection of what was clearly a tiny town, in a sparsely populated part of the state, and its continued existence after what looked like a couple of centuries (at least) meant it was likely a place where people — locals and tourists alike — actually went, which meant it had to keep up a certain level of quality and hospitality, which meant it was a pretty good bet Jean and I would find a pretty good lunch there. All of this went through my mind in a flash, so fast I could barely process it, and I took a right and turned into the parking lot of the Old Hancock Hotel. Jean remained skeptical.

Me, I was… hopeful? I’d been on countless road trips, three of them cross-country — including this epic one for the New York Times — and most of them in the pre–Google Maps era, in relatively undocumented parts of the world, or with unreliable cell service. And through trial and error, and much, much agonizing, I had generally made delicious discoveries: a patty melt in Iowa, fried oysters on the Washington coast, Lebanese food near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. My hit-miss ratio has not been bad!

But still the anxiety remains, and it’s an anxiety unique to road trips, which have unique constraints. Sure, you could plan out every food and gas stop on a long drive, but the joy of a road trip is found in improvisation and serendipity. You veer from GPS guidance to explore an intriguing country lane, let yourself get a little lost, stop at a farmstand, follow a handwritten sign to a petting zoo or ceramics shop — this is the point! But then… you get hungry. You don’t know if the diner you’re about to pass is the last eatery for the next 50 miles, or if it’s worth listening to your stomach grumble another 50 miles for the genius roadside barbecue joint you don’t yet know exists. On a road trip, where forward momentum dominates, no backtracking, sorry, you get one shot at each meal, so the potential for disappointment looms as large as the potential for enlightenment. With urgent need warping your decision-making process, how do you figure out where to stop and when to drive on by?

In Blue Highways, his classic 1983 road-trip travelogue, William Least Heat-Moon comes up with an “infallible” way to find “honest food at just prices” in the country cafes he wanders into during his exploration of America’s back roads: He counts the wall calendars.

Wall calendars, for those of you too young to have encountered them, weren’t just printed calendars you hung on the wall. They were, and sometimes still are, produced by local businesses, with images showing off, say, old Mustangs and T-birds repaired by the garage down the road, or farmhouses restored by a contractor who shares a last name with a good quarter of the area population. Tractor dealers and real-estate agents made them; so did accountants and toy-store owners. And since the calendars were essentially advertising, their creators distributed them freely. The more calendars on display at a cafe, the more popular and the more tightly woven into its community it clearly was.

For Least Heat-Moon, no calendars was the same “as an interstate pit stop.” One calendar and two calendars weren’t much better. At three, you start to sense quality: “Can’t miss on the farm-boy breakfasts.” Four: “Try the ho-made pie too.” Five: Gatekeep this one. More than five? Least Heat-Moon explains:

It’s a marvelous, if outdated, system whose chief weakness is that, to know what you’re in for, you first have to set foot in the establishment. You have to commit. (Unless you’re the kind of brave psycho who’ll get up and leave — are you?) You can’t, as the façade approaches at 47 miles per hour, peer through the glass to see if the 2026 Ace Hardware edition has been posted.

So how do you evaluate a 21st-century restaurant from a distance and in a matter of seconds? For me, a lot of this has become so instinctual that it’s hard to break down into discrete rules, but let’s give it a shot:

The Old Hancock Hotel checked all of these boxes (except no. 4). Established in 1788, according to the sign out front, it was old, but well-kept, with that inviting porch, landscaping that was attentive but not anal-retentive, and a busy parking lot. And “GOOD FOOD HERE” — that’s my ideal balance of hype and humility.

Inside the Heart of Hancock — which is technically the restaurant’s proper name — Jean and I entered and were greeted by a young woman with light-colored eyes and a Thrasher T-shirt; she walked us through the dining room, past the counter stools and the library, to the porch and sat us right next to a flower box, with a view of the intersection and the greenery beyond. The menu wasn’t surprising — burgers and sandwiches, pizza, a kielbasa grinder — but then it didn’t need to be. We weren’t there for tweezer cuisine. We ordered, and while we waited for a food, I sipped on a root beer, Jean on a Coke, and we watched cars come and go on Route 100. Sometimes they’d turn, and sometimes they didn’t. At one point, an ambulance roared by, its siren diminishing quickly in the distance. I got the feeling we were doing exactly what people here had been doing for 200 years or more — observing the passage of time and the doings of humanity from a comfortable position in what was once and in some ways still is the precise middle of nowhere.

My BLT was just what I wanted, on toasted homemade white bread, with its constituent elements in proper proportion. (Note: Too much bacon ruins a BLT.) The fries were hot and crisp. Jean’s burger was a burger, no more, no less. “It tastes like meat” is how she praised it. Have we had better? Sure, but we’ve also definitely had worse. Simply put, however, this lunch fulfilled the promise of the Old Hancock Hotel’s advertising: This was good food here. But more important, this lunch was the right lunch — “honest food at just prices,” as William Least Heat-Moon put it. Which, ironically, means it was indeed the best road-trip lunch I could have hoped for. I just hope they don’t put that on a sign out front.

Do you have any rules for picking a road-trip stop? Let us know at [email protected]!

I have been eating chef Arthur Grigoryan’s food for years, starting from when he did pop-ups at his brother’s garage, then a ghost kitchen where his pastrami pita became a viral sensation (F the haters!). So when he and his wife finally opened their brick-and-mortar restaurant, at Yerord Mas Bakery and Deli, in Glendale, where there’s a big Armenian population, I was extremely excited to try. Arthur’s pita is the best in the city, pillow soft (can literally sleep on it!) and great for any sandwich, or even by itself. We ordered the pistachio hummus and lentil kyuftah, a spiced red lentil patty that was so good that I could become a vegetarian and eat that every day. Then the pork belly and hangar steak kebabs, perfectly seasoned and juicy, cooked on a grill outside. There’s no takeout orders here, so get here early and be prepared to wait. Good food is a labor of love, and you can feel every bit of that at Yerord Mas. 

When Bill Addison recommended A T in Echo Park, I knew I had to try.  I was the first one there on a Sunday, so I got to spend time chatting with chef Andrew Ponce, learning how he honed his craft at Bestia and Bavel. The kanpachi and uni tostada with salsa negra is a big hit, and I was impressed by the homemade tortilla, which was light, airy, crispy, and still holds all that fish without breaking. Then a Ratatouille moment with the crispy beef tacos, which transported me back to junior high and high school (shouts to Arcadia High Class of 1996!). These tacos reminded me of cafeteria food in the 1990s, but with elevated ingredients. Will be back to try more dishes like the crispy duck mole, and a preview of the fall — a lamb birria, according to chef Ponce.