My favorite summer restaurant, The Market at Lobster Cove, serving some traditional local foods in new ways with sincere emphasis on local – like moist, house-smoked haddock on a bed of tender shaved fennel and radishes - has a wine list. Click to continue »
Amelia O’Reilly and Nico Monday arrived in Gloucester last spring with beaming smiles and an enormous paella pan. They rented a pile of gray timbers simply called The Market at Lobster Cove in Annisquam and turned it into one of the best food destinations on Cape Ann, limiting the menu only to what they could find in the fields and fish markets from Lanesville to Maine. Click to continue »
We’re at the end of the peninsula, the last stop before Portugal, a tiny town that has proudly but quietly celebrated fame in the form of lobster, granite, and art. (The light on our little harbor is no less beautiful than the coast of Italy or France.)
But click on this site to find out why Rockport is about to present an autumn event so traditional it’s hip, so local it’s global, so filled with truly the best Cape Ann and New England foods, music and entertainment, it will soon be the fall tradition for which to drive to the end of the line.
After the thunder and lightning rolled away on Thursday evening, we drove to Annisquam to attend the soft opening of The Market at Lobster Cove. Springtime New England ingredients have rarely been treated so artfully.
Everyone cooked in my family, even my brothers. We subscribed to Gourmet Magazine and hungrily read the articles about what people in little French villages were having for supper, and then my mother and I tried to recreate them ourselves.
My academic background is in painting and writing, but I waitressed at Jasper’s and Hammersly’s Bistro in the 1980’s, when dining in Boston was just becoming exciting, and the people in it - waitstaff and kitchen staff - were like a small university of students and faculty. Everyone knew each other, ate in each other’s restaurants, and were aware that dining in Boston had just turned a corner, inspired by youth, global awareness - these were chefs who had traveled to Europe - and new respect for American ingredients. It was a wonderful community of people who cared about all sorts of good food and wines. Because they cared about these arts, they also cared about growing food, preserving space for it to grow, preserving the lifestyles of people who grow it. We were all beginning to understand that caring about what was served on a plate was to care about the bigger picture.
Married, the mother of two daughters, I now live in Rockport, Ma. My daughters cook. Everyone in our house welcomes a new cookbook for the dinner and dessert possibilities it might offer, which really means the possibility of changing our lives just a little, pretending we live in a little French village for a night. Isn’t that what food does, too - a little bit of theater every single day? “What are we having for dinner tonight?” is really the question of “What is the performance tonight? Where are we traveling? Who will we be?”
I write a column called “Food for Thought” for The Gloucester Daily Times. In it and on this blog, I’m always looking for the possibility food offers for transformation and I’m looking for those wonderful communities of all kinds who care about preparing a great dish, setting a beautiful table, drinking a good glass of wine, and then having a great conversation.
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