Stuffies, gaggers cabinets? We're talking vintage Rhode Island cuisine cuisine

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Stuffies, gaggers cabinets? We're talking vintage Rhode Island cuisine
Some come to Newport, Rhode Island, for the mansions. During my recent weekend visit, I was more interested in the mollusks.

Yes, this small port city on the Atlantic Ocean is better known for its grand, gilded, historical homes where America's richest and most powerful dynasties vacationed. The Vanderbilts and Astors built monumental "cottages" here. U.S. presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy had their "Summer White Houses" here, too.

However, after the long drive from Ottawa to Newport (nine-plus hours, including sluggish traffic around Montreal and Boston), I was much more interested in satiating my hunger than my interest in history. Newport and Rhode Island do not disappoint foodies, either.

To disclose all, I should say that music also sparked my journey, namely, the Newport Jazz Festival, a star-studded blowout held each year on the first weekend in August. But since you can enjoy all kinds of topnotch jazz at the Ottawa and Montreal jazz festivals in June and July, I'll focus on the out-of-the-ordinary dishes that no visitor to Rhode Island should miss.

We're not talking about haute cuisine from Michelin-starred eateries, although Providence, Rhode Island's capital, does boast some of the best Italian restaurants in the U.S.

Since I visited the Ocean State during the height of summer, I intended to gorge on as much clam-shack cuisine as possible, planned to feast on bivalves prepared as many ways as you could imagine - or not even cooked, for that matter.

But to ensure a balanced diet, I planned to visit some of the state's more notable greasy spoons.

Rhode Island, after all, is where diners were invented in the mid-1800s, evolving from horse-drawn wagons to decommissioned railroad passenger and diner cars.

From distinctive beverages (the state drink is a concoction called coffee milk) to uniquely dressed hotdogs (meat sauce, onions, mustard, celery salt) to oddly named offerings (a milkshake is called a "cabinet," a submarine sandwich can be called a "grinder") Rhode Island has a shortorder fare all its own.

First, however, came the Grand Slam of Clams.

The jazz festival, which takes place on the grounds of Fort Adams State Park overlooking Newport Harbor, has more than a dozen food vendors, one of which featured local seafood treats.

On the festival's muggy Saturday, my lunch from Matunuck Oyster Bar consisted of three raw, unadorned clams, fresh and briny little gems shucked and swallowed to the sound of jazz. Later, I returned to the bar for some equally tasty raw oysters.

I washed my meal down with some Del's Soft Frozen Lemonade, only to learn afterwards that what I had had was a slushy, made-in-Rhode Island refreshment with its roots in Neapolitan fruit ices.

That night, after six hours of live jazz, I and several other jazz fans ventured to Flo's Clam Shack, a 75-year-old eatery, for a full-scale celebration of all things clammy. (The most diligent clam-shack buffs would have made the trip to Narragansett, a town 25 kilometres west of Newport where much of Rhode Island's clam-shack cuisine is concentrated.)

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The clammy food stuffed clams, clam fritters, chowder at Flo's Clam Shack in Rhode Island.


Modern Diner in Pawtucket, Rhode Island

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IF YOU GO

Where: Newport, Rhode Island

How to get there: It's about a nine-hour drive from Ottawa. Head east past Montreal and into the Eastern Townships of Quebec, then head south through Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts to Rhode Island. A more scenic, but no less slow, route travels through the Adirondacks and New York State through Massachusetts, bypassing potential traffic delays in Montreal and Boston. Or, fly to Boston and rent a car for the 90-minute drive south.

When to go: In the summer for seafood, although Newport's restaurant week, gonenewportrestaurantweek.com, is in the spring. Nearby Providence has several restaurant weeks each year, and its next one is scheduled for January 2012.

Some eateries/diners in Newport and environs:

- Flo's Clam Shack: 4 Wave Ave., Middletown (just outside Newport), Rhode Island, flosclamshack.net

- Brick Alley Pub and Restaurant, 140 Thames St., Newport, Rhode Island, brickalley.com

- Modern Diner, 364 East Ave., Pawtucket, Rhode Island

- Connie & Nikki's Restaurant & Creamery, 526 Pawtucket Ave., Pawtucket, Rhode Island

- Wein-O-Rama, 1009 Oaklawn Ave., Cranston, Rhode Island (for a video of a visit to Wein-O-Rama: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOUbrpmK5mU)

Newport Jazz Festival: The world's oldest outdoor jazz event, which this year marked its 57th edition, typically takes place the first weekend in August in Fort Adams State Park on Newport Harbour, presenting music on three stages from roughly 11 a.m. till 7 p.m. each day. As many as 10,000 people visit the park for jazz each day. Apart from the music, sample the wares of more than a dozen food vendors and browse the extensive craft market. Tickets in 2011 ranged in price from $15 for a children's day pass to $125 for an adult's two-day pass.

- More information: newportjazzfest.net

Along with my new Wein-O-Rama T-shirt, I packed my second gagger for the ride home, but ended it up tossing it out hours later, at a gas station in the Adirondacks. For some reason, I was still feeling pretty full.

Peter Hum is the editor of the Citizen's food section and its jazz critic.

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When I arrived at Connie's, Let's Make A Deal was on its small TV. But it was hard to pay attention to the game show, what with all the red-and-white posters, glasses, toys and other Coke-related souvenirs - three decades of lovely kitsch donated by customers and neighbours, all because Dernikos' favourite colour is red.

Before I could strike up a conversation with her, Dernikos was working the room, chatting with regulars when she was taking a break from cooking. Apropos of a recent baseball game between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, she emerged from the kitchen and exclaimed, "The Yankees suck!" Then she blew a raspberry. In a more genteel fashion, she later spoke kindly to a young boy and his younger friend from the neighbourhood.

Once I had finished my linguica (a spicy sausage and gift from Rhode Island's many Portuguese) and eggsover-easy, I began chatting with Dernikos. "They call me the Coca-Cola Lady. They see me at the market - 'Hey, Coca-Cola Lady!'"

Dernikos's daughter Helen made me a coffee milk, one of Rhode Island's famed beverages that testifies to the fact that with syrup, every drink is better. A coffee milk is a mix of milk with a coffee-flavoured syrup. Although the syrup is caffeinated, coffee milk is reportedly sold in Rhode Island's school cafeterias, which is perhaps as you would expect given that the beverage was designated the state drink of Rhode Island in 1993.

At Connie's they make coffee milk with Autocrat syrup, the leading brand, sold even at Wal-Mart. It's good enough for me. If you prefer a boutique brand, there's Morning Glory, sold at selected foodie-oriented shops. But it's made in Massachusetts - I suspect Dernikos would have blown it a raspberry.

For the road, daughter Helen also made me a cabinet, which is Rhode Island-speak for a milkshake, so named, they, say because it's made with a blender from the kitchen cabinet. In the rest of New England, a milkshake is more sensibly known as a "frappé," which they pronounce "frap."

A sign on the wall at Connie's notes that her twin brother runs an eatery in Lincoln, Rhode Island, the ostensibly magical hangout called Weiner Genie. Although the last meal I wanted before leaving Rhode Island was indeed wieners, I decided to head to Wein-O-Rama, in Cranston, Rhode Island, since I liked its vintage cachet. Wein-O-Rama is a long, narrow diner that was opened by Greek immigrant Michael Sotirakos in 1962 - in one more year, it will be eligible for inclusion on the U.S. National Historic Register.

When I arrive, the diner is filled with people chowing down, most of them devouring wieners that are all-dressed which, in Rhode Island, means, from the bottom to the top: mustard, meat sauce, chopped onions and celery salt. They're $1.80 a pop, and I order two of them. The wiener man at the front of restaurant's foremost grill station adds my request to his Sisyphean task.

In Rhode Island, hotdogs are also called hot wieners, New York Systems and, perhaps more significantly, bellybusters, destroyers or gaggers. I see some signs on the wall that support the last three nicknames. At Wein-O-Rama, one sign says, a record-holding patron ate 16 wieners in 30 minutes. A second sign named a junior champion in the diner's under-10 category, a youngster who had downed six wieners in 10 minutes.

Since I had come directly from breakfast at Connie's, and had a cabinet during the drive, one bellybuster in five minutes was all I could manage. It was an assertive destroyer that tasted more of toppings than hotdog. (I had read that Wein-O-Rama's popularity stems in part from its cut-above meat sauce.)

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At Flo's, the patient are rewarded. We queued up outside for more than 40 minutes to place our orders at a window. But soon after we had ordered and found a table, we were rewarded with the ocean's bounty, more often than not deep-fried into submission.

Naturally, we kept the clam quotient high. In addition to fried clams, we tried Flo's chowder, which was made the Rhode Island way - neither creamy, as New England clam chowders usually are, nor with a tomato base, like so-called Manhattan clam chowders. As per the state preference, Flo's tasty and toothsome chowder boasts a clear broth, or at most a broth thickened by longcooked potatoes. Above all, there's no distraction from the flavour and texture of the toothsome clams.

At Flo's we also tried two other variations on clams, the fabled "stuffie" and the much-loved clam cake. A stuffie consists of a fist-sized Quahog clam, held shut at Flo's by a rubber band. Break the seal and you find inside an orange, slightly spicy mass of bread, ground clams and spicy sausage. It was pasty, with a kick to it, a less posh version of Clams Casino, another Rhode Island invention that uses smaller clams and adds a bacon topping. As for clam cakes, they are more like doughy, deep-fried fritters, and not at all like pan-fried crab cakes.

A more reasonable crowd might have stopped there. But we also dug into the fisherman platter's fried fish, fried calamari, fried shrimps and fried scallops. After all, you work up an appetite listening to jazz all day.

Having sampled clams deep-fried in batter, ground up and baked in dough, stewed in soup and straight from the shell, I still felt that I had missed out on something. Yes, steamed clams (also known as "steamers" in Rhode Island parlance). They would have to wait until Sunday night, after the day's big helping of jazz, which only sounded better after another visit to the Matunuck Oyster Bar for a superior, lunchtime lobster roll that was meaty, flavourful and not overly sauced.

Jazzed out, we ordered steamed littlenecks at the Brick Alley Pub and Restaurant, a bric-a-brac-festooned venue on Thames Street, one of Newport's main drags. We hoped the shareable appetizer would measure up to the menu's impressive boast: "The 50th anniversary issue of Bon Appétit named Brick Alley's Portuguese clams one of the 13 best recipes in the history of the magazine."

Of all the weekend's clam dishes, the big bowl of steamed littlenecks was both the prettiest and tastiest. A dozen or so clams swam in a potent broth of white wine, garlic and olive oil, adorned with bits of onion, green and red peppers and chorizo. The clams were plump and irresistible, and our server was right to exhort us to mop up the broth with our bread.

At some point during this meal, I learned that I'd missed out on the fine wood-oven-baked clam pizza sold by another vendor at the jazz festival. You cannot imagine my disappointment.

Consolation came the next day during my whirlwind diner tour of Rhode Island as part of my return trip to Ottawa. (I can heartily recommend the scenic route through the Adirondacks in New York State, bypassing Boston and Montreal.)

I drove to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, home of the Modern Diner, a simulated railway car built seven decades ago. I was glad to snap a photo of the first American diner to be listed on the U.S. National Historic Register. It's a pretty, nostalgic sight - but it wasn't where I wanted to have breakfast.

Instead, because I wanted to meet its gregarious owner, I opted for the nearby Connie and Nikki's Restaurant and Creamery. (A creamery, by the way, is what we would call a dairy bar.) There, Connie Dernikos has held court for three decades. While the Modern Diner's interior is sleek and rounded, Connie's is a modest, three-decade-old little box that is charmingly cluttered with Coca-Cola memorabilia.