We spent 48 hours in the Nantasket beach area between Wednesday afternoon and Friday (yesterday). Babies that we are, we’re taking baby steps toward eating out, so we went equipped with a cooler stuffed with salamis, ham, cheeses (hard, soft and blue), roasted artichokes, fruit, etc., and a picnic basket of breads, crackers, chocolate and wine. Two of our three lunches, the first a picnic on Wednesday at the lovely Word’s End park on the way to Hull, were from our provisions as were our late night snacks.
Thanks to the suggestion of @GretchenS and the endorsement of @Saregama our first dinner (Wednesday) was takeout from Jake’s. My wife followed @GretchenS’s advice and ordered the grilled swordfish on salad (she chose the Mediterranean). Both the salad and the swordfish were excellent, the fish beautifully cooked to the right texture. It’s easy to dry out swordfish, but this was juicy and just perfect. My fried fish platter was a slightly mixed bag. The frying was excellent – greaseless, not too bready, and again perfectly textured. The shrimp, in particular, were lovely – another item that can go from perfect to rubber in a flash. The hake was excellent, too. But the whole-belly clams were small, and the scallops a little unexciting. (I don’t think deep frying is the way to go with scallops.) Still, the meal was great enough, that the next night we decided to revisit Jake’s rather than risk an untried place. There was also the advantage that they were a 15-minute walk from where we were staying, essentially right on the beach.
The next night my wife had the swordfish again – just as good as the first time – but this time on the “power salad” (not as successful as the Mediterranean), and clam chowder (a lot of nicely textured clams, but a bit bland). I had steamed mussels with a butter-garlic-shallot sauce (the sauce was more of a topping and you needed to stir it into the hot broth to let the garlicky flavor develop, but the mussels were, again, cooked just right) and a grilled salmon sandwich with aoli.
I join the previous endorsers of Jake’s and wholeheartedly recommend it.
For one of our breakfasts we dug into our hams and our boiled eggs and our bread, but for our second (Friday) we got excellent breakfast sandwiches from a nearby bakery, Breadbasket. We liked them enough that on our way out we got lunch from them – a very good tomato and mozzarella flatbread and a spectacular beef sandwich: thick, warm, meltingly tender slices of beef with caramelized onions and horseradish. Based on what we had, this place is well worth a visit if you’re in the area. I’d love to return and try both their lamb and pork sandwiches. (ETA: We also brought home a loaf of their pumpernickel bread, which turned out to be very good, too.)
Many of you know the area better than I do, so you may know this, but Nantasket Beach was once the site of an apparently spectacular amusement park called Paragon Park. Sadly, only the carousel remains.
