There are more famous historic towns in New England, but few possess the small town prettiness of Bristol, Rhode Island, whose territory was once occupied by the Wampanoag Indians and later became part of the vast Plymouth Colony.  Being quite a ways off Interstate 95 and without the island appeal of Newport, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, Bristol has managed to stave off tourism overkill and maintain its character, which is based on colonial, 19th century, Gilded Age and pre-war architectural gems and a notable history as a deepwater sailing port where for a quarter century the America’s Cup yachts were designed and built. 

    For a medium-sized town—only about 21 square miles, half of it water—Bristol busies itself year-round with events and festivals that include most proudly the oldest continuous Fourth of July parade in America: 233 years and counting. Two hundred thousand people show up for the three-hour event (preceded by others beginning on Flag Day, June 14). The line down Main Street is painted red, white and blue and the day climaxes with a fly-over by the Blue Angels.

    This month the annual Bristol Harbor Festival will include a blessing of the fleet and a stuffed quahog (called “stuffies”) competition. In September, Raptor Weekend at the Audubon Experimental Education Center will feature two days devoted to eagles, owls, falcons and hawks, followed on September 30 by the Bristol Burger Bash and Bluegrass festival at the Linden Place Mansion.  Starting in November holiday events abound, leading up to the Grand Illumination of Hope Street.

    The principal attractions on a grand scale include the unique Blithewold Mansion and Arboretum (above), centered by a magnificent but unpretentious 45-room English-style summer manor house owned by the Van Wickles family and surrounded by 33 acres of both local and exotic plants, shrubs and trees that lead down to Bristol Bay. Landscape designer John DeWolf’s original concepts were to incorporate the Colonial Revival and Arts and Crafts movements.  The Great Lawn itself encompasses 10 acres, laid out in the late 1890s, followed by the Lord and Lady Burnham Greenhouses in 1901, the Bosquet Rose and Water Gardens (left) and the Rock Garden in the 1920s, with the entire collection made up of 2,000 trees and shrubs and 500 plants. Not even the Newport mansions approach Blithewold in the variety and grandeur of flora of every description.

    Linden Place Mansion is a striking “Great House,” whose 19th century owners were among the wealthiest slave traders in the U.S. Today it is a marvelous venue for weddings (my niece was married there) and the 1974 film version of The Great Gatsby used it as a location. It also houses the Bristol Art Museum.

    My wife and I stayed within the pastoral beauty of the national historic site Mount Hope Farm, whose 1745 colonial house was owned by Governor William Bradford. It has been dubbed by locals as “the Grand Lady of Bristol” (below), now a non-profit preservation with 12 period guests rooms, in three buildings, set amidst rolling farms and gardens bound by old stone walls.  This is also a highly desirable wedding venue at the estate’s Cove Cabin, an Adirondack-style log cabin from the 1930s.

    No one with even a vague interest in New England’s maritime history can fail to visit the Herreshoff Marine Museum (below), where the restoration of some glorious old wooden boats goes on slowly and steadily, while in the front of the edifice is an extraordinary exhibition of seafaring dating from1859, when it was a working shipbuilding concern under the Nathanael G. Herreshoff family, who built several America’s Cup contenders. Between 1893 and 1914 Herreshoff designed and built seven of the largest sloops ever launched, and five Cup defenders all won in their year. (It is also home to the America’s Cup Hall of Fame.)

    Bristol is not home to many notable restaurants, although DeWolf Tavern (below), located on what was the 1818 DeWolf Rum Distillery on the Thames Street Landing at Bristol Harbor, is a solidly American tavern and dining spot with a considerable number of Indian inflections by Chef Sai Viswanath.  Thus, you might begin with steamy, puffy naan breads along with chickpea battered pakora fritters and sweet chili sauce, or local lobster roasted in the tandoor oven. There’s also a vegetable plate of Brussels sprout cornbread hash with cauliflower, mixed bean stew and basmati rice.

    More traditional and representative of the big seafood houses that line the New England shoreline is the Lobster Pot, overlooking Bristol Harbor.  There since 1929, it’s a big space with two rooms and a menu of all the classics based on what’s freshest in the markets that day, so it’s won its share of “Best of New England” awards over the years.

    You can build your own raw bar plate with oysters, clams, shrimps and crabmeat. There’s also quahog clam chowder and a rich lobster bisque, steamers and jumbo lump crabcakes, a very hefty lobster roll with French fries and slaw and a clam roast with grilled artisan bread. Its “classics” include a diversity of lobster dishes, of course, along with baked stuffed jumbo shrimp, broiled scrod, and a baked seafood casserole of fish, scallops, crab, shrimp, clams browned with seasoned breadcrumbs. And there's a whole category of expertly fried seafood.

    I think a restaurant of this style, caliber and longevity should have a better wine list, but to feast on seafood there while drinking a glass of La Crema Chardonnay and watching the sun dip below the Bay is as pleasant an evening as one can have in New England.

Despite a strong tourism flow, Bristol has been struggling downtown. As one shopkeeper told me, “It’s tough making a profit selling to tourists. We used to have 38 storefronts along Hope Street, now only seven are occupied.”

    In the mornings the options for just taking you’re time and walking through the old streets of town and along Hope Street, its main route, you’ll find bakeries like Angelina’s (good scones and pastries and excellent coffee) and the Beehive Café is always full of locals who come for the brownies, macaroons, Queen Bee chocolate cake and pumpkin pie. There are art galleries and darling boutiques like Grasmere, known for its beautiful preserved flowers.

    On our morning stroll,  we happened upon the Island Child Care Center in the midst of a graduation, with toddlers trying to stay in double file as they received their diplomas. It was the kind of unexpected event that, after a while, you come to expect in a town like Bristol.

AND A LITTLE NORTH OF BRISTOL. . .

Persimmon

99 Hope Street

Providence, RI

401-432-7422

    Up until two years ago Bristol was home to one of the finest restaurants in New England, called Persimmon, quite a labor of love in a small town by chef Champe Speidel and his wife Lisa.  After eleven years they moved the restaurant to Providence (about 20 minutes northwest) to larger quarters (85 seats), with an open kitchen and very popular bar lounge.  Now, with its reputation intact and a much bigger pond to draw from, Persimmon is very much on people’s radar when visiting or passing through  Providence from the north or south.

           Champe, who looks a bit like James Corden, had been a butcher and such a talent is always a great boon to a kitchen, and the Speidels are very committed to local farmers and the bounty of North Atlantic waters.

    On a recent visit,  my wife began with excellent, puffy focaccia, arancini rice balls in a cream sauce and truffled beignets, all of which we could have made a meal of. A beautiful, silky asparagus soup with smoked ham and duck egg was remarkably light but very rich ($12), and then came “chicken and waffles” made of chicken morsels with slivers of crispy skin.

    A green salad was composed of native wild greens in a tangy Green Goddess broth ($9).  Canaroli rice was used for a well-rendered risotto with tender creamed leeks, glazed baby onions and green onions ($15). A crispy chicken leg was artfully stuffed with veal sweetbreads and morel mushroom sauce ($19).

    Never does Champe blur flavors by adding too many ingredients to a dish.  Everything seems perfectly matched for maximum effect. Equally so, desserts like a Valrhona chocolate semi-freddo with hazelnuts ($9) and a citrus custard and cheese tart ($9) aim for a sharp intensity rather then frilly aromatics.

 
   There is a five-course tasting menu at $78, with wines $42 more. There are a score of wines by the glass, and the wine list is especially strong in French regional bottlings.

    Persimmon is an exceptionally friendly place, casually cast but with a clientele that wears good sports clothes for a night out. The Speidels (Lisa recently had a baby) are as devoted to their cuisine as they are to their guests, and anyone from Manhattan to Maine looking for a superb meal must head North Northwest from Bristol.

Persimmon is open Tues.-Sat. for dinner.

    Joël Robuchon, who many of his colleagues believed was the greatest French master chef of his era, has died at the age of 73 in Geneva, Switzerland. The cause was pancreatic cancer.

    During his 60-year career his restaurants would win 28 Michelin stars—the most of any chef in the world—yet he was, ironically, best known for his decadent butter-rich mashed potatoes (below) rather than for any other dishes he created for any of his kitchens.

Born in Poitiers to a stonemason father and a mother who cleaned houses, he learned to cook from the local nuns and his first job as a cook was at the Mauéon-sur-Sévres seminary in Deux-Sévres. After his culinary apprenticeship, Robuchon was able to travel through Europe cooking at various restaurants, and by the age of 31 was honored with the prestigious Meilleur Ouvrier de France for his contributions to French cuisine. Chefs Gordon Ramsay and Eric Ripert of New York’s Le Bernardin were among his students.

    Robuchon’s international fame came in the 1990s with the opening of his Paris restaurant Jamin, which won three Michelin stars, but by 1995 the stress of maintaining the rigorously demanding standards and expense of such a restaurant forced him into retirement at the age of 50.  When he did make a comeback he eschewed haute cuisine to open a far more casual-style modern bistro called L’Atelier  de Joël Robuchon, which had counter service and a global menu. He repeated that formula in New York and Las Vegas, where the MGM Grand also made him an offer he couldn’t refuse to open a very posh, exceedingly expensive restaurant that, with his colleague Guy Savoy’s namesake restaurant, truly brought high-end fine dining to a city better known for flaming desserts and cheap buffets.

    Careful not to burn out, Robuchon rarely appeared and almost never cooked in any of his restaurants, becoming more of an overseer of his international empire, usually signing management contracts and stocking the restaurants with brigades of cooks he trained.  This year, after closing two Singapore restaurants, he went back into the New York market with another L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in the Financial District.

        In the kitchen Robuchon could be a hard-driving taskmaster—Ramsay said Robuchon once threw a plate of poorly cooked ravioli at him—but outside of it he seemed very shy.  I recall the story of how driven he was to obtain only the best of the best ingredients available in a city, once refusing perhaps eight out of a dozen baskets of raspberries brought to him for inspection.

    I met Robuchon once while he was in New York opening L’Atelier, in an interview conducted through an interpreter, since the master’s English was close to non-existent and my French was high school level. I found he answered questions with little emotion, like someone who wanted to be anywhere else than in an interview.  He spoke of how he was trying very hard to find ingredients the equal of those he obtained in Paris and how he really didn’t know the American palate. Working in a union-dominated kitchen eventually compromised Robuchon’s abilities to orchestrate as he wished and the restaurant closed.

    But I also remember that, as he stood behind the marble counter, quietly directing his French cooks, inspecting each dish for the tiniest flaw, I enjoyed one of the finest meals of my life.  Dish after marvelous dish appeared, some very French, some quite Japanese, with pasta and tapas-style Spanish accents. And plenty of Champagne.

    Weeks later I returned to L’Atelier and had one of the more disappointing meals of my life, with little of the vitality and intensity of the one I’d so enjoyed when Robuchon was there. 

    But Robuchon could not be everywhere and now he is nowhere on earth to be found. He’s only to be greatly missed, for he was a beacon of the grand traditions of French cuisine and a chef who urged his people to go further and taste more, learn new techniques and make trends, not follow them. He was never in the molecular cuisine mode, nor did he much enjoy being a celebrity chef, unless it was together with his friends like other master chefs Paul Bocuse, Roger Vergé, Alain Senderens and others, now also gone.  Indeed, it’s hard to imagine another like Robuchon appearing at a time when fine dining is under siege.  Fortunately, we’ll always have his books and his recipes and his enduring influence on at least two generations of chefs.

OH, PUH-LEEZE!

DIALOGUE, Santa Monica CA