La Veracruzana, Northampton and Amherst
Roberto’s, Northampton
💙 | $$ | The saddest thing that’s happened to the Northampton restaurant scene in the last two years has been closure of Sylvester’s, a restaurant that I recommended in my first Gazette column ever. The good news, though, is that the owners of Sylvester’s also run Roberto’s, just a bit further down King Street, so not all of the greatness is lost. It’s just re-focused. So if you were a Sylvester’s lover, like I was, then you can still support the family.
Roberto’s is a baby by Joe’s standards but a local stalwart by any other, founded in the 1960s. The place is simple and folksy inside, with a balanced bustle of activity that puts you in the mood. They’re good at accommodating big groups. Roberto’s is also a sleeper hit for outdoor dining: you can sit out on a gracious patio next to the big old house and watch some hipsters across the street sell outrageous vintage clothes. They might even sing or rap.
The antipasto is a necessary way to start. It’s a generous spread, a massively tricked-out Italian-dressed salad with marinated mushrooms, ham, cheese, nicely acidic banana peppers, and pepperoni fried to a delightfully chip-like crispness.
A well-coated Caesar salad is straightforward, and just what it should be.
Cheesy garlic bread and thin-crust pizza are two more eternal favorites here. They’re both in the greasy, pile-it-on school of culinary art in American pizza and garlic bread, which was really flowering in the Northeastern U.S. around the time of Roberto’s birth in the 1960s.
But the best thing on the menu is what my grandmother, Nonnie, would order every time: eggplant parmigiana, crispy outside and melty inside and absolutely addictive. Most mains, including the eggplant, come with a choice of pasta, of which cavatappi (squiggly, mac-and-cheese-like noodles) are the best by far.
Ravioli are another strength of the kitchen: butternut squash ravioli comes lusciously sauced and generously layered with grated cheese, while buffalo chicken ravioli is stuffed with minced chicken and served with blue cheese. These are hardly 1960s dishes, but they too may live long lives.
Oriental Taste, Northampton
💙💙 | $ | Chinese two-course lunch specials—e.g. pork with chili pepper, ma po tofu—come with soup and rice, and they’re priced like gifts, under ten dollars a person. But don’t stop there: a lot of the more authentic à-la-carte dishes at Oriental Taste are fire. Their cumin lamb, for example, is one of my favorite things to eat in the world. Also great are boiled beef, boiled fish, and juicy, golden-fried “Special Sichuan Spicy Chicken,” tossed with crispy red chilies. They’re open late, too.
Easily the best Chinese restaurant in Northampton, Oriental Taste is a simply decorated space with high ceilings. I like the tables by the front windows, from which you can watch the bustle of Main Street.
The menu’s real firepower is found in a section called “Chef’s Special Dishes.” A great party dish that feeds two or three people is “spicy grilled whole fish,” which comes to the table bubbling in a giant metal tray with a burner under it, swimming in a red-colored broth with generous portions of cabbage, lotus, and other Chinese vegetables.
The kitchen makes great use of ma la, and you can’t go wrong with any menu item that includes the word “Sichuan.” Beef in hot and sour pickle broth and dry-braised dishes hit the spot, as does red-cooked pork, a Taiwanese specialty of rich, fatty belly meat slow-braised and deeply infused with flavors of soy sauce and five spice.
Oriental Taste is also one of the city’s best-value lunch options. Every “Chinese Lunch Special” rings in at under ten dollars, including soup and rice. Pork or beef with wild chili. There are plenty of great vegetarian options on this list, including ma po tofu with Sichuan peppercorns and shredded potato with chili—China’s answer to hash browns.
There’s also decent sushi and pan-Asian here, if that’s what you’re craving, but you’d be missing out on the really good, authentic stuff.
The wine list is not broad, but it’s one of the best values in town. There’s not a single bottle over $30, and everything is marked up to no more than about twice what you’d pay in a wine store—a departure from the 3–4x that you’ll see at so many restaurants.
Eastside Grill, Northampton
💙💙💙 | $$ | My go-to for a great, fun downtown meal has always been this lively house with intimate booth seating. The raw bar is fresh, sweet potato ravioli rich and seductive, gumbos deep and mysterious. A stellar Gorgonzola-vinaigrette house or Caesar salad comes with every full main, and half-portions are served. The well-chosen wine list sometimes includes great local reds from Mineral Hills Winery in Florence.
When I think of fried seafood in my hometown, the first place that comes to mind is Eastside Grill, a restaurant that opened in 1985 and has aged with exceptional grace under the leadership of a management and culinary team that’s been around for decades. Inside a gracious old white house, a series of warmly lit rooms draw you in with a pleasant buzz every night, and a kind and informal staff that treats every customer like family.
But there’s so much more than the indoors. Over the past few years, Eastside has helped spearhead the Summer on Strong program, which for several months transforms Strong Avenue in downtown Northampton into a giant pedestrian-only piazza, an outdoor-dining block that rivals Boston’s North End for vibrancy. Beyond Eastside, Summer on Strong includes its neighbors Local Burger, Homestead, Familiars Coffee & Tea, the Tunnel Bar, and Progression Brewing. Summer on Strong kicks off in May and continues into the early fall.
On a warm spring or summer evening, Eastside’s lamp-lit alleyway behind the building, spread with tables, gives off an aura of romance that evokes New Orleans. This dovetails well with the restaurant’s unique culinary concept, which is to cross New England seafood with New Orleans-style creole and cajun. This might not seem like the most obvious move, but the northeast Atlantic and Louisiana Gulf coasts happen to be two of the greatest seafood-frying regions in the world, so it’s no surprise that Eastside is a champion at this.
Start with a well-mixed bloody mary (the house version comes with two juicy cocktail shrimp), a generously sized dry martini, or a local draft beer, or order from one of Northampton’s best-value wine lists. One time in late 2023 I found the Mineral Hills Cabernet from Florence, which was my #1 local wine pick of the year.
Next you can move on to some of the city’s best oysters on the half shell—if you sit at the bar, you’ll be treated to a full frontal shucking. The classic American spinach-and-artichoke dip, a favorite for all ages, is also done right here.
Better still are Eastside’s fried oysters: big, indulgent Gulf-style delights, plump and well-seasoned, not too briny, with a pink rémoulade that gets some peppery heat from Tabasco and stands up to the deeply flavorful batter.
Fried popcorn shrimp, like fried oysters, are well crisped and bubbled hot and fast enough to preserve the moistness of the meat inside.
The star of the show still awaits: I would challenge you to find a better gumbo anywhere on the East Coast than Eastside’s rotating gumbos of the day, almost all of which incorporate smoky andouille sausage.
The kitchen also has a way with Gorgonzola, starting with their famous Gorgonzola garlic bread, which absorbs tangy cheese crumbles, melted butter, and garlic so richly that they penetrate every bite of bread.
Big crumbles of Gorgonzola also show up in a pleasantly acidic vinaigrette on the house salad that comes with every full-sized main. You can also upgrade to a well-executed and (optionally) anchovied Caesar salad. If you’re in a party of two or more, I recommend sharing at least one of each.
Among mains, the fried chicken, served with buffalo sauce, is always a winning choice, even though it’s a breast with no bone—a light, crunchy batter coats the juicy meat well. Rotating vegetable sides might include garlicky green beans with an al-dente pop.
That same expertise with the deep fryer does good work with cornmeal-crusted fish and chips, and there are also expertly blackened steaks (though boneless), and other New Orleans-themed fare. I have always been less impressed, however, with jambalaya, étoufée, and sautéed-chicken-breast dishes.
Rich, sultry sweet-potato ravioli, smothered in a gorgonzola cream sauce with wilted spinach, is my mom’s favorite order here. As a result, she’s always a frequent fork-jacking victim of all the flex-Ketos at the table. The ravioli dish, like several other mains, is also available in a half-portion for smaller appetites, but my mom has learned from experience not to do that.
Kulangsu (Gulangyu): UNESCO World Heritage site announcement coming this week!
Kulangsu Island (Gulangyu Island), the small pedestrian-only tropical classical music island off the coast of Xiamen, China, is set to be named a UNESCO World Heritage Site this week at the 41st Session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in Krakow, Poland.
See the official Kulangsu Island Visitor’s Guide here.
Xi Wu Bar & Café (Xi Wu Jiu Ba 隙屋酒吧)
💙💙💙 This indoor-outdoor café-bar in Jing’s childhood neighborhood had been around for more than eight years when we first stumbled across it. The shaded hipster garden is a work of outsider art. Hanging lanterns, spinning pinwheels, bric-a-brac, and eclectic music give the place a French-Corner-of-Kulangsu feel. Drinks are expensive, but there’s a full range of designer whiskies and Goose Island IPA. There’s cool vintage jewelry and home-made souvenirs at reasonable prices at the shop in the garden, where the young geniuses who run the establishment also live.
For more Kulangsu travel ideas, see the new Kulangsu Island Visitor’s Guide.
Miryam Hotel
💙 One of the most gracious properties on the island, overlooking gardens and the sea beyond, houses the Miryam, which is advertised as “boutique” but feels more like a grand dame clinging to the cliffs of Italy’s Amalfi Coast.
The Continental feel extends to the furnishing of the clean, airy, well-lit rooms, some with claw-foot tubs. Ask for a room with a sea view—the generous private balconies and their bucolic vistas are worth the upcharge.
Prices are above average for Kulangsu but reasonable given the views upscale feel. The restaurant’s availability and hours are unpredictable, so don’t plan around meals here. The staff runs a tight ship and can be curt to non-hotel guests (not allowing them to enter the upper balconies, lobbies, and other public areas of the hotel) , but the rewards of being a guest are considerable.
For more Kulangsu (Gulangyu) travel ideas, see the new Kulangsu Island Visitor’s Guide.
Canaan D Cocktail Bar (迦南D)
💙💙💙 In New York, it was Milk & Honey. In Houston, it was Anvil. On Kulangsu, the next-generation cocktail culture has been shaped by a genuine, hard-working man named Gino, an island native who (in addition to being a star attacker for a semi-pro soccer team) has raised the local mixology bar forever.
Gino is about as serious about his drinks as anyone on the planet, but the decor in his dim speakeasy-style haunt is playful, too–especially the upstairs, whose darts, bric-a-brac furniture, and wainscoting give the place the look of a 1970s rec room repurposed by Brooklyn hipsters.
Thankfully, Gino’s no hipster–he’s a Kulangsu native, which is pretty much the opposite–but he does speak some English, and more importantly, he’s fluent in the international language of alcohol: just name your base spirit and leave the rest to the artist. Tricked-out cocktails aren’t cheap, but the labor and material costs are extraordinary, whether it’s dry ice, smoking wood shrubs, obscure spirits practically unavailable in China, or a Ramos Gin Fizz that needs to be shaken for a full five minutes.
Gino’s thoughtful and futuristic glassings and glass-platings are as unpredictable as his late-night hours. Come ready to be surprised, whether it’s by a perfectly spherical ice cube the size of a baseball or a steaming bowl of pork-bone broth just when you need it most.
For more Kulangsu (Gulangyu) travel ideas, see the new Kulangsu Island Visitor’s Guide.
Weibo Bar (围脖酒吧 Weibo Jiu Ba)
💙 American hip hop and R&B greet you as you walk into this dark, eclectically decorated haunt, whose name means “scarf bar”–no relation to the Weibo that was China’s answer to Facebook before Tencent’s Wechat took over the entire Chinese ether.
Weibo Bar features a periodic one-man live music show at the keyboard/mic station in the midst of things, but the real highlight of the interior is the movie screen, which plays comedies with their soundtracks pumped through the excellent sound system by day and serves as a visual accompaniment to the live and canned tunes by night.
A set-menu lunch features Western dishes like steak. The cocktail selection is standard, but there’s unspoiled Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon on offer, and a Tiger beer tap is coming soon. In the meantime you’ll have to settle for bottled Tsingtao, Bud, or Heineken. Amongst the bar snacks, don’t miss the cucumbers with a wasabi-soy dipping sauce (芥末青瓜, jie mo qing gua), which will clear out your sinuses in short order, thus enabling you to stay until the bar’s 2am closing time before resting up for the next morning’s 9:30am opening time.
For more Kulangsu (Gulangyu) travel ideas, see the new Kulangsu Island Visitor’s Guide.
💙 Picky About Food (Tiao Shi 挑食)
This is one of the swankiest tables in town, with an original branch on Quanzhou Lu and an even more polished new branch on Fujian Lu. Picky About Food is highly selective in its ingredient sourcing, with reliable local and international seafood swimming in well-tended tanks and an elevated level of service that seems almost stuffy by Kulangsu standards.
Beneath precisely positioned Edison bulbs, you’ll dine at sleek wooden tables and wooden chopsticks and spoons. A pleasant way to start is gan bei zhu sun tang （干杯玉笋汤), a gentle clear soup of minuscule dried scallops, veiled lady mushroom (a translucent white and irresistibly spongy bamboo fungus whose suggestive species name is Phallus indusiatus), and tofu.
One of the house specialities is dubbed “Boston lobster” (bo si tun long xia，波士顿龙虾), which comes steamed with glass noodles, garlic, oil, and spring onions. This prep is more in the Kulangsu street-food style than anything you might find in Massachusetts, but it’s fresh, flavorful, and juicy, unlike some of the tough, overcooked lobster you might be deceived into buying from the hawkers on Longtou Lu. When it comes to lobster on Kulangsu, you get what you pay for.
If you once enjoyed the Chinese-American dish known as “egg foo young” back when it was a standard at U.S. Chinese restaurants in the 1980s, as I did, then tiao shi dou fu （ 天使豆腐), fried egg custard cubes in a light brown sauce, will take you back. On the other hand, the taste, texture, and name of this dish might also fool you into thinking you’re eating tofu. It’s adorned with tomatoes and thinly julienned red peppers. Other local specialties include fen shen yu mi bang（分针玉米棒）：long, full-bellied “corn clams” steamed with garlic glass noodles.
Skip the marked-up staples like Chinese lettuce, which comes out too oily; likewise, Xiamen fried noodles with shrimp, egg, and spring onions are no better here than they would be at any corner food shop. Instead, make a date night of it, splurge a bit, and challenge this able kitchen.
