I picked up from Winsor Quincy this weekend - very smooth .
Everything was good, just a big bigger / thicker than my nyc usuals.
(My only nit is that they’re still using styrofoam.)
Next time: China Pearl.
I almost went to Jake’s and then the Hingham lobster pound for a lobster roll this weekend, but then randomly took a look at Yelp and decided to skip them - seems HLP may have changed ownership and the recent reviews are less than stellar, and Jake’s, while atmospheric, is not actually known for its lobster rolls.
But that was me, in search of a lobster roll. Ymmv.
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@Saregama you’re in our midst! Welcome!
Styrofoam makes me sad. But so does all food packaging.
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Thanks!
Come and gone… home already.
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The Weymouth Lobster Pound inside of Prevites Market in Weymouth always gets rave reviews. Sorry to hear that about the Hingham Lobster Pound. I haven’t been down there yet this summer but was hoping to get there in the next week or two for their fried clams.
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Good to know - thanks!
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.
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Attention @digga:
Given your fascination with the Hull windmill, I took a picture of it for you, which I took the trouble to edit to make the viewing angle comfortable for you:
I also took a picture of the eatery/drinkery that interested you. Although the posted hours said they ought to be open, they were not. So you’ll have to continue to wonder about what type of establishment they are:
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Just to establish that @GretchenS is not the only sniffer-outer here of roadside BBQ places, heading back to Boston we passed by a BBQ truck on route 3A, just after the bend where the Hingham Lobster Pound is (as @Saregama said, recently the recipient of several 1-star reviews on Yelp). It was called Morrell’s. They were on the opposite side of the road, and it was too tough for me to turn around, but I did some digging on my return:
It’s likely they are the continuation of a place in Stoughton that closed in late 2019:
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I should’ve posted the norwell jiffy lube / lobster express reference for you here - next time.
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If we hadn’t completely lost our marbles at chez digga and weren’t heading to Iceland this evening, I would’ve responded sooner.
What a fabulous report. Can’t wait to check out the South Shore again. Sideways, even.
Everyone stay safe through Henri. Although I started calling it Tropical Storm Avocado. Am I the only one who sees that?
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I took a few for the team and decided to make a comparison in Cambridge before the memory of Jake’s faded from my tongue. There’s always the danger that you romanticize the food you’ve had on vacation. You’ve spent the day at the beach, you’re in that blissful state of having been baked in the sun, coated in a nice mix of sand and salt. Perhaps, anything will taste good.
So, now that I’m washed of all salt and sand and sin I ordered tonight from Summer Shack, the closest place that offers stuff similar to Jake’s.
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Clam chowder v clam chowder: The SS offering had marginally more flavor, but was faintly lemony (or worse, was off) – not a plus. There were fewer clams (and they were tougher), bigger chunks of potatoes and the chowder was very heavy on the cream. Jake’s was the clear winner, with its thinner texture and cleaner taste (although I now regret not adding to it some of the sea salt we’d brought in one packet, and the coarsely ground peppercorns in another – they would have raised Jake’s to full perfection).
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Fried clams v fried clams: Here SS narrowly edged Jake’s, simply because they had 4 gloriously fat-bellied clams. The rest were small, and on those they drew with Jake’s.
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Mussels v mussels: Jake’s all the way. The SS ones were slightly overcooked and the broth was flat. It may sound like faint praise to say that Jake’s cooks its stuff to the right degree, but I think everybody here appreciates how easy it is to overcook seafood, and how often that mistake is made. It’s an achievement that Jake’s doesn’t.
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Grilled salmon on saffron rice, with asparagus: No swordfish at SS to compare with Jake’s, but the salmon was slightly overcooked, and – worse – the rice and asparagus were undercooked. People have taken this al dente thing too far in recent times. There’s a significant line between leaving a little toothiness to rice or pasta, and leaving an entirely uncooked core, or leaving asparagus in a state where you’re forced to spit out fibers.
Bottomline: Jake’s!!! You go, grrrrl!!!
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Iceland again? I fear the worst. Have a great trip, though!
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Thanks for sharing!
We’d call this a mini- or a micro-vacation, depending on how much time you have and how far you venture. It’s the theme of our summer.
For us, sometimes it’s just a meal outside and a stroll on the beach. A weekday afternoon has proved best when it’s possible to take time off. That way we can steer clear of crowded settings and relax.
Also started to get out to a couple of restaurant patios locally when we can. A change of scenery, even for an hour or so, does wonders.
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I actually do think a lot of Jake’s is atmospheric…
I’ve had fresh seafood prepared better in lots of places, but it’s actually quite hard to get beach food that’s above average, so on that scale Jake’s scores a lot higher than places elsewhere that don’t have that working against them!
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I used to go here all the time in the 80’s. It had a great wooden roller coaster where the thrill was enhanced because it really looked like it was about to fall down.
When the park closed, the coaster got bought and moved down to an amusement park outside of DC. They even restored a portion of it that had been damaged by fire.
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Thanks for the link. Are you “Lone Wolf”?
Something about the general Hull area intrigued me, in a way that Cape Ann or Cape Cod (both the targets of multiple visits in the past) have not. There’s the utter desolation of the town of Hull, for example, not because it’s run down, but because it’s not: row after row of neat, well-maintained homes (most with a boat in their yards) , but no stores (except for one bait-and-tackle joint), no markets, no eateries. There is a high school, and there is a library, so presumably there’s life somewhere, but it’s hard to understand how people live it.
I was intrigued enough that I ordered one of those “Then and Now” books on Hull and Nantasket (that one exists at all was fascinating), and another from “Images of America”. There’s also a tourist guidebook to the area from around 1900, which I snagged reprint of.
As in a lot of small communities, there’s a resident writer, John Galluzzo, author of one of the books above and also of other intriguing works such as “Crime, Politics and Corruption in Hull” and “When Hull Freezes Over”.
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I can’t speak to the atmosphere at Jake’s, since both our meals were takeout.
I don’t want to oversell the place – it’s not Le Bernadin – but it really is very good at what it does, not just slightly better than the competition (based on my limited experience of Jake’s, but more extensive experience of the competition over many years).
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For us, it was our only vacation.
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haha, no I am not.
