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bellastraniera
a.k.a. Marcy Swingle - obsessed with food and fashion.View my photography website.
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Category Archives: travel
Atria, Martha’s Vineyard
There’s no shortage of fancy restaurants on Martha’s Vineyard – the only problem is choosing just one when you only have a few nights on the island. Alchemy is a perennial favorite, but if you want to get away from the hoi polloi in the center of Edgartown on weekend nights, head to Atria for its patrician atmosphere.
At Atria, whitewashed Adirondack chairs spot the gracious side lawn, where you can settle in for drinks or dinner outside, and inside there’s a dining room hung with antique fish prints and furnished with dark spindle chairs, plus a downstairs pub, Brick House, that serves up burgers, beer on tap and live music. It’s the sort of place you can imagine the Kennedys going (but that may be just because several people in the clubby dining room that night actually looked like Kennedys). (more…)
On-Island Vs. Off-Island: Keeping It Local on Martha’s Vineyard
One look inside the market at Morning Glory Farm in Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard and you’ll see the crux of a food movement gaining ground here. Beets, baby squash, wax beans, corn and many more vegetables and fruit that come from this large working farm are labeled with a yellow “on-island” sign; anything shipped in from “off-island” gets a generic-looking white sign.
The local, sustainable food movement is nothing new, but on this vacation destination off the Cape it takes on a particularly political spin. As chain stores like the Super Stop & Shop on Main Street land on the island and suck in summer people and locals alike, farmers markets and local specialty food shops have lobbied to keep money on-island, not moving offshore towards some far-flung corporate entity. But can even the most well-intentioned consumer ever buy mostly local? (more…)
The Bite, Martha’s Vineyard
It may look pretty basic, but this famous seafood shack on the road down to Menemsha draws people from near and far. One one side of us, a family chatted in Italian, and on the other, a couple of summer people despaired the outage of fried scallops so early in the afternoon. What you see is what you get: a shack, sodas from a machine, fried seafood and some picnic tables, but there’s nothing ordinary about the quality of the Bite’s fried clams.
This seemingly simple dish is actually easy to mess up, and therefore I usually avoid it. More often than not, fried clams come out listless, dry and tasteless, with a leaden, greasy crust. But lesser fry cooks everywhere could learn from the Bite, where the batter is light and slightly spicy with a hint of cayenne and the finest grinding of sea salt, the crunch satisfying but not overwhelming, and the clams themselves still plump, bursting with juiciness and served whole. (more…)
Larsen’s Fish Market, Martha’s Vineyard
You could plunk down a good deal of money for dinner at the fancy Home Port restaurant in Menemsha, Martha’s Vineyard, a tiny fishing town known for its beautiful sunsets. Or you could enjoy the sunset as the families who have been coming here for years do: bring your beach chairs and wine and make it a picnic.
About that wine: don’t forget to buy it from Edgartown or Oak Bluffs, since they don’t sell it “up island,” which is completely dry due to some rather antiquated blue laws. But wait until you get to Menemsha to buy your dinner, or you’ll be missing out on one of the town’s main attractions. Larsen’s, half seafood store, half take-out shop, dishes out lobsters, clams and oysters just hours after they’ve been plucked from the sea. This market also acts as the wholesaler supplier to many of the seafood places on the island, so when you come here, you’re getting it at the source. (more…)
Cantler’s Crab Shack, Maryland
On a recent weekend, we set out to do what so many Marylanders do as soon as the weather gets hot: head out to a crab shack to feast on piles of hard shell blue crabs.
Cantler’s holds a place of honor among crab shacks. It’s so popular that it’s even included on nautical charts of the Chesapeake Bay – all the better for getting there by boat. (more…)
Mother’s Restaurant, New Orleans
Certain hometown restaurants inspire a kind of mania among their fans. In New Orleans, that restaurant would be Mother’s, whose po’ boy gets raves from longtime patrons of the creole lunch counter. Go here and locals will give you one important instruction about that sandwich: “Make sure you get the debris.”
As with many recent additions to New Orleans patois, this one has a traceable history. When a customer asked for the shreds of roast beef from the pan on his po’ boy, original Mother’s owner Simon Landry responded, “You mean the debris?” A sandwich was born. (more…)
Eat Louisiana Shrimp
To answer the question that’s on everyone’s mind: yes, there is still excellent seafood to be had in New Orleans. Much of it is top quality shrimp, crawfish, blue crab, and much of it is local. Though National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has closed 60,000 square miles in the Gulf of Mexico to commercial fishing to date, 75 percent of federal waters are still safe for the shrimp and shrimpers that make their livelihood on the Gulf. As Food Safety News reports, all of the waters directly affected by the spill remained closed to commercial and recreational fishing, so no seafood from the region is at risk of oil contamination.
In other words, don’t add insult to injury by postponing or canceling a trip to Louisiana because of the oil spill. The kind folks down there will make sure you are extremely well fed during your visit. Shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo, shrimp etouffee, shrimp remoulade and shrimp sandwiches are still on the menu. If there is excellent wild shrimp anywhere in the area (including Lake Pontchartrain), Louisianans will find it.
Americans also shouldn’t assume the impact of this disaster is limited to Gulf states. Nearly half the nation’s domestic seafood comes from the Gulf area, and every time BP fails to seal off the oil spill, the area of federal waters closed to commercial fishing increases. The longer-term impact on shrimp and fish lifecycles in the region is still unknown.
In the meantime, do what you can to support Gulf fishermen by buying wild-caught domestic shrimp – which have far less pollutants and do far less environmental damage than unregulated farmed or wild-caught shrimp from China, Mexico and other developing nations.
Buy wild domestic shrimp at Fresh Direct.
Future updates about the safety of Gulf seafood can be found here:
Galatoire’s, New Orleans
Life is grand at Galatoire’s, the century-old restaurant in the French Quarter, where ladies in hats and men in white linen jackets gather under the ceiling fans in the sunny, tile-floored interior for a lunch that stretches into the afternoon. An oasis of air-conditioned civility on rowdy Bourbon Street, Galatoire’s still requires men to wear jackets, even if the mercury’s pushing 95. It’s one of many ways that Galatoire’s hews to tradition, even as the rest of the world constantly changes.
One of the best windows into New Orleans food, Galatoire’s specializes in the remoulades and etouffees that give Creole cuisine its particular French-Southern twist. The crowd is largely local, and there’s lots of table hopping on the main floor. Service is genteel, efficient but unhurried. A recent lunch here began with a cocktail proffered up on a silver tray. Cocktail hour seemingly never ends in New Orleans: the bar here was full by 2 in the afternoon. (more…)
Cafe Beignet, New Orleans
At this location on Royal Street in the French Quarter, prime tourist territory, Cafe Beignet could be serving stale doughnuts and watered-down coffee and still they’d make a profit. Fortunately, New Orleans’ pride in good food is evident even in this little cafe, which specializes in these addictive breakfast pastries.
Each beignet is about the size of your fist, so you’d be fine splitting an order of three for a meal in Cafe Beignet’s charming tree-lined side garden. A beignet isn’t exactly a doughnut, and it’s not exactly Italian zeppoli. (more…)
MiLA, New Orleans
Considering its proximity to vast swaths of upriver farmland, it may come as a surprise that there’s not much emphasis on locally-sourced produce in New Orleans. Seafood here may be as local as it gets, but southern techniques of boiling and frying vegetables and French techniques of butter, butter and yet more butter still rule at most restaurants. Fortunately, a handful of new spots are beginning to bring fresh, seasonal produce to the forefront of the menu.
One such place is MiLA in the Central Business District. Husband-and-wife chef team Allison Vines-Rushing and Slade Rushing acquire many of their ingredients from a nearby farm, Lujele, which is described in detail on the restaurant’s website. This all sounded vaguely Dan Barber-ish at first, but then came the clue: this duo, originally from Mississippi (“Mi”) and Louisiana (“LA”), logged several well-regarded years at Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar (Vines) and Fleur de Sel in New York (Rushing) before heading back south. An appetite for green market produce came back with them. (more…)
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