Margaritas at Margaritas and Shakes at Shake Shack

My husband and I moved to New Hampshire in January 1986 from Ft Myers, Florida. There weren’t many restaurants in the area at that time, and we love to go out to eat. One restaurant stood out and became a regular. The Chart House, located at 1 Nashua Drive in a building that according to Nashua: Historic Places and Spaces, “once was the Jackson Mills station.” A fun aspect of the location during The Chart House time was the lower level giving you a unique view of the dam built to power the mills sitting adjacent to the red brick building.

Known for its great prime rib, we would take my mother-in-law there for dinner whenever she visited from New Jersey. She too, was a great lady who modeled as a young woman, opened her own hair salon in her fifties, and lived to be nearly 100 years old. In her time, she had many admirers, of whom four men loved her and she outlived all of them. Two of the men she married and the other two were constant companions of the woman who never learned to drive.

The restaurant today is Margaritas Mexican Restaurant & Watering Hole. We stopped in for a small birthday celebration and enjoyed some of the best tacos I’ve eaten. I went with the original fish tacos that the menu reads as “tortilla-encrusted fish, corn salsa, red cabbage pulled together with chipotle aioli.” It was some of the best fish I’ve had in a taco but opted to have the chipotle aioli served on the side to control the amount of heat I prefer. My husband went with the tacos del mar that he enjoyed, but rather than a tortilla, was served in bib lettuce which made it somewhat messy. I had a $6 margarita during the happy hour time that was perfect in price and taste. We loved the location, and the food was just what we were craving.

On another day, we visited the Tuscan Village in Salem, New Hampshire whose mission is “a true downtown-like cosmopolitan community experience.” If you haven’t visited, I urge you to go and explore this shopping, eating, and lake-side village, offering 15 restaurants all within walking distance from one another.

ShackBurger at Shake Shake. Screenshot image from website.

For this trip, I wanted to try the burgers at the Shake Shack that I’d heard about but didn’t have one nearby until the Salem location opened. Their mission is to “stand for something good,” and their goal is to “do the right thing.” It’s one thing to have honorable credos but what about the food?

A friend of ours had said their french fries were delicious. We made our way there on a sunny Sunday afternoon and the ample parking lots were packed with cars. Finding a spot, my husband and I walked over to the main street that is becoming the heart of all the shopping, eating, and staying experiences. We worked our way through the process of ordering, which can be done at a kiosk or at the counter where you could get help from a friendly server. Both of us went with the ShackBurger adding cheese, one order of fries to split and I got a vanilla shake with whipped cream and my husband went with chocolate.

While we waited for our food to be brought to our table, I enjoyed some people watching outside where so many were enjoying the sun and the strolls down the sidewalks. Inside what caught my attention were two families that were enjoying the Shake Shack experience. One family of five with the mom and dad and three little boys who were probably all under eight. They scooted into a booth with two boys on one side with dad and one on the other with mom. They were all too cute and the little one would pop his head up and look at us with a smile. At another table was a father sitting with three young girls probably just almost teens but not quite, and a young boy who was eight or nine. What made them so distinctive to me was the father sat at the end of the table and really just seemed to be enjoying the food, the chatter, and the camaraderie with the kids. I’m guessing one of the girls and the boy were his children and the others were friends. Still, it was such a lovely opportunity to see the charming normalcy of a parent enjoying his children.

Once our food arrived, I dived into the burger which was a good burger . You hope for that when you go to a fast food restaurant. The fries were adequate but not quite to the height of our friend’s feelings. But the shake was really good. The vanilla shake weighs in at 680 calories and the “house-made frozen custard with real vanilla,” was so filling we didn’t need dinner later that day. It’s not the kind of place we will probably go to again, but I wanted to try celebrity chef, Danny Meyer’s take on “fast-casual” food that opened as a “hot dog stand in 2001” in New York City.

Beverly Stoddart is an award-winning writer, author, and speaker. She is on the Board of Trustees of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project and serves on the board of the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism. She is the author of Stories from the Rolodex, mini-memoirs of journalists from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.