You will never go to the Student Prince . First off, it’s a 90 minute drive away in western Massachusetts – so far off, you might as well be teetering on a fiery lip overlooking the nothingness of the end of the world.

Who knows what spiny, lantern-jawed fish are fit to survive so far from Bostonian civilization.

But I braved it anyway. I hoped to do the foodie equivalent of resume padding. It was the last night of February – and the last night that Student Prince would be serving exotic game meats. Lipoff had tipped me off on yak, bison, elk, alligator, and boar in hearty preparations.

The trip wouldn’t have been possible without Lipoff’s battered-but-spunky Peugeot, riddled with quirks. The seatbelt, for example, is backwards: you pull up from the bottom left to affix it above the right shoulder.

After a delayed start, we arrived, 90 minutes later, in Springfield, MA. Student Prince is unabashedly German, and there’s a pleasantly institutional feel to the place. (Meaning established, not infirmary-like.) You think about how many years it’s taken to accumulate the beer steins on the wall, the knick knacks and ski lodge-esque wood paneling, and the loyal clientele – primarily white and older on the night I went, a score of families bonding.

Travel is surreal: I remember the tired, cheesy desperation of the ferry that shuttled me across across the strait from Dover to Calais. This wasn’t hopping between England and France, but the past 90 miles in the Peugeot felt inadequate to match the impossibility of where I sat.

Game meatballs

Alligator tail cutlet with spicy Creole sauce

Lipoff tore through the menu and ordered a storm of exotic meats. The dishes came, uniformly all pretty good – alligator tail cutlet with spicy Creole sauce ($8.95) tasted mostly of the sauce, and had a texture somewhere between chicken and fish. It wasn’t spicy so much as a highly flavored and salty, which made me think of my mother’s cooking. The game meatballs ($5.95) – composed from a variety of exotic game meats – had been finely ground and tightly packed. Swimming in a pool of gravy and sliced mushrooms, they were comfort food. Sautéed sugar snap peas almondine ($2.95) were tender and sweet.

Sugar snap peas almondine

Yes, it came with the little illustrated sign.

But I was clearly here for the game kebob. Chunks of buffalo, venison, wild boar, yak, ostrich, and elk arrived on a bed of spaetzle (a traditional German egg noodle) and a dearth of gravy.

Bison and elk, the framing meats, were the most successful. Finer grained and less gamey than yak and ostrich, they made me reconsider steak. Venison I’ve had before; the wild boar chunk we got had some tendon running through it, and suffered from hard-to-chew tastelessness.

A cross section of the elk - delicious!

Pickled herring was pronounced excellent by Lipoff (I’m not normally the biggest fan) and he also insisted on tacking on another order of fried potato pancakes, which came with apple sauce and sour cream, latkes style. The server tipped us off on eating them smothered with sour cream and doused in white sugar.

Finally, in over the top fashion (hey, I’d come all the way from Cambridge), apple strudel arrived for dessert, crowned with a warm ball of cream and studded with raisins. Being part honorary Jew, I obviously compared the apple strudel to noodle kugel.

Not bad for the end of civilization.

Apple strudel, I love you.

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