The line stretched across the parking lot on a recent summer night. Beachgoers and vacationers with families in tow were all hungry.
It was dinner time on the Rhode Island shore. Everyone was in the mood for local seafood. And it seemed as though everyone wanted to get it at the same place.
It also seems that summer evenings were always spent this way. Certainly in the memories of just about everyone in line this night, going back a couple of generations, this was the quintessential end of a perfect day on Narragansett Bay. But it wasn’t always this way.
About a century ago, things were different in this neighborhood. Imagine searching Point Judith for just a cold drink – let alone a seafood dinner – and being unable to find one. That was the way it was when Ulysses Cooper and his family summered on the beach.
And it was literally “on the beach” where the family camped out on their annual trip to Narragansett from Connecticut. (Some things never change.)
Cooper lamented the fact that there was no place in Point Judith where he could get refreshments for his six children and his wife, Carrie. Opportunity knocked and the family started selling cold lemonade to other campers and to the local fishermen. Carrie had a corn-fritter recipe which worked well with the local clams, as well as a chowder recipe which became wildly popular around the beach.
Ulysses thought maybe they should try selling the clamcakes and chowder, along with their lemonade. Their fellow campers and the locals agreed. Since the family was often accompanied by nieces and nephews, they also encouraged their Aunt Carrie to keep making her seaside treats, along with pies and raisin bread. They built a small stand, which they promptly outgrew and built a restaurant in 1920.
Awards and accolades followed, and in 2007, the James Beard Foundation honored Aunt Carrie’s by naming it one of “America’s Classics” restaurants. The most sincere form of flattery had started some years before, with competitors opening from across the street all the way around the point to the fishing port at Galilee.
As one of my listeners put it when he stopped by my broadcast location, “You can’t go wrong at any of those places.” True, but it all had to start somewhere.
The same can be said for the experience at Rhode Island’s wineries. Our own Napa Valley follows the Coastal Wine Trail, a collaboration among not only the winemaking venues in our state but those in southeastern Massachusetts and one in Connecticut.
While grapes have been grown in Rhode Island for centuries, the start of the modern industry can be traced back to when Cortlandt and Nancy Parker planted a French variety of red wine grapes called Marechal Foch on their Greenvale Farm in Portsmouth in the 1960’s.
Just to the northeast, Sakonnet Vineyards was begun in 1975. To the south, the Nunes family started to grow grapes in 1977 for Sakonnet. Later, John Nunes and his sons established Newport Vineyards on their land, while Sakonnet Vineyards became Carolyn’s Sakonnet Vineyards.
The wines all sold well locally, as well as in some restaurants and wine shops elsewhere in the state and at a few restaurants as far away as New York City. But the bulk of the wine sales took place at each of the wineries, which were becoming tourist destinations of their own as interest in food and wine picked up in the late 1990s.
The crowning jewel is to be a new restaurant in a renovated space closest to the road, where an event facility had been originally planned. The new eatery, which will seat about 100 guests, is slated to launch at the end of August.
While the new name is still being kept under wraps, the chef under whose culinary direction the restaurant will take has been announced. As Cassandra Earle, Newport Vineyards new marketing director, related on my radio show in late July, the kitchen will be headed up by a familiar name and a longtime favorite on Aquidneck Island: Andrew Gold. He had a successful run in Middletown for many years with Gold’s Wood Grill restaurant. Locals still remember the mussels on his menu. According to Earle, dinner and Sunday brunch will be served at the new place.
It takes vision to bring an established entity to the next level and potentially influence the experience and image of an industry. Ulysses Cooper did it in 1920. John Nunes – son of the original – and Newport Vineyards have the potential to do it in 2014. And we foodies are the lucky ones who will reap the benefits.
Bruce Newbury’s “Dining Out” food and wine talk radio show is heard on WADK-AM 1540, WHJJ-AM 920, online and through mobile applications. He can be reached by email at bruce@brucenewbury.com.
