cape cod restaurant crawl
Each summer I spend a few weeks on Cape Cod and I usually have pretty good luck with the weather but there is always the inevitable stormy day. So what do you do when it rains at the beach? Explore all the restaurants receiving local buzz… in one night!
Yesterday afternoon, while I was sitting in front of the window watching a storm descend from the north-no, really, that is exactly what I was doing!-I got a call from my friend Pat Rabin, one of the Cape’s leading restaurateurs. The planets must have suddenly aligned because Pat found herself with the night off. (What restaurant owner gets a night off in high season? Particularly one who runs an operation with as high a quality level as Pat’s Chillingsworth.) But a night off she had wrangled and she was ready to go out on the town.
Now, going out on the town on Cape Cod is a little different than a big night out in Miami, if you know what I mean. So we decided to head to Provincetown, the village at the very tip of the Cape with a tightly packed conglomeration of clubs and restaurants.
But first, Pat suggested, we meet up with friends in the town of Wellfleet at Mac’s Shack, for sashimi and oysters. We ordered a special of sea bass with truffle oil, which was at once rich and refreshing. And although Mac’s entire sushi menu sounded wonderful, the piles of those famed Wellfleet oysters on ice next to the outdoor bar were calling. I decided to order the Russian Oyster, topped with a dab of sour cream and tobiko. The combination of oyster and sour cream was surprisingly lovely. But what made this slippery devil a star was simply its sea flavor. This had to be the freshest Wellfleet I’d ever tasted, (not really surprising since we were sitting feet from its source!)
Before we headed out, the chef also sent out a special little something for us, a plate of sashimi-quality sea bass lightly torched on one side with crisps of seabass skin and a salad of tiny tomatoes from the restaurant’s garden. The dish was decorated with a sharply herbal chive oil, the perfect foil for those sweet, peak of summer tomatoes.
On to P’town to visit the Red Inn. But it seemed that we weren’t the only ones with the idea of spending a stormy evening in the great indoors. Both the bar and restaurant were packed and with no outdoor seating on this wind-whipped night, the crowds were practically spilling out the doors. So we moved on to a new spot called Victor’s, a pretty little restaurant in a quieter part of town.
Although the dining room was full, we managed to snag four bar stools and a copy of the dining menu. In addition to wine, we ordered something called “lobster spring roll lettuce wraps” and a bruschetta trio. The lobster rolls were indeed spring rolls wrapped in lettuce with a little sweet mint sauce. The combination was surprisingly nice. I particularly appreciated the hot/cold effect of wrapping a fresh out of the fryer spring roll with cold, crunch lettuce. The only problem, as Pat astutely pointed out, that you never knew you were eating lobster. And its true, I was thinking the roll was stuffed with less expensive and less interesting shrimp until she mentioned it, but it was yummy none the less.
The bruscetta was a different story. Three tiny toasts were covered in less than inspiring ingredients. The worst of the bunch was a ricotta bruschetta with “pistachio brittle crumbles.” What arrived was a stale toast with a mound of grocery store ricotta straight from the tub and one pinkie nail-sized morsel of pistachio brittle. And they wanted $8 for this? Welcome to Provincetown in summer. Apparently people will pay for anything!
After Victor’s we strolled Commercial Street and hit Edwige for ginger cosmos. Awesome, by the way. If you ever get to P’town, stop in and try one. And then we finished the night at Pepe’s, where I drank coffee to warm up from walking in the wild wind and we enjoyed a few snacks to fortify us for the drive home.