And really, how could bacon and oysters in the same bite go wrong?  You’d have to work pretty hard at it, but except for some serious oddities and head scratchers at Harvest Grille, in Manchester, VT, this decadent sandwich was largely successful.  But let’s start at the beginning.

Harvest Grille sits unassumingly near the center of Manchester, which seemed like a nice enough place to me, if not a complete illustration of cliche yuppie-dom, complete with a Ben and Jerry’s, specialty dog-treat bakeries, and outlet shopping centers with clothes still way out of my price range.  I and my traveling companions knew there would certainly be good eating around somewhere, but probably nothing particularly unusual or remarkable outside of what you would expect from a town full of summering suburbanites and tourists who would just assume it were ski season.  At least one store owner recommended Harvest Grille so that’s where we were.

For starters, I knew my Oyster and Bacon sandwich was my choice the second I saw it on the menu but it came with chips and not fries.  Frankly, there are times that call out for fries and I was ready to just substitute french fries for chips but then I saw the menu also had fries cooked in duck fat as a special item.  I don’t pass up duck fat so I got an order for the table.  The fries actually came out first before the sandwiches (maybe I should have been clearer with the waitress on my intent) and they looked promising at first, but were ultimately disappointing.

As you can see they came with peppers and onions (good) and were very heavily seasoned (good) but yet still needed salt (not so good).  More points came off for these just not being very crispy or crunchy and full of that fried potato goodness I want when ordering something like this.  A few more minutes of cooking or a lot more heat to really put some color on these would have made them much better.  Luckily when the check came I noticed they charged for a “side” order and not the full price which was listed on the menu, which was nice.  On to the sammie.

Like I said, I can’t imagine how you could make this not delicious.  The bacon was pretty typical stuff and cooked well for this sort of bacon-application: not cooked so far that it would shatter and break once bitten into, but still taken far enough to be crispy and succulent.  The oysters were also fried until they were crunchy on the outside and soft and wet on the inside, and thankfully, there were a lot of them.  This was a very full sandwich.

And yet it could have been so much better.  The bun was soft but still a bit too bready for my taste, and lightly toasting it would have made it perfect.  In addition, the sandwich came with the weirdest condiment ever.  I looked into the little cup it came in and was a bit confused by the…onion dip?  Like really thick onion dip made with Lipton’s Onion Soup Mix?  I dipped a chip in and sure enough, that’s exactly what it tasted like.  Needless to say I did not put it on my sandwich which had enough fat content as it was but everyone at the table was a little confused.

For a lunch place in southern Vermont you can probably do a lost worse than Harvest Grille and we did truly enjoy the service and the rest of the menu was full of stuff I would have liked to try.  Every dish we had seemed to need just a little bit of plussing-up and attention to detail to become something truly delicious.  I can’t say I’ll be back anytime soon because there are so many other wonderful places to eat in the area but if I were a local I would not at all shy away from stopping in from time to time for a cold drink and a hot sandwich.

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