Food and Drinks Worth Driving To

Kennebunkport was the Sunday drive of my childhood, and I still get a little smug knowing what hides at the end of Goose Rocks Road. Earth is the restaurant at Hidden Pond, a resort tucked into the birch woods a couple of miles back from the beach, and dinner here does not feel like Maine so much as a very good dream about Maine - lanterns in the trees, gardens right outside the kitchen door, a dining room that is half greenhouse and half treehouse.

The kitchen cooks from those gardens and from farms up the road, and the menu is a three or four course affair that changes constantly. The scallops and the tuna sashimi are the plates people photograph, but the sleeper hit is dessert: order the doughnuts and thank me later. This is the most polished dinner on this list by a mile, and somehow it still feels like a summer camp for grownups rather than a jacket-required room.

Practical notes: it is dinner only, from 4:30 to 9, and closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Reservations are essential - resort guests get first priority in peak summer, so book as far out as you can and treat a mid-week table as a win. The resort is seasonal, so confirm the calendar before you make the drive. Save it for an anniversary, a milestone, or a Tuesday you want to feel like one.

For years, Tree House was the brewery people crossed state lines for - the parking lot lines for cans of Julius are craft beer folklore at this point. Their Tewksbury campus, built on a former country club just south of the New Hampshire line, is the easiest way to understand the fuss: the beer that half of New England used to queue for is poured at the source, in a lodge-style clubhouse that looks like it wandered out of a national park.

What makes Tewksbury the location worth driving to is the trifecta. There is the beer, obviously. There is The Course at Tree House, a real nine-hole golf course wrapped around the property - you can book a tee time, play a round with a fresh pour, and pretend you are at a member-guest with much better beverages. And there is Tree House Pizza, their crispy-bottomed, pillowy-topped take that splits the difference between New York and New Haven styles. Beer, golf, pizza, in whatever order the day demands.

Go with a plan: the pizza counter opens at 11 and waits can stretch to an hour or more on peak afternoons, so order early and let a flight fill the gap. The grounds are big, family-friendly, and dotted with Adirondack chairs, and the to-go coolers mean nobody leaves empty handed - in this house, a case in the trunk is considered a rule of the road.

Full disclosure: this one breaks my own within-an-hour rule. Bethlehem is closer to two hours from the Seacoast, and I am including it anyway, because this is the dinner I think about on the drive home from every White Mountains hike. That should tell you something about the cooking.

Cold Mountain Cafe is a small storefront bistro on Bethlehem's Main Street, women-owned and feeding the North Country since 1999. The menu is short, seasonal, and quietly ambitious - the kind of place where a mountain town gets a proper bean cake, a real cocktail, and art on the walls from people who live up the road. It has none of the gift-shop polish of the tourist strips a few notches south, which is exactly why the locals love it and why it stays feeling like a secret.

It is dinner only, 4 to 9, and closed Thursdays and Sundays - plan around that, because the room is small and summer Saturdays fill up. The move is to make a full day of it: a morning in Franconia Notch, a slow walk past Bethlehem's galleries and the old theater, then a table here as the light goes gold on Main Street. You will pass a hundred restaurants on the drive up. Keep going.