In the final part of his profile on Rhode Island dining, David Latt investigates the surprisingly forward-thinking fine-dining scene in the state’s traditionally laid-back southern half.
Newport is probably Rhode Island’s best-known tourist destination.
Located on the southern tip of Aquidneck Island, Newport is home to Cliff Walk and the world-famous mansions built at the end of the 19th century with distinctive architecture and opulent details.
Its sheltered harbor and many beaches also makes Newport a destination for anyone who enjoys sailing and water sports. The city is family-friendly as well, with dozens of affordable restaurants on Broadway and Bowen’s Wharf in the harbor. Newport also has fine dining, but you have to search it out.
One Bellevue inside the Hotel Viking is located on Historic Hill, overlooking Newport Harbor.
Chef Kevin Theile’s menu changes with the seasons and emphasizes local produce and seafood. “When people travel to New England, they’re looking for seasonal New England seafood,” he explains.
So it’s no surprise that most of the seafood on his menu is caught in nearby waters, including Maine lobsters, sole, shrimp, bay scallops, and oysters. “Right off the docks, right out of the water,” is his mantra.
Chef Theile tells a story about a recent gastronome’s tour of New York he took with his sous and banquet chefs. Most memorable, he said, was a meal at Mario Batali’s Babbo Ristorante e Enoteca.
They feasted on ingredients they love but could never serve at One Bellevue: head cheese, pigs’ feet, lamb brains, rabbit, and goat. But, he points out, Newport is a tourist town, not a culinary scene and people want familiar food.
That was a refrain I heard frequently on my tour of the state. Many tourists simply enjoy eating food that doesn’t challenge their culinary boundaries, but that doesn’t stop chefs from occasionally pushing the envelope.
For starters, Chef Theile’s menus are based on seasonality and locality—one bite and you know you’re in Southern New England. But for those who want some cross-cultural surprises, he offers southern New England ingredients treated with a French and Asian flair. Think grilled lobster with cipolini whipped potatoes and ginger sesame haricot vert and chili-rubbed tuna with wasabi potatoes.
Don’t miss the first entry in this series: Rhode Island Renaissance: The Restaurants of Providence.
Located at the end of Cliff Walk and looking every bit like one of the nearby Newport mansions is the Chanler Hotel, featuring 20 guest rooms furnished with European designs—no two rooms are alike.
Taking up most of the ground floor, the Spiced Pear Restaurant looks like the dining room of a Mediterranean villa. From its vantage point on the cliff, the restaurant has a sweeping view of the brilliantly blue water below. In the colder months, the dining room occupies a room facing the open kitchen. In summer, diners can also sit outside in the covered patio and enjoy the cool breezes off Rhode Island Sound.
Executive Chef Kyle Ketchum describes his menu as contemporary New England cuisine. If you love lobster, start with the lobster bisque, then go on to the delicately flavored butter-poached Maine lobster, served with sweet creamed corn, English peas, and mushrooms.
Acknowledging that his guests do not live by seafood alone, Chef Ketchum serves beautifully composed plates such as American Kobe beef with potato gratin. His vegetarian tasting menu takes advantage of seasonally available local produce.
If you’ll allow yourself the calories, Chef Ketchum will delight your sweet tooth with the eye-pleasing Tahitian vanilla bean soufflé or his acrobatic chocolate trio that couples a wedge of chocolate truffle cake, a dark chocolate terrine, and a pistachio and dark chocolate brownie with a Bailey’s Irish Cream float topped with whipped cream.
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Twenty minutes from downtown Newport, the 35-room Castle Hill Inn & Resort sits on a hill overlooking Narragansett Bay.
The day we drove out to the restaurant, a rain storm pelted Ocean Drive, the solitary road that circles the island. The lobster skiffs that fish the waters had taken refuge in sheltered coves to avoid the storm. The Inn looked all the more romantic in the rain.
The restaurant occupies the sun room of the converted mansion. Open on three sides to a view of the water, light poured in even on a rainy day. Chef Jonathan Cambra, like his fellow Rhode Island chefs, emphasizes local seafood and seasonal produce on his menu. The clams in his New England clam chowder and in the sauté combining littlenecks with Portuguese sausage and fennel are from local waters, as are the raw Matunuck Farm oysters he tops with a Bloody Mary sorbet and black pepper gelee.
While the menu lists familiar dishes like bacon and eggs, a lobster roll, and a grilled cheese sandwich, Chef Cambra prepares them with upgraded ingredients: the bacon is actually pork belly; the lobster roll uses a tarragon dressing instead of mayonnaise; and the grilled cheese is made with a selection of Narragansett Creamery cheeses on Sicilian bread. Even the hash is made with lobster.
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A trip to Rhode Island should always include a stop on Block Island. Ferries leave frequently from Point Judith and New London.
Looking very much like a Norman Rockwell painting, Old Harbor is one of those rare places where time appears to have stopped. There are no high-rises here. Turn-of-the-century, four-story hotels like the National dominate the skyline. Walk a few blocks inland to Spring Street and you’ll find Victorian houses that have become B&Bs.
Love seafood? Don’t miss Rhode Island Renaissance: Lobster, Oysters, Clams & More on the Rhode Island Shore.
Conventional wisdom would have you believe that there is only café-style food on the island. Among the dozens of local restaurants, Eli’s is deservedly well-reviewed because the food is fresh, reasonably priced, and well-prepared.
But the best place to eat on the island, bar none, is in the Hotel Manisses Restaurant.
Chef Ross Audino takes local sourcing one step farther than his mainland colleagues. During the summer, 70 percent of his vegetables and 100 percent of his herbs come from the large garden behind the restaurant planted by Justin Abrams, the hotel’s owner.
Not only are the blue fish, striped bass, mussels, lobster, and other seafood staples fished from local waters, but because Block Island is a tight-knit community, the chef knows the fishermen personally, like Joe Szabo, an old-timer who fishes for local swordfish.
Learn more about the “locavores” who favor local ingredients in Rhode Island Renaissance: Spotlight on Providence’s Locavore Chefs.
The summertime dining room extends outside into a spacious brick lined patio that looks out on the herb garden at the back of the building.
When the weather cools, diners stay inside, usually starting off with a drink at the bar and one of the appetizers, like Maryland-style crab cakes or freshly shucked Moonstone oysters.
Chef Audino also puts the local seafood to excellent use in his entrees, including the inventive grilled swordfish with lobster mashed potatoes (yes, that’s lobster mashed potatoes and they are delicious).
The menu accommodates vegetarians with a grilled garlic marinated tofu with house-made mozzarella and a beet salad made with beets from the owner’s garden.
For meat-eaters, the menu is a lot of fun. A smoked beef brisket sandwich with crispy onion rings and barbecued St. Louis ribs on a bed of jalapeno and cheddar spoon bread from the Bistro menu are delicious. The ribs are full of flavor and, literally, finger-lickin’ good because they are brined, dry rubbed, slow braised and then finished in high heat so the moist, nicely fatty meat gets a thin crust on top.
Desserts range from an apple crumble with an excellent nougat ice cream to a seven-layer chocolate cake with mocha ganache. All are good, but if I were going to leave room for anything, it would be for a couple more of the St. Louis Ribs and a handful of those French fries.
Like barbecue? Don’t miss Ribs, Ribs, and More Ribs: The Biggest Barbecue Cook-Off in the West.
Before leaving Rhode Island, you should make one more stop before you go home: the coastal city of Bristol.
Located on the eastern side of Narragansett Bay, mid-way between Providence and Newport, Bristol has small-town charms, New England style. The small craft harbor is encircled by a bike and walking path. The small town shops remind you of a “time before we had malls.”
Walking toward the harbor on State Street you might pass by Persimmon Restaurant without noticing the intimate, tastefully decorated dining room inside.
Opened in 2005 by Chef Champe Speidel and his wife Lisa, Persimmon has gained a large following among tourists and locals, including chefs throughout the state.
Traveling along the New England coast? Don’t miss: Ask the Locals Travel Guide: New London, Mystic & Mashantucket, Connecticut
Even though much of Bristol’s business is summer tourism, the town is a bedroom community of commuters who work in Providence and Newport, which means a year-round clientele supports his restaurant.
Challenging himself, Chef Speidel prints a new menu every day, featuring what’s fresh and local. Keeping his menu in sync with the seasons means his customers look forward to the new ways he’ll prepare ingredients with a short season, like asparagus, black bass and tautog. For his loyal customers he balances favorites like the crispy skin Long Island duck breast with new dishes so he’ll encourage them to come back several times a week.
Speidel borrows freely from world cuisine and American traditional food. His approach is highly skilled and witty.
Eight years ago, he attended his first clambake on the beach, and loved the experience of a wood fire, freshly cooked clams, corn, lobster, potatoes, and chorizo. Wanting to recreate the experience back at the restaurant, he created the mini clambake, one of his most popular appetizers.
When the dish is presented at the table, the plate is covered by a glass dome. When the covering is removed a scented cloud of apple wood smoke is released and, for a moment just before you devour the sweetly flavored seafood and broth, you’re transported back to a summertime beach where you don’t have a care in the world.
One of the dishes I enjoyed the most was his two-minute ceviche of native razor clams, served with Vietnamese kalamansi lime, chilies, and mint sauce. Never has a southern New England clam been so well-served.
His menu includes some upscale comfort foods. For those who can afford the fatty indulgence, he serves up a perfectly seared Hudson Valley foie gras with oven roasted figs dressed with a duck reduction and aged balsamic vinegar. For another appetizer, an egg slow cooked at precisely 143.6 degrees for one hour, shares an elegant bowl with sautéed hen-of-the-woods mushrooms flavored with a touch of curry oil.
The dessert selections run from the delicate (yogurt and vanilla panna cotta with native berries) to the sublime (rich chocolate mousse with dark chocolate-hazelnut feuilletine and caramel ice ream). But I confess a simple plate of Berkshire blue cheese with a wedge of honeycomb dusted with fennel pollen stole my heart that night.
After having so many wonderful meals, and taking everything into account—the simple elegance of the dining room, the host’s friendliness and charm, the execution and distinctive flavor profile of each and every dish—eating at Persimmon was my best dining experience on a very memorable trip.
By David Latt for PeterGreenberg.com. Visit David on the Web at MenWhoLiketoCook.com.
Don’t miss the previous articles in this series:
- Rhode Island Renaissance: The Restaurants of Providence
- Rhode Island Renaissance: Spotlight on Providence’s Locavore Chefs
- Rhode Island Renaissance: Lobster, Oysters, Clams & More on the Rhode Island Shore
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