Fried everything!

Yesterday we made the hour-long trip out to Ipswich to eat at the Ipswich Clam Box, which was just featured in Gourmet Magazine as one of the best farm-to-table restaurants in the US (along with Henrietta's Table and Rendezvous, both in Cambridge). I had also read about it somewhere very recently, maybe the New York Times, as the only place in the area that changes their oil once a day (no matter how long the line is!).

It was great! The Clam Box is not for the health-conscious. Almost everything on the menu is fried, and what isn't has mayonnaise in it (lobster roll, cole slaw). They do have hamburgers and hot dogs, presumably so you can convince your seafood-hating friends to accompany you there.

It is fall, and the leaves are turning, so the drive there was beautiful and very easy. Coming from California, it seems so strange that you only have to drive for an hour to get into a rural-ish area with lots of trees, big house lots, and not that much development.

We met my seafood-hating sister-in-law and her boyfriend there. My SIL and I teamed up to order, and neither one of us were happy, we decided to order a mini-meal of clams and a mini-meal of oysters, when originally I was going to get a mini-meal of clams and she was going to get the haddock plate. While the clams were DELICIOUS, the oysters were terrible. They were bland and flavorless, while the clams had that briny bite that I so love about shellfish. Then my SIL wasn't so crazy about the clams, so she ate the fries, and I ate the clams and some of the oysters, and we probably both wished that we had gone with our original impulses. My husband got the haddock, which he pronounced "not as good as the Anstruther (the little Scottish town where his grandfather lives that has the best fish-and-chips shop in all of Scotland), but just as good as any random place in London," which is high praise, coming from my husband. It would have been perfect if the fries had been thicker wedges like you get at fish-and-chips shops, but this wasn't a fish-and-chips shop, it was the Clam Box!

So skip the oysters, get the clams or fish, and most of all, don't fear the fry!

East Coast Grill and Raw Bar

We had dinner at East Coast Grill and Raw Bar in Inman Square last night. We went primarily for the oysters; my husband and I have great memories of slurping down a dozen oysters artfully arranged on styrofoam plates by the oyster-mongers at the Washington DC fish market (we learned later that people had actually died of food poisoning from eating oysters there!) and barbecuing probably a hundred oysters (seriously- there were about seven of us, but still) at Tomales Bay in Northern California. My husband doesn't like seafood in general, but he loves him some oysters!

The oysters at East Coast Grill were okay. I am not sure what kind we got because the place was so loud we had a hard time hearing our server. We determined that there were 2 kinds of oysters, though, so we had half a dozen of each kind. One was "brinier" than the other, and we didn't care for that one- it had this metallic aftertaste that was not very pleasant.

Where the place really shines is the entrees. I had the bluefish and my husband had the... striped bass? Monkfish? I can't remember, but both were very good, and the sides were also very good. I got these huge fried sweet potato wedges and balsamic flavored greens that unfortunately were swimming in oil or butter, so I didn't want to eat too much of them. My husband's fish came with a really great side of heirloom tomato salad and really tasty fried artichoke hearts. The artichoke hearts appeared to come from a can because they didn't have much flavor, but the batter was really good, and they weren't greasy but tasty and crispy. I kept picking them off his plate!

We skipped dessert because if we wanted dessert, we would have just gone to Christina's, which is right next door. However, we were too full, so skipped the sweet stuff. Alas, because Christina's is really good!