At the tip of Cape Cod, on a narrow strip of land 60 miles out to sea, lies Provincetown, Massachusetts—the end of the world (or, at least, New England), and the place I’ve called home for close to two years. Locals might call me a “washashore,” but I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

That’s because Ptown is (per capita) the queerest town in the country and one of the most sought-out vacation spots for anyone on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. It’s a place of extraordinary natural beauty (the dunes! the beaches! the gardens! the architecture!) as well as a playground for freedom and pride. The main drag, Commercial Street, runs the length of the town along the bay side and is home to the majority of the restaurants, clubs, shops, and galleries. During the summer, it overflows with people of all flavors of gender expression, kink, and sexuality.  

I landed in Ptown after 20 years in professional kitchens ended in epic burnout. In 2021, mid-pandemic, I sold Willa Jean, my restaurant in New Orleans, and headed north. Love was waiting, as was eventual heartbreak and, ultimately, recovery and healing in Ptown. 

I’m not sure if it was the sunset G&Ts with friends on the beach, the impromptu clambakes, or the slices of pizza I devoured in the street after raucous nights out, but eating my way through the city has taught me that to be a queer person in Ptown is to be part of a community. Every restaurant and bar contributes to this spirit, and these are some of my favorite places.

Nor’East Beer Garden

206 Commercial Street

The Nor’East Beer Garden is an unassuming outdoor space on Commercial Street that serves some of the best food and cocktails in Ptown. That’s because you never get bored: The culinary “theme” changes each season; this summer, it’s “light Italian,” which means you can savor dishes like mushroom pâté, burrata with fried dough, and minty brown-butter mussels. 

Sal’s Place

99 Commercial Street

Sal’s is by the water in the West End, which makes for spectacular views. Cash-only and often difficult to reach by phone, Sal’s is worth the trouble of getting a reservation, whether you’re booking dinner with friends or a date. Don’t skip the cauliflower Caesar with baby romaine, which I love to order alongside the charred octopus with garbanzo beans and smoked chile oil.  

Relish

93 Commercial Street

This inviting little bakery in the West End makes a variety of breakfast and lunch sandwiches—great for a handheld meal while strolling about, or as beach picnic fare—but I always go for the pastries. Spring for a wedge of key lime tart, or grab a cookie or a slice of coffee cake.  

Tea Dance at the Boatslip Resort

161 Commercial Street

Shirtless muscle gays, margarita-sipping drag queens, straight vacationers who love to party—Ptowners of all stripes congregate every afternoon at the ultimate pregame called Tea Dance (or just “Tea”), held at the Boatslip Resort from 4 to 7 p.m. The legendary bartender Maria reigns over the right side of the bar, the end closest to the water, and will happily start you off with the Planter’s Punch, their official cocktail. 

Strangers & Saints

404 Commercial Street

After Tea, many revelers flock to Strangers & Saints, housed in an incredible 1850’s Greek Revival homestead. The Ken Fulk-designed interior, and well-made cocktails make for a dependably enjoyable second stop. The food goes well beyond basic bar snacks with dishes like meatballs with salsa verde and cucumber kimchi (my go-to dish), which pair nicely with the charred shishito peppers or spicy Moroccan carrots. Eating at Strangers & Saints feels like being welcomed into the home of someone with impeccable taste who loves throwing dinner parties.

The Mayflower

300 Commercial Street

Long before Provincetown was an LGBT+ mecca, it was a Portuguese fishing village. Remnants of that past can be found at the Mayflower, where traditional Portuguese flavors endure in dishes like the Portuguese kale soup, made with spicy linguica sausage and red beans. Its obligatory sidekick is an order of garlic bread, and if you’re still feeling peckish, a dozen steamers, a Cape classic of brothy soft-shell clams that you dunk one by one in melted butter. Family-run with a no-reservations policy, the Mayflower has an old-school diner feel with a down-home friendliness to match. They also happen to make the best Manhattans in town.  

Irie Eats

70 Shank Painter Road

Provincetown has a large, vibrant Jamaican population—many first arrived as seasonal workers and wound up making Ptown a year-round home. A little off the beaten path is Irie Eats, which offers spicy Jamaican food that fuels my summer season. My favorite dishes in the regular rotation are the curry goat, jerk chicken or pork, salt fish, and oxtails—all of which come with rice and red beans, and slaw. It’s a grab-and-go vibe, but they do have a small outdoor seating area to soak in the sun (and the flavor). 

Pop + Dutch

147 Commercial Street

My personal “best sandwich shop” award goes to Pop + Dutch. Their slogan is “Sandwiches. Salads. Lube,” and their tiny market selling vintage, often slightly titillating textiles and art only adds to the appeal. The shop carries everything you need for a day at the beach or pool, including sunscreen and, yes, lube. The fridges are stocked with fresh potato salad, pimento cheese, chicken salad, dolmas, and a variety of drinks including a great Arnold Palmer. But the sandwiches are the main event (lately, I’ve been loving specials like turkey topped with Cool Ranch Doritos and ranch-flavored mayo). In the morning, they make a mean scrambled egg sandwich on brioche, but slugabeds be warned: It’s only available from 9 to 10:30 a.m.

Crown & Anchor

247 Commercial Street 

The grande dame of Ptown is Crown & Anchor, an entertainment venue that sits in the center of town. Housing six bars and entertainment venues, a restaurant, a pool club, and a hotel, it caters to visitors and locals of all types. In 2021, it got new owners who were determined to turn the complex into a safe (and profitable!) space for queer artists, musicians, and chefs, among others. The restaurant concept changes daily, while the oyster bar is open seven days a week. Brunch (Thursday through Sunday) is hosted by yours truly and features a New Orleans-meets-New England menu. Expect my famous biscuits and gravy, plus live drag performances fueled by talent and fantasy. 

Lobster Pot

321 Commercial Street

The bright neon lobster sign, one of the Cape’s most recognizable images since 1979, welcomes stampedes of seafood lovers to the Lobster Pot. Tanks of fresh lobsters? Check. Ocean views? check. Consistently friendly service? Check.

The plan of action here is to venture upstairs to the “top of the pot,” snag a seat at the bar, and kick things off with a perfect bloody mary. Then, it’s lobster rolls all around—or, for the lobster-averse, a wide-reaching menu of all sorts of fish and shellfish that you can order pan-roasted, grilled, stuffed, baked, blackened, fried, and more. There are also to-go dishes around the corner at Lobster Pot Express (5 Ryder Street). 

The Red Inn

15 Commercial Street 

Happy hour at the Red Inn is peak Ptown. From 2 to 4 p.m. daily, you can enjoy a raw bar menu, cocktails, and wine specials—all on a deck overlooking the beach that’s blessed with the best natural light in town. If oysters won’t cut it, chase them with heartier dishes like panko-crusted shrimp with sweet chili sauce, bacon-wrapped oysters, or shrimp remoulade salad. 

Helltown Kitchen

338 Commercial Street, Unit 3

Legend has it that Provincetown, because of its remote location, used to be a hideaway for smugglers and pirates. That’s why Puritans began calling it Helltown, a nickname that inspired the name of this restaurant that blends international flavors with New England ingredients. There’s truffle-scented, South American-spiced lobster risotto studded with peas and mushrooms. And if lobster isn’t it for you, Helltown does an incredible pork vindaloo that comes with mango chutney, basmati rice, and naan to sop it all up. 

Provincetown Brewing Company

141 Bradford Street 

Provincetown Brewing Company is fueled by community activism, and its business model reflects that. Not only does the brewery donate 15 percent of proceeds to LGBTQIA+ and Outer Cape causes; it also buys from queer-owned businesses and farmers. I’m big on their artichoke-cheese dip and jerk chicken sandwich, which I wash down with a flight of whatever PBC beers happen to be on tap. Keep an eye out for themed parties, trivia nights, “fag-out Fridays,” women’s night, and even a “yappy hour” for dogs. 

Atlantic House

6 Masonic Place

If Tea is where the party starts in Ptown, the Atlantic House (aka “A House”) is where it ends (or at least where last call happens). Most patrons have no idea that the establishment is a contender for the oldest gay bar in America, having been in continuous operation for over two centuries. It draws the biggest crowd of any bar in Ptown and has three spaces: little bar, macho bar, and the dance floor, where the lights are low, the music is loud, and little by little the clothes seem to disappear. 

Spiritus Pizza

190 Commercial Street

Spiritus pizza is an old faithful and has become the staple stop between the party and the after party—so much so that the hour from 1 to 2 a.m. is called “pizza dance.” Spiritus is the only late food option in town, and after last call at the bars, the pizzeria fills up with hungry crowds, who overflow onto Commercial Street to revel in what’s essentially a nightly pizza party. There are three New York-style slices: cheese, pepperoni, or Greek (cash only!).  

Chalice at the Land’s End Inn

22 Commercial Street

Chalice is a new favorite wine and beer bar on the manicured lawn of the Land’s End Inn, which sits atop the tallest point at the end of the Cape. Complete with a fire pit and stunning views of Provincetown and beyond, it makes an ideal pitstop on your way to Tea or pre-dinner cocktails.  Look out for the pink martini flag: If you see it flying, then Chalice is open and well worth the uphill walk.

The post Where to Eat and Drink in Provincetown, Massachusetts appeared first on Saveur.

Earlier this month, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program downgraded American lobster to its red list. According to the organization, which rates seafood based on criteria of sustainability and environmental impact, consumers should avoid red-listed seafood because its harvesting poses a threat to wildlife or the environment. In the case of American lobster, also known as Maine lobster, the at-risk wildlife is the North Atlantic right whale, among the world’s most endangered whale species (fewer than 350 remain). In Maine, the red designation—the latest in a series of setbacks to the industry—has taken locals from lobstermen to politicians by surprise, and they’re pushing back. 

The hazard that the lobster industry poses to right whales mostly stems from the design of the fixed-gear fishing equipment, which involves a buoy that connects to underwater traps or pots by vertical rope. Whales can get tangled in this rope, which, along with vessel strikes, is a leading cause of death for the animals. As bad luck would have it for the marine mammals, their habitat range overlaps with large commercial fisheries that use this type of fishing gear, including the Gulf of Maine lobster fishery (referring collectively to the thousands of commercial owner-operators catching lobster off the state’s coast).

According to Curt Brown, a commercial lobsterman and wholesale lobster company Ready Seafood’s marine biologist, the Maine fishery has overhauled many aspects of its harvesting practices to minimize risk to right whales. Improvements, some of which came as federal requirements, include installing weak links in the gear that would allow a tangled whale to break free, reducing the amount of rope in the water (which has eliminated more than 30,000 miles of line throughout the Gulf), and adding markers to their gear to help trace the location of any entanglement. “We believe strongly that we’ve done everything that we need to do and we’re still doing more. We’re doing our part,” says Mark Murrell, founder of seafood distributor Get Maine Lobster. By Brown’s estimate, these safety updates have collectively cost Maine lobstermen tens of millions of dollars—and he says their efforts have paid off.

However, a recent court decision indicates those efforts aren’t enough. In July, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled that the federal government violated the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act by neglecting to sufficiently protect the critically endangered North Atlantic right whales from potentially fatal entanglements. The National Marine Fisheries Service, also known as NOAA Fisheries, is also pushing for stronger right whale protections, last year initiating a seasonal ban on lobster fishing gear in a nearly 1,000 square-mile stretch off the coast of New England, among other new regulations. (The Maine Lobstering Union sued the federal government in response, but recently dropped part of the lawsuit). 

Maine’s lobstermen believe these setbacks to their livelihood place undue blame on them. “We continue to get pushed for something that we are not the cause of,” says Brown. “There have been zero documented mortalities of a right whale in Maine lobster gear ever, and there have been zero documented entanglements of a right whale in Maine lobster gear since 2004.” According to a 2021 data analysis published in the journal Oceanography, right whales are foraging less in the Gulf of Maine and increasingly shifting to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in eastern Canada. “Climate change and warming sea surface temperatures may be forcing right whales to spend more time farther north than they used to,” explains Jack Cheney, a researcher with the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. Maine fishermen, many of whom may not have even seen a right whale in years, “don’t understand why they’re getting penalized,” he says. “There’s no smoking gun.”

Still, that doesn’t mean the marine mammals are absent from Maine lobster management zones. Many North Atlantic right whale deaths can’t be attributed to any human activity in particular. According to a recent Seafood Watch press release, the majority of entanglements happen unseen and thus can’t be linked back to a specific location or type of gear. As a preventive measure, the program designated numerous fisheries using fixed-gear equipment in the habitat range of the whales as unsustainable. Multiple commercially caught species in addition to lobster were impacted, including black sea bass caught by pots in New England. Even though that fishery doesn’t operate during the times of year when right whales are typically in the area, Seafood Watch still downgraded the fishery’s fixed-gear harvesting method to red, Cheney explained. “They’re taking an extremely precautionary approach.”

But this approach “makes it appear that all of these fisheries are on equal footing,” Brown argues, pointing out that the Maine fishery has taken more steps toward sustainable fishing than many others along the eastern seaboard. Since the advisory team released its draft assessment in 2019, representatives from Maine, including Brown, have met with Seafood Watch assessors multiple times to present evidence of the specific measures the lobster industry has taken. “I think all the information we presented fell on deaf ears,” says Brown.

Cheney, too, was surprised that the entire Gulf of Maine received a blanket rating. “I don’t know why they couldn’t potentially rate specific areas along the Maine coast with different ratings,” he says, pointing out that Norway received 13 distinct ratings for farmed Atlantic salmon. 

Though Seafood Watch has issued controversial ratings before, red-listing the Maine fishery has impacted an iconic industry that not only is deeply associated with New England culture but also has a strong generational component and vocal stakeholders. (The Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative has launched a petition urging Seafood Watch to reconsider its rating.) “They [Seafood Watch] just kind of dropped it on people,” says Cheney, pointing out that the industry wasn’t given time to adjust its practices before the red designation was issued. 

It’s uncertain if advance warning would have ultimately made a difference in the rating. One risk-reduction solution, which NOAA officially proposed in July, will likely take years to implement: a transition to “ropeless” fishing gear. This equipment, which the Center for Biological Diversity is urging the federal government to require for trap fisheries by 2026, involves various methods of deploying and retrieving traps without the need for vertical lines or other ropes in the water.

Because ropeless fishing gear would no longer be visible from the ocean surface, the entire industry would have to integrate into a new GPS-based system. “Ropeless gear would [almost] solve it all,” says Cheney, but he recognizes how drastic of a technological jump the conversion would entail. “It’s like having bicycles and being like, ‘Okay, everyone’s going to switch to Teslas.’” The shift would also alter the very framework of the industry. “People use their extra traps to mark their territory so people don’t fish there,” explains Cheney. “If you get rid of that system and have just ropeless gear, it’s going to kind of throw the whole culture into disarray.” Not to mention, all the new technology would be a heavy financial burden for the lobstermen to shoulder—and make it cost-prohibitive for many young would-be entrants to join the industry. “There’s not enough federal support for the industry to make a major shift like they’re calling for,” says Ethan Morgan, the general manager of seafood restaurant Portland Lobster Company.

One positive change Cheney hopes will result from Seafood Watch’s red rating is to generate investment around projects aimed at further improving the sustainability of Maine’s lobster-catching industry. “I do think ropeless gear can happen eventually,” Cheney says, but notes that more funding and research and development are necessary before state-wide adoption will be within reach. “You can’t just change an industry overnight,” adds Murrell, and in the meantime, “people have families to feed.”

What long-term economic impacts Seafood Watch’s designation could have on Maine’s lobster industry is still unclear. “Red listing plants the seed in people’s minds that Maine lobster is not sustainable,” says Brown. Some retailers and restaurants, including Whole Foods and Red Lobster, consider the ratings in their sourcing policies. Murrell, however, mentions that since Maine lobster was red-listed, he’s only received one email from a customer asking about the designation. But no direct sales impact so far doesn’t mean the industry won’t feel the pinch going forward. “It may carry over into where people decide they’re going to be vacationing next year,” says Morgan, pointing out that lobster season draws significant tourism to Maine.

Cheney emphasizes that there are valid arguments on both sides of the debate over whether the Maine fishery’s red rating is warranted. “It’s just such a complicated situation. I don’t think there’s any hard, fast, right answer,” he says. “Expecting people to know the solution is unfair and unrealistic. It’s so complicated—and unprecedented.”

“You have thousands of people out there on boats,” adds Morgan, “trying to do the right thing.”

The post Why Did a Seafood Watch Group Red-List American Lobster—and Cause an Uproar? appeared first on Saveur.

This is not entry-level fish,” says a smiling Michael Benevides, standing in what has to be the United States’ largest purpose-built bacalhau chamber. It occupies one end of Portugalia Marketplace, the emporium Benevides opened with his father, Fernando, six years ago in Fall River, Massachusetts. The glass-enclosed, temperature-­controlled monument to salt cod is just one corner of the ambitious family market, but it perfectly represents the store’s mission to serve the local Portuguese community and to celebrate and share the culinary heritage of Portugal.

Benevides was born in 1977 on São Miguel, the largest island of the Azores, a chain of Portuguese islands more than 800 miles from the mainland. But when he immigrated to Fall River with his family at age 2, he settled into an already well-established community. The Portuguese have had a strong presence in southeastern Massachusetts since the 19th century, when many immigrated for jobs in the booming whaling and textile industries. Both of his parents worked in Fall River’s textile mills, and his father started a small import business on the side out of their garage. After word of the operation spread among the Portuguese community, he moved into a larger warehouse space to focus on Portugalia full time.

For its first 25 years, their customer base was almost entirely Portuguese. But Benevides became convinced that Portugalia could reach a larger audience. When a former textile mill came up for sale, Benevides envisioned something to rival international markets in New York like Sahadi’s, Zabar’s, or Eataly. But first he had to convince his father that quadrupling square footage and bringing a design-conscious shop to a small former mill town was a sound business decision.

RELATED: 6 Portuguese Pantry Staples We Can’t Stop Using

Serendipitously, Benevides’ plans for expansion coincided with a boom in Portuguese tourism from the U.S., and, with it, an increase in Portuguese cultural literacy and enthusiasm among non-Portuguese Americans. These days, Portugalia is humming. There are shelves of high-quality olive oils, tinned fish, jams, and the country’s largest selection of Portuguese wine. There are heaps of locally produced Azorean breads, like massa sovada (similar to challah) and bolos (fluffy disks similar to English muffins), alongside piles of smoky chouriço, linguiça, and morcela (blood sausage).

“I wanted to create a place,” he says, “where people would feel like, ‘Okay, wow, this is a really different representation of Portugal than we’re used to seeing.’ ”

The post How America’s Best Portuguese Market Ended Up in a Small Town in Massachusetts appeared first on Saveur.

1. Start in Lubec with breakfast at Fisherman’s Wharf, where, true to the name, you can watch fishermen bringing in the day’s catch from the deck. Don’t miss the fresh jam and the fried dough, a surprisingly light and fluffy treat that gets drizzled with molasses or maple syrup.

Fisherman’s Wharf
69 Johnson Street, Lubec, Maine
207/733-4400

2. Drive into Canada for a tour of Campobello International Park, FDR’s summer retreat. Tour the home where the family summered, which is furnished almost entirely of original pieces, including the original stove and kitchen tools the family used.

3. Quoddy Bay Lobster is our pick for lunch—lobster rolls are an obvious choice, but the fish chowder, haddock sandwich, and chicken salad are also standouts.

Quoddy Bay Lobster
7 Sea Street, Eastport, ME
207/853-6640

4. Visit the farm stand at Tide Mill Organics (open from 10–2pm on Saturdays) and pick up some of their fresh vegetables, yogurt, or grassy, flavorful milk.

Tide Mill Organics
91 Tide Mill Road, Township of Edmunds, ME
207/733-2551

5. About an hour west you’ll find Bartlett’s winery, where Bob and Kathy Bartlett are making nuanced fruit wines and a fragrant small-batch rum. Our favorite is the Blueberry Winemakers Reserve—an oaked wine that’s super fruity and full-bodied, with notes of vanilla on the nose and a dry finish.

Bartlett’s Winery
161 Chicken Mill Pond Road, Gouldsboro, ME
207/546-2408

6. Go for some small plates at Fiddler’s Green, where Chef Derek Wilbur serves an eclectic mix of global foods mixed with Maine specialties, like house-smoked mussels with mushrooms, salt cod fritters, and plenty of local oysters.

Fiddler’s Green
411 Main Street, Southwest Harbor, ME
207/244-9416

7. Stop off at the Liquor Locker in Southwest Harbor for some hard-to-find Maine beers to take home (or to enjoy as a nightcap), like Marshall Wharf’s Sorachi Ace Pale Ale or Baxter Brewing Co.’s Daughters Of Poseidon.

Liquor Locker
11 Seal Cove Road, South West Harbour, ME
207/244-3788

8. If you finish the evening early enough (and you still have room), head to Morton’s Moo for a scoop of grape nuts or ginger ice cream—both local favorites.

Mornton’s Moo
9 School Street, Ellsworth, ME
207/266-9671

9. Stay the night at the Blue Hill Inn and go for a breakfast of local treats like blueberry pancakes or crab quiche with eggs from the inn’s own chickens. Or go for coffee and the Platonic ideal of a sticky bun at Millbrook Company Restaurant and Bakery.

Blue Hill Inn
40 Union Street, Blue Hill, ME
207/374-2844

10. Drive out to Nervous Nellie’s on Deer Isle, where sculpture artist Peter Beerits has created a fantastical town named Nellieville straight from his imagination, peopled with life-size figures made of wood and metal. On the side, Beerits and his wife Anne make jams and chutneys in the nearby kitchen, in flavors from blueberry to hot tomato.

Nervous Nellie’s
598 Sunshine Road, Deer Isle, ME
207/348-6182

11. Have dinner at Aragosta in Stonington, where chef Devin Finigan is turning out beautiful, subtle dishes like local oysters grilled with fennel butter and housemade charcuterie. Eat out on the deck, where you’ll have a spectacular view of Stonington Harbor.

Aragosta
27 Main Street, Stonington, ME
207/367-5500

12. If you have room for dessert, trek over to Quietside Café on Main Street. Go for a slice of their monstrous blueberry pie, or if you’ve had enough blueberries, the creamy key lime tart with chocolate cookie crust.
Quietside Café
360 Main St
Southwest Harbor, ME
207/244-9444

The post Instagram Itinerary: Maine’s Downeast and Acadia Regions appeared first on Saveur.

Specialties: Cruise, Culture, Culinary

Office Contact:
Largay Travel
625 Wolcott St
Waterbury, CT 07605

Phone: 585-624-1285
Website:www.largaytravel.com
Email: travel@iedestinations.com

< See all SAVEUR Exclusive Offers

< Back to the SAVEUR Travel Advisory Board home

The post Trisha Iannazzi appeared first on Saveur.

On a Monday morning last fall in in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a group of inquisitive visitors to Curio Spice Co. stood in a semi-circle and passed around small jars of spices. Many of the offerings were familiar to the group: they work together at Oleana, one of the country’s foremost Middle Eastern restaurants, and they know their coriander from their cardamom. But then a new jar circulated and, one by one, like a string of old Christmas lights illuminating bulb-by-bulb, everyone’s facial expression changed: eyebrows arched, eyes widened. This was something new. “It’s like stars on my tongue!” someone exclaimed. “It’s like Szechuan Froot Loops!” offered another. It was sansho pepper, the electrifying Japanese cousin of Szechuan pepper, which tingles taste buds with bright, citrusy heat. Most common in Japan as a counterpoint to sweet, fatty unagi, sansho is not well known in the U.S, at least for now.

Presiding over this ceremony was the gently smiling Claire Cheney, who founded Curio in 2015 and opened it as a brick-and-mortar shop a year later. Her store is a curiosity cabinet stocked with familiar and unfamiliar herbs, spices, and accessories from New England and way beyond-Greek mastic, Maine sea salt, Madagascar wild voatsiperifery pepper, mortars and pestles, pepper grinders. One of Claire’s wisdom teeth is displayed in the shop as decoration; somehow it doesn’t look out of place.

Cheney has been interested in spices since she was the Local Foods Coordinator at Oberlin College’s student-run co-op. She became particularly enamored of saffron, going so far as to self-published a book on the crimson threads. Later, she worked as a manager at Oleana herself (and its sister cafe, Sofra), where here she was slinging sumac before Ottolenghi was a household name. All of this exposure to spices alongside previous experience in the specialty coffee industry got her thinking: do those who go out of their way to buy fair-trade coffee and single-origin chocolate do the same for spices? And even if they wanted to, could they?

Sensing a hole in the spice industry, Claire moved to Bangkok in late 2013, where she lived for roughly half a year, traveling throughout the region to develop relationships with small spice producers. It was this trip that provided the framework, both logistical and ideological, for Curio. She got to know cinnamon, turmeric, and mace growers in Sri Lanka and visited Kampot pepper farmers in Cambodia. When she came back to the U.S., she set to work crafting spice blends influenced by her travels, using ingredients largely sourced directly from small farms-organic and female-owned whenever possible. The small, light-filled shop on a busy Cambridge thoroughfare followed, as with further sourcing trips, including Japan, for that sansho pepper. Which brings us back to the semi-circle.

The Oleana staff came for a general spice tutorial, smelling, sampling, and asking questions, and Cheney was a fount of information, speaking passionately about seeds, pods, and berries the way others discuss wine. She proved points about freshness and terroir by offering side-by-side sniffs of two paprikas, one produced in southern Massachusetts and the other in California; so stark was the difference that they could almost be different products entirely. She then produced a pair of Sri Lankan turmerics, one pre-ground, the other processed in-house from dried slices of the bright orange rhizome. It was no surprise which was the more fragrant of the two.

After her students departed, Cheney worked on a batch of her newest spice blend, Edo, inspired by the Japanese seven-spice blend shichimi togarashi. Her sourcing trip to Sansyou Farm in Wakayama Prefecture, south of Osaka, yielded dried yuzu peel in addition to the sansho pepper, and both turn up in the mix. Also present are crushed chile Japonés, orange peel, black sesame, poppy seeds, Sri Lankan ginger, pickled sakura (cherry blossom) powder, and dried seaweed from Maine.

Cheney’s riff on togarashi strays from tradition, yet pays homage to the spirit of experimentation she found in Wakayama, where Sansyou’s husband-and-wife owners tinker with unusual blends and funky applications of their crop. Her first tastes of the farm’s sansho came, unexpectedly, mixed into lemonade and sprinkled atop Camembert. She says she left the farm with new relationships, sourcing partners, products and, most importantly, inspiration. Selling individual spices is an important part of what Cheney does, but, she says “I think there’s a certain amount of whimsical creativity that is really fun about spice blends.”

The back of Curio’s modest storefront is where Cheney does all the toasting, grinding, packaging, and labeling for her own blends. First in the grinder for the Edo blend went the sansho and orange peel, the combination of which released an unbelievable sharp citrus scent through the whole store. In a large mixing bowl, they were then joined by the remainder of the constituent parts. It was a colorful, playful mix, combining spices sourced ethically and directly from a small family-owned farm with ingredients from around the world, plus a nod to New England—a perfect distillation of all that Cheney wants you to explore.

The post A Visit to the Best Little Spice Shop in Cambridge appeared first on Saveur.

In August, we savor the last moments of summer by going out and exploring. Whether that’s going halfway around the world or getting to know our own backyard a little better, we try to make the most of the fleeting sunny season. This month, SAVEUR editors ate their way through New England, the US Virgin Islands, and Newfoundland. Here are the best bites.

Every August, my boyfriend’s family spends two weeks at a big house on Lake Winnipesaukee, and all of the cousins take turns cooking. This year, Ian and I were first, and we prepared a giant feast of pasta cooked with bacon and sungold tomatoes and sweet peppers and fresh summer corn, with a big peach-cherry crumble for dessert. All 18 of us were comfortably satisfied. By the end of the long weekend, I was sad to leave them all behind, but I had to get back to the office. Ian drove me to the airport in Boston, but on the way down, we took a detour off the interstate to hop across the border into Kittery, Maine. Ian’s aunt had recommended Bob’s Clam Hut, and we were not disappointed. We got a lobster roll, some fried oysters, and two orders of fries, and were back on the road to Boston in a half an hour, though I was glad to have had one last view of the sea. — Alex Testere, associate editor

The western U.S. was hit with a blistering heat wave, and Hurricane Harvey slammed the Gulf Coast, but New York City fared well this month, weatherwise. The temperature only broke the 90-degree mark once. So being stuck here this summer hasn’t been a bad thing. Chili may not come to mind in August, but football season is around the corner, and I had black bear loin from British Columbia in my freezer, a gift from Colin Kearns, the editor-in-chief at Field & Stream (where I work in addition to SAVEUR). And F&S had just the recipe to tempt me: a dark, earthy bear chili made with wild blueberries and black beans. A big mugful of black and blue chili with a dollop of sour cream brought the forest to my table. I’d wager that it would be delicious made with beef or venison, if you don’t happen to have a supply of bear meat. — Donna Ng, copy chief

The afternoon everyone traveled south to catch a glimpse of the total eclipse, I found myself far north catching a glimpse of a pretty incredible post-dinner sunset in the quaint village of Twillingate, Newfoundland, famous for its icebergs, charming locals, and fresh fish. I was on a week-long roadtrip exploring the island’s recent discovery of craft beer (they’re quite a few years behind the rest of North America) and eating as much fish as I could in between.

A local woman, Crystal, and I were walking along the beach in quite substantial winds, but it was too beautiful not to have dinner outside. The tide rose higher than anticipated, we hugged the edge of rock in an attempt to not get soaked by the incoming waves, and once we successfully crossed the narrow passage, found a lovely patch of beach where the fire was started. Dinner consisted of smoked mackerel, fried cod tongues, and a hearty cod soup with carrots and potatoes. All favorite family dishes Crystal ate growing up in the neighborhood. As the sun set, we grabbed some of Split Rock Brewing’s new IPA, a brewery that opened just the night prior, and hiked up the nearby hill to take in the view. — Michelle Heimerman, photo editor

Come nice weather, a certain tea friend of mine gets antsy and starts spending more and more of his time at his cabin in the woods of Connecticut. If all this sounds a little vague, it’s because I’ve been sworn to secrecy on revealing the friend’s name or exact location. Tea people are weird like that. But when you get there—hours after leaving home, then riding a Jeep up the mile of woodlands path, crashing through streams—it’s paradise. A cabin overlooking a little pond, tall trees stretching over picturesque bluffs, lush moss on the ground so you can walk barefoot forever, and little gathering nooks scattered everywhere you look.

Here we are at one at hour 3 of drinking in the sun. The tea is good. The view is better. The company is a bunch of friendly weirdos. Keep your beach days; I’m home. — Max Falkowitz, executive digital editor

When my family plans a vacation, I always choose the beach. This year, we visited the US Virgin Islands (Saint John and Saint Thomas) to relax, unwind, and soak up some sun. After a hike through the gorgeous Reef Bay Island, we re-fueled at Ocean Grill inside the Mongoose Junction shopping-and-dining complex, which also houses the standout taproom for St. John Brewers.

The highlight? Cocktails at The Longboard, an open-air gastropub with goes-down-easy frozen drinks and a strong selection of rum-forward classics (mai tais, Hemingway daiquiris). — Dan Q. Dao, deputy digital editor

The post Where SAVEUR Editors Traveled in August 2017 appeared first on Saveur.

At SAVEUR, our obsessive quest to unearth the origins of food and discover hidden culinary traditions sends us from our test kitchen in New York City to all the corners of the globe. This month, we went everywhere from the fields of Wisconsin to the English countryside, and ate everything from Danish porridge to crisp stuffed masa in Oaxaca.

Oaxaca, Mexico

There’s a word I learned my recent trip to Oaxaca: gordibuena. Roughly: Beautiful curvy girl. I learned it in the context of diving face-first into one of these beauties above, a gordita (less affectionately “little fat girl”) from the Gordita Lady in a market just outside Oaxaca City.

Gorditas are one of masa’s many miracles: disk-shaped lumps of masa, studded with nubs of pork skin and meat, fried until crisp, then cracked open, stuffed with meat, veggies, and salsa, and eaten piping hot. They’re more of a northern Mexico thing, but here, under an orange tarp in the morning sun, this Oaxacan masa master and her all-female crew expertly feed a never-ending stream of market-goers.

That crispy crust has its obvious pleasures, but it’s really the custardy interior of a gordita—moist but not mushy, utterly light in ways tamales rarely are—that won me over. It fused with ridiculously tender chicken tinga and offered just enough lettuce and pickled onion for crunch. It’s a beautiful foodstuff, distinct from a taco or a tamal or an empanada, despite the similar ingredients and preparations, and it underscores just how many forms and instances of joy masa can take.

It also gives me a greater appreciation for the term gordibuena. Just as we can respect and appreciate masa in all shapes and sizes, so it should be with people, si?

Chicago, Illinois

This month, my boyfriend and I took a trip to Chicago for a friend’s wedding. There was dancing and drinking and sneaking outside with our wine glasses to lie in the cool grass in the evening, but the best part was brunch the following morning. Another friend of mine lives in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, which puts her right at the heart of some of the city’s best restaurants. Lula Café is our usual go-to, with an ever-changing farm-to-table menu from their self-taught chefs, but with just one meal to go before our plane trip back to the city, we decided on something a little more … boozy.

At Parson’s Chicken & Fish, the wait for a table that Sunday afternoon was an hour and a half long, which sounds ludicrous until you remember you can spend that entire 90 minutes sipping a frozen negroni in a sunbeam on their back patio. And then you can sip one of the frozen dark and stormies. And then a frozen “purple drink” made with red wine, port, and orange blossom water. By the time you get officially seated, and you’ve ordered your fried chicken sandwich and your cream cheese and ham hock–stuffed hushpuppies, it’s like no time has passed at all—but then how did I end up with this sunburn?? —Alex Testere, associate editor

Reykjavík, Iceland

Food in Iceland is expensive. But the fish is super fresh, pulled from the North Atlantic’s waters; the lamb, from animals that range free on the highlands. Everything is small-scale, pristine, and organic. My husband and I put 1,000 miles on the odometer circling the Ring Road in 10 days. We’d scrimp on lunch with cold cuts (smoked lamb) or pylsur (snappy lamb hot dogs), then splurge on dinner.

Options were limited in remote areas, especially since we were traveling before the high season, but we had memorable fish soups, peat-smoked Arctic char, and earthy bread that was buried for 24 hours to bake by the heat of the hot springs. I tried guillemot, a seabird that brought to mind dark and minerally venison.

On our final night in Reykjavík, we dined at chef Ylfa Helgadóttir’s Kopar (Copper). Small plates to start included velvety rock crab soup with shrimp, spinach, and an unexpected touch of bean sprouts; blueberry-cured beef tenderloin with a Parmigiano crisp and caramelized walnuts; and fried cod tongues with a sherry-garlic cream cheese and a zingy lemon dip. My husband had a langoustine-crab risotto bathed with shellfish sauce and topped with a fennel salad to cut the richness. For me it was the catch of the day, roasted Atlantic catfish—aka wolffish—with bread crumbs and tartar sauce, accompanied by bok choy, carrots, and pickled red onion. As we walked out of the restaurant and into the city’s old harbor, close to midnight, a fiery sunset lit up the sky, beckoning us to return to the Land of Fire and Ice. —Donna L. Ng, copy chief

Edenton, North Carolina

My mom really loves Campari. Both of my parents do, but my mom has particularly strong feelings for it, and I think that has something to do with how much she loved Italy. She managed to finagle a bottle out of a friend’s recent trip to France and brought it with her on vacation in North Carolina. Cocktail hour involved a hefty glass of Campari and orange, perfect next to a sea breeze and the sound of waves. —Katherine Whittaker, assistant digital editor

The Middle of Nowhere, Taiwan

Two years ago, I found myself in the mountains of Taiwan. I wandered around with my delicate tea ware in my backpack knocking on wood with every step. Each breath felt new, crisp, and so clean my chest expanded to catch every bit of mountain air it could hold. My stomach did the same, trying to fit as many mountain vegetables as humanly possible. In between sips of freshly roasted soymilk and my tired breaths as a traveler, I found the time to slowly exhale: “wow.”

On my third trip to Taiwan, I said “wow” once again. But this time, it was at squirrels fighting me for my soymilk. I don’t blame them. The soymilk there is so good, I’d fight for it too. It’s comforting to have food taste homey while traveling. Even more when the people open their homes and world to a distant traveler. As the edges of the mountains were blurred by mist, and the creek sang with the fish swimming upriver, I took another breath and the mountains stole it back again. —Nissan Haque, digital production assistant

All Over Wisconsin

In May, our photographer Matt and I took a food and farm tour of south-central and western Wisconsin. We foraged for morels in Madison with Chef Jonny Hunter and the Wisconsin Mycological Society and stopped in on the Muscoda Morel Festival. We visited artisan cheesemakers in Dodgeville and Clear Lake, cider-makers in Maiden Rock and distillers in New Richmond, and we met with a few of the folks behind Wisconsin’s summer pizza farm trend. We consumed our weight in pork products, cheese curds, and frozen custard as we made our way up the staggeringly beautiful Great River Road and enjoyed a sunset cruise on Lake Pepin, one of the widest and calmest points along the Mississippi. —Kat Craddock, test kitchen assistant

Providence, Rhode Island

I went to Providence, Rhode Island for my college reunion, and had planned to spend the weekend eating like an undergrad: breakfast burritos, late night calzones, and only-kind-of-cold Narragansett. But I couldn’t resist an impulse trip to check out Oberlin, which opened downtown a year ago, long after I graduated. Providence has always punched above its weight as a restaurant town, thanks to Italian and Portuguese influences and abundant local seafood. Oberlin has updated all of that for one of the most compelling meals out I’ve had in any city recently: heaping portions of raw fish and smoked mussels, whole wheat penne made in-house from local grains, and an orange wine from Philippe Tessier in the Loire that was just the right amount of weird. —Chris Cohen, senior editor

Boston, Massachusetts

Right off of Davis Square is Redbones, a down-home-style Southern barbecue restaurant with a history. After walking through Boston Commons and taking a trip to Quincy Market, I followed a few Boston natives on over to Somerville for what they called “the best barbecue in Boston.” And they weren’t wrong. After plates of delicious fried okra, fried pickles, and corn fritters, we devoured a rack of their fall-off-the-bone Baby Back Ribs with potato salad and slaw. After one slice of the pecan pie we ordered for dessert, Redbones took the top spot on my list of favorite restaurants in Boston. Disclaimer: Come with an appetite—I had to be rolled all the way to Fenway Park. Who knew Boston had such good barbecue?

Complete with a downstairs bar that serves a mighty 29 different types of fresh beers on tap, Redbones is a must-go for those who want to add a little local flair to a Boston trip. Black and white photographs of blues and jazz musicians that used to frequent the famous BBQ joint cover the walls, and the slow blues of Muddy Waters and BB King somehow makes the ribs taste a whole lot better. Wicked good “bah-b-que.” —Ian Burke, digital intern

I’ve always had fantasies of driving the English countryside: winding flower-lined roads, stops at old inns that had been there for ages, the thrill of driving on the wrong side of the road. The way I envisioned it, it’d be more about the journey than the destination, since of course sheep and cows would wander onto the road from nearby farms, blocking us from getting anywhere fast anyway. A trip to England in early May made my dreams come true.

It was the perfect time of year to go—right when the rains and mists had begun to dry up (however temporarily) and the wild bluebells had recently bloomed. My husband and I lost our cool more than once, our exclamations over the sheer beauty giving us away as nothing more than ogling tourists. We stayed at The Pig at Combe, where we ate lunch from the wood-fired oven between long walks through the neighboring villages, greeted by, yes, cows and sheep everywhere we went, but also pleasant country dwellers who made us remember that seeing the untouched places—where green is a religion and there’s still one schoolhouse and neighbors who know each other’s names—can be the best way to travel. —Stacy Adimando, test kitchen director

All Over Wisconsin—Again

I got to spend the middle of May road tripping around western Wisconsin with test kitchen assistant Kat Craddock (which, side note, is real fun if you ever get the opportunity) And I have to say the state is magical. We met so many kind warm happy people who took us in and showed us a great time, the land was lush and vibrant green and there seemed to be rivers everywhere. Every meal was tasty. And antiques are CHEAP as hell.

But my favorite place was Lake Pepin. Lake Pepin is the Mississippi river, just farther north of where the river turns into an industrial channel. The river banks are large bluffs covered in trees and bald eagles dive into the waters for fish. The whole experience was so lovely and beautiful I looked at buildings for sale and wondered what business the town needed and how I could make it work. —Matt Taylor-Gross, staff photographer

Copenhagen, Denmark

Recently, while in Copenhagen for an upcoming story in our August/September issue, I watched, day after day, as cool kids lined up for brunch at Møller. One morning, I finally walked in and ordered a bowl of parsley smashed potatoes and something called øllebrød. This is how sacred the nation’s precious and nutritious rye bread is: the leftover crumbs are preserved and combined with beer to make a tangy, chocolatey porridge.

Usually it is topped with fruits like orange but Møller’s was finished off with sea buckthorn berries. It was delicious so I Instagrammed it, eager to spread the word about my new Scandinavian revelation. Hours later, a local asked me what traditional foods I had consumed during my journey. “Open-faced sandwiches, local perch, Øllebrød,” I bragged. Øllebrød?! He laughed. That’s what your mom gives you when you’re a kid and she doesn’t know what else to make. One man’s trash porridge… —Andrew Richdale, deputy editor

Franciacorta, Italy

I spent a few days exploring the Franciacorta region of Italy. Visiting wineries and restaurants, talking to chefs and producers, and eating and drinking more than anyone needs (it was basically heaven). My favorite part, though, was poking around the garden at the Corte Bianca vineyard and finding all the produce they were growing. I plucked peas and cherries and some lettuce leaves (to my gracious hosts: I’m sorry!). Then one of the owners told me they had white mulberry trees, and let me pick them to my heart’s content. I’ve only ever had dried white mulberries, and eating them fresh from the tree was pure joy. I collected a few to take with me, they lasted about 5 minutes. —Kristy Mucci, test kitchen associate

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Visiting Boston, Massachusetts for the Boston Calling Music Festival, I decided to make a stop at Little Donkey, the new(ish) globe-trotting Cambridge charmer helmed by James Beard-awarded chef Jamie Bissonnette. With a menu diverse in formats and influences, it’s the perfect restaurant to please all of your friends who “can, like, never decide where to eat.”

A friend visiting from France, on a mission to try the “best American burgers” was delighted by the house version, with dry-aged beef, Buffalo pickles, onion-soup mayo and, yes, foie gras. Meanwhile, another in the mood for Asian food tried the wok-fried chow fun, a riff on black bean-rice noodle classic with asparagus, ramps, and Calabrian chili. For my part: the Jamaican jerk chicken wings, whispered with habanero and charred pineapple, really hit the spot.

But perhaps the highlights of the meal were the ‘gram-worthy and excellent cocktails—get the mezcal number served in a hollowed-out grapefruit—and a safe-to-eat, pasteurized-egg–based cookie dough dessert, flecked with cocoa nibs and served still on the beater. — Dan Q. Dao, deputy digital editor

The post Where SAVEUR’s Editors Traveled in May appeared first on Saveur.

Welcome to Hawk’s Illustrated America, a monthly series following illustrator Hawk Krall’s journeys through the back roads of the U.S. in search of our country’s most obscure and delicious regional specialties.

Fall River, Massachusetts is food mecca of sorts, but not in the way you may expect. There are no sleek coffee shops or modern-rustic restaurants in this sleepy, somewhat rundown fishing village. But there is a wealth of hyperlocal delicacies: chow mein sandwiches, chourico rolls, hot weiners, “marinated” hamburgers, Syrian meat pies, and linguica bakery pizza.

Even in this culinary twilight zone, where American lunch counter cuisine mixes with New England seafood and influences from China, Greece, Portugal, and the Middle East, one particular oddball dish stands out: the legendary hot cheese sandwich.

Know this: A hot cheese sandwich is not a grilled cheese, as the bread is not toasted in a pan. Nor is it a cheese sandwich as you and I know it. Here in Fall River, “hot cheese” is a custardy, semi-liquid product that looks a little like scrambled eggs. Said product then gets placed on a burger bun and handed over to you. It’s delicious, and Graham’s Hot Dogs is the place to get it.

“People think it’s mashed potatoes,” laughs owner Linda Seidl, who runs Graham’s with her son. “The base is a sharp cheddar cheese. That’s all I can tell you!” It’s served like a hamburger, on a soft bun, topped with either Coney Island-style meat sauce or a combination of mustard, onions, and relish.

Imagine sharp, salty cheese grits without the grits, maybe fortified with a little whipped cream or butter for structure, and you can appreciate the beauty of hot cheese, or “chopped cheddar” in Fall River lingo. It’s satisfyingly oozy but doesn’t run all over the place, and it’s firm enough to support toppings usually ladled over a hot dog.

Graham’s also spoons the cheese goo over hand-cut fries along with their Coney sauce, and offers it as a topping on burgers and hot dogs. But the classic hot cheese sandwich—the original formulation, the way god intended you to eat it—is by far the most popular. It’s one of the top sellers on the menu, and the one that draws fans from all over. “It’s most popular with older people,” Linda explains, “usually with just mustard, onions and relish.”

Today in Fall River, Graham’s is a hot cheese legend, but it isn’t the originator of the concept. “We stole it,” Linda says with a laugh. “There used to be hot cheese carts all over downtown that sold the sandwich,” and it became a staple of every Coney-style hot dog shop in the area, of which there are many. Linda laments that only four or five decades-old hot dog joints remain. Still, most towns way larger than Fall River would be lucky to have one.

Graham’s opened in 1962, by the original Graham who started with a menu of Fall River standards like Coney dogs, fried seafood (still popular, especially during Lent), chourico, baked beans, and of course the hot cheese. Linda’s in-laws bought the business two years later (it’s unclear what happened to Graham) and it’s been in the same family for decades. It’s a funky little place with old photos of JFK and cats on the wall, and a line of classroom-style desks for solo diners alongside some tables. The hot dog grill sits in the sidewalk-facing window to draw in passers by.

There’s more to the place than hot cheese. The Coney dog is good; getting it topped with the baked beans is better. True to Fall River’s multicultural melting pot, Graham’s also does a dog made of local Portuguese sausage that you can get chopped with fries. There’s also something called a whimpy burger—another semi-forgotten Fall River specialty that consists of a marinated burger patty that’s braised for hours with onions and gravy until it’s fall-apart tender. Almost everything at Graham’s is homemade.

You could spend a week’s worth of meals eating your way through Graham, appreciating delicious regional spins on hot dogs and burgers. But there’s nothing like their glorious hot cheese anywhere else on Earth. Try it with relish, try it with Coney sauce, try it on some fries. Just don’t pass by Fall River without experiencing the magic of hot cheese.

Graham’s Hot Dogs
931 Bedford Street, Fall River, MA
(508) 678-9574

Hawk Krall is an artist, illustrator, and former line cook with a lifelong obsession for unique regional cuisine, whose work can be seen in magazines, newspapers, galleries, and restaurants all over the world. He focuses on editorial illustration, streetscapes, and pop-art style food paintings.

The post Every Small Town Should Have a Hot Cheese Sandwich Joint appeared first on Saveur.

Welcome to Hawk’s Illustrated America, a monthly series following illustrator Hawk Krall’s journeys through the back roads of the U.S. in search of our country’s most obscure and delicious regional specialties.

In the endlessly fascinating world of New England regional food, the tiny state of Rhode Island has an especially outsized supply of culinary oddities. Try “gaggers” (hot dogs). Or coffee milk (think chocolate milk but with coffee syrup). Or clamcakes, crisp little clam doughnuts. Rhode Islanders seem determined to confuse and delight the rest of America with their food, and if you want a front row seat to Rhode Island eating at its finest, pull up to the counter of Bishop’s 4th Street Diner, an old chrome-plated honest to goodness train car diner on the fringes of Newport.

The train car diner—a freestanding structure shaped like a railway car, with an open kitchen, long counter, and a few booths along the opposite windows—is a dying breed. Most these days have expanded to include larger dining rooms, or disappeared altogether. But Bishop’s is the real deal, the walls covered with bric-a-brac and the seats packed with locals chatting in thick New England accents.

Bishop’s menu reads like an all-star lineup of Rhody specialties: chourico, johnnycakes, “stuffies” (stuffed clams), Portuguese toast, coffee milk. If you’re confused about what any of those things mean, you’re not alone—neither did I until having a meal at Bishop’s. But it’s all excellent, the kind of under-the-radar roadside food find that people like me dream about.

I got the lowdown on Bishop’s backstory from current owner Nancy Bishop, who’s been running the place for over 20 years. Bishop’s began as a porcelain and stainless steel John O’Mahony era diner, built in New Jersey in the 1950s, and installed in Swansea, Massachusetts, where it was christened the Princeton Diner, until the former owners trucked it over to Newport in the 1960s and re-named it the 4th Street, in honor of a Newport street that was planned by the city but never paved.

Nancy bought the 4th Street some 20-odd years ago with her then-husband, giving it their family name. After a divorce, Nancy stayed on running the diner, where she meet her current husband, a retired colonel who was a regular customer.

One day, that regular told her about a great old diner his grandfather took him to as a kid, where he scratched his initials into a mirror with a pen knife. It turned out that diner had been located in Swansea Massachusetts, and—you guessed it—Nancy walked over to a mirror near the restroom, and there it was, his initials still carved into the diner decades later. “I’m a big believer in fate,” Nancy says. The diner and the new husband—“It was all meant to be.”

In this part of the country, close to Fall River, Massachusetts, the epicenter of America’s Portuguese population, chourico (a.k.a. shore-eetz) is everywhere. It’s a topping on pizza, meaty filler in a $3 cup of soup with elbow noodles, or the sausage in an egg sandwich, which is my preparation of choice and one that Bishop’s does especially well. Sourced from Mello’s in nearby Fall River, which drops off orders twice a week, Bishop’s chourico is sliced into thick coins that allow the casing to char just enough while chunks of paprika-stained fat sizzle out of the coarsely ground sausage.

As for the johnnycakes, these aren’t the vaguely corn-flavored pancakes you might be imagining. Light, paper thin, and crispy at the edges, Bishop’s johnnycakes are closer to crepes than anything I’ve eaten at a pancake house, and come topped with mounds of melty whipped butter. There are no exhausting doughy cores here, just thin, crisp edges with a sweet corn undertone.

Bishop’s prides itself on those johnnycakes, made exclusively with cornmeal from nearby Kenyon’s Grist that’s ground on local quarry stones from a mill that’s been standing since 1886 in neaby Usquepaug. For the full experience, wash them down with a frosty glass of coffee milk. The flavors dance to the thick accents of locals shooting the breeze.

This kind of from-scratch pride stands in stark contrast to diner trends across America. Most diners these days have long abandoned family recipes for ready-made frozen products and, faced with greater competition and narrower margins than ever, make whatever concessions to convenience they have to so they can keep the lights on. New England, though, seems to be an exception to this trend; at the very least Bishop’s sure is.

“We make as much as we can from scratch, get whole turkeys in, cut our own potatoes for breakfast,” explains Nancy, who sets the menu at Bishop’s along with a list of daily specials that include anything from fried chicken to American chop suey. “Food is really important to people in this part of the country,” she continues. “Everyone talks about where to get the best lobster rolls or johnnycakes, and people expect good food, especially in the Newport area.”

Nancy’s earned a loyal following at Bishop’s, which, despite a few appearances in diner history books and TV programs, mostly has skirted beneath the national radar. That makes the customers from Paris, Germany, and the Ukraine all the more surprising. They’re tourists staying in nearby hotels, and when they ask their concierges where they can find a legit New England restaurant experience, they’re usually sent to Bishop’s.

Hawk Krall is an artist, illustrator, and former line cook with a lifelong obsession for unique regional cuisine, whose work can be seen in magazines, newspapers, galleries, and restaurants all over the world. He focuses on editorial illustration, streetscapes, and pop-art style food paintings.

The post Rhode Island’s Bishop’s Belongs in the New England Diner Hall of Fame appeared first on Saveur.