Syracuse, NY

We are leaving tomorrow morning for 36 hours in Syracuse (college trip.) Are there any places we shouldn't miss? We eat anything except meat. Thank you.

I would highly recommend you try the Egg Plant, where (assuming eggs and cheese are part of your diet), you can get some very fine breakfast items. They are known for (1) novelty omelets, including my favorite with peanut butter and banana (or jelly) and (2) grilled sliced honey buns, none of which is unique to the Egg Plant, but they do them very well.

Egg Plant Trivia: Formerly known as the All Night Egg Plant, it was originally located near campus; now it is a 15-minute drive away, in a strip mall off Erie Boulevard, and is technically in East Syracuse.

The Egg Plant
5781 Bridge St.
East Syracuse, New York
Phone: (315) 446-8178

We were staying somewhere outside of Syracuse on Sunday and the hotel desk staff, who might just have wanted us to spend our $$ in the overpriced mediocre hotel restaurant, told us that we wouldn't find anything other than a few chains open on a Sunday night. Well, after a long, hard day, Sweet Baboo wanted some steak, and wouldn't have minded if the only place to get that was at Outback Steakhouse. He gave me just a few minutes to search, and I found, with the help of Yelp, a better option: a place in in Dewitt, NY, just on the south side of Syracuse, a great little place called the Dark Horse Tavern.

The bartender confirmed that they were one of the few local places open on Sunday nights. It's a very attractive, dark but warmly lit, cozy place, with a bar and about a dozen booths, with a great selection of wines, and really fine food. After regretfully ruling out steamed clams and sautéed scallops and shrimp cocktail (I said it was a long, hard day; by the time we got there, we wanted to eat everything!), we decided to share a crab-and-lobster cake appetizer; we both had the delicious sirloin steak with fried onions and homemade garlic mashed potatoes and gravy; we enjoyed the delicious warm bread that was served to us with olive oil and cheese and spices for the oil, and I tried a white and a red wine, both very good. The staff there was so friendly to us and appreciative that as travelling tourists we had picked their restaurant for the evening, and at the end they surprised us by bringing us a big wedge of chocolate-iced chocolate layer cake to take with us. They refused to let us pay for the dessert, so we tried to make it up to them in the tip. We also learned that under one management or another, the Dark Horse Tavern had been a GNR for that neighborhood for more than 50 years, and that many of the locals eat there several times a week.

Dark Horse Tavern
4312 East Gennessee Street
Dewitt, NY