Rhody Squid

On Friday at an Irish pub called O’Hara’s in the Newton Highlands part of Massachusetts, my friends and I, all visiting from Rhode Island, began our lunchtime food-and-drink excursion by glancing at the appetizers. At the top of the list was calamari, served “traditional” and “Rhode Island style.” So we asked the waitress: How do you make the Rhode Island style?
“Comes with banana peppers and garlic butter.”
“And the traditional?”
“Comes without those things.”
A day later, I talked with a couple of folks from Connecticut, who said that menus in the Nutmeg State increasingly refer to “Rhode Island-style calamari.” Some diners have even found it on menus in southern California. There are subtle variations, but the gist is hot cherry peppers (served as rings) or banana peppers (or both), cooked in garlic butter or garlic and oil. Often a small condiment serving of marinara sauce accompanies. In general, it’s a spicier and greasier version of the dish and famed New England chef Jasper White pays tribute to those qualities by calling his flavorful version, “Spicy and Greasy Rhode Island Calamari.”
In the past year, Rhode Island has been referred to as “the squid capital of the East Coast,” with more than 7 million pounds caught in local waters. Last fall Bryan Rourke of the ProJo reported it this way: “Squid is to Rhode Island what lobster is to Maine; cod is to Massachusetts.”
But the Rhody cuisine renaissance isn’t limited to calamari. Clear-broth Rhode Island chowder, sometimes called South County chowder hereabouts, is also making its way onto more menus, along with variations of white, from the thick, stick-a-spoon-in-it-and-it-won’t-move versions popular in Boston and Cape Cod to the thinner milky versions, locally called Newport chowder. One food Web site reported that “Rhode Island Red chowder” is gaining fans as well, popping up on regional menus, elbowing its way as a soup du jour as something distinct from Manhattan chowder, far spicier and creamier than its New York-dubbed cousin.
In some Rhode Island restaurants (and, I’ve heard, Long Island ones as well), we’ve had a clam chowder variant that could be called “dirty chowder” or “gray chowder,” being a blending of the clear and milky chowders. Perhaps it should be called “New England skim chowder.” Long Island food shacks have also popularized a mix of the red and white chowders. One of my friends calls that “Long Island chowder,” although I’m not sure anyone over the Throgs Neck Bridge would be able to identify it as such.
The predominance of food shows on TV, easy recipe hunting on the Internet, a growing awareness of regional cuisines and ubiquitous kitchen experimentation has led to the discovery of Rhode Island’s notoriously insular food culture on plates and platters outside the state. Can anyone envision the day when French cafes, along with their croissants and brie, will offer Rhode Island New York System hot wieners? (Wouldn’t be the same without the neon sign in the window.)

What will be the next Rhode Island food to go national?

With Apologies to Monty Python...

Friday is Rhode Island Independence Day, marking the moment when our forebears became the first residents of the Colonies to renounce allegiance to the British Crown. Details are murky, but according to some historians of ill repute, Rhode Island patriots gathered in a dim pub and, fired up on casks of ale and the demon rum, collectively asked, “What have the British ever done for us?”
One voice spoke out meekly:
“The ale house?”
“Right. Fine. But except for the ale house, what have the British ever done for us?”
“Well, Shakespeare…”
“Very well. Shakespeare and the ale house.”
“Dictionaries.”
“Dictionaries. Of course. That goes without saying.”
“Shorthand.”
“Clearly. Conceding the points on shorthand, Shakespeare, dictionaries and the ale house, what have the British ever done for us?”
About an hour later, after the patriots had exhausted the positive benefits of British rule, they all agreed to revolt and, following a few historical anomalies in the ensuing years, Rhode Island, as we know it, was born.

So the question is: How should we celebrate Rhode Island Independence Day?

Some suggestions:
1) Take the day off. As currently constituted, Rhode Island Independence Day, unless it falls on a weekend, is a working day for a majority of Rhode Islanders. But how can we all exuberantly assert our independence when we are working for The Man?
2) Rename it. As holiday names go, Rhode Island Independence Day has all of the poetry of Administrative Professionals Day. Massachusetts figured it out. They have Patriots Day (celebrated with a little road race in Boston, a skirmish between Minutemen and Lobsterbacks on the Lexington Green and a morning baseball game at Fenway). So why not Rogue’s Day, a day of roguery to commemorate the subversive dissident in all of us?
3) Renounce all things British for a day. That means no listening to old Beatles, Stones or Who albums. No catching up on “Dr. Who” DVDs. No bangers ’n‘ mash for lunch. No bitters after work. No checking on Premier League scores. No following Ricky Gervais on Twitter. No practicing your fake Cockney accent while shaving in front of the mirror.
4) Convert Rhode Island Shore Dinner Halls into all-you-can-eat May Breakfast buffets.
5) Anchor something somewhere.
6) Pay bills in wampum.
7) Attend Fifestock, an all-day Fifeapalooza of fife and drum music at Fort Adams.
8) Invent a Roger Williams drinking game. (Believe me, this is harder than it sounds.)
9) Moon Connecticut
10) Go quahog tipping.

We Are What We Are

The Web site The Awl ranked Rhode Island's latest slogan, "Unwind," as the third worst out of 51 (including all states and the District of Columbia), barely beating out Maryland's "Maryland of Opportunity" and Washington's "SayWa!" The ranking, which is entirely fair, illuminates a long-standing problem for Rhody: We can't sell ourselves.

For many of us who live here, that's fine, of course. We're happy with our secret knowledge of Rhody's collective cool, contentedly brunching at Jim's Dock in Jerusalem, watching kids catch crabs near the moorings or gazing at boats that motor or sail in and out of Salt Pond. Taking our rambling drives along coast and through country to Tiverton Four Corners, for a cone of coffee or butter brickle at Gray's Ice Cream. Cycling with a picnic lunch to Colt State Park in Bristol, where the bay opens up to a patchwork of green fields attracting communities of kite flyers, Frisbee tossers, smorgasbord crashers and games of volleyball, baseball, touch football, bocce and horseshoes. No, it doesn't bother us that the rest of the world hasn't discovered some of our simple but peerless pleasures.

But the state wants tourist money. So it comes up with slogans. Like "Discover Rhode Island." As if we are too small for the average American to find. Or "Unwind." As if the world's tightly wound will encounter bliss, harmony and tranquility in a Rhode Island February.

The slogan concept has even confused the Great Oz of Dictionaries, Wikipedia, which in a list of state slogans, says the following about Rhode Island: "Unwind (formerly Hope)."

Uhh, sorry all you Wikipedians out there, but Hope is our motto, never our slogan. A motto is a much deeper thing than a slogan, a core tenant, a belief, a way of being. A slogan is just trying to sell something, a marketing gimmick, a shallow catch phrase. Perhaps that's why we've never gotten the hang of it. "Unwind" sounds like something California would say. It's not us. We're a state of slapstick. We're a state of scandals. We're a state of contradictions. We're a state of little-known secrets. We're a state that loves to laugh. We're a state that lives to the daily rhythms of the ocean. We're a state obsessed with our quirks. We're a state that likes to eat and drink and gamble. We're a state that immerses itself in history and nature and roadside kitsch. We're a state that is happy it's not Connecticut.

It's hard to get all of that into a slogan.

More successful was the response to a student posting a Yahoo Answers question, requesting help for a social studies project in which the assignment was to come up with a slogan for Colonial Rhode Island. The best answer, chosen by three voters:

I named a chicken 'Red.'

Yup. That about sums it up. Beats "Unwind," at any rate.

We've asked this question before, but we're not above repeating ourselves. What should be Rhode Island's slogan?

Taste for Tacky

After passing the pink gates and fake deer menagerie of a Bristol home along Route 114 en route to Newport, I began thinking about the profusion of tacky lawns in Rhode Island. With streaks of forsythia and daffodil clusters yellowing the commute, and the pinks and whites and pastels of the blooming and budding spring bushes and trees serving as colorful distraction, Rhody’s endless fascination with lawn animals, mini-lighthouses, glass orbs and leftover holiday decoration can go unnoticed. But operating on the theory that there is nothing in the universe that can’t be Googled, when I got to work I plugged into the Matrix and, wouldn’t you know it, there’s already a blog called Tacky Lawns dedicated to documenting the wonderful world of yard kitsch.

Our purpose and mission is to document the hordes of tacky lawns and lawn ornaments that blight American yards. We seek out everything from the ordinary tacky (pink flamingoes, gnomes on the roam, resin animals of every stripe and shape) to the extraordinary in tackiness.

My search led to a post on the tacky lawns of West Warwick, a photo sequence accompanied by the following note:

As of April 1, 2000 there were 13,186 housing units in West Warwick. As of November 2, 2009, 90% of these housing units featured Tacky Lawns.

Rhode Island, Land of Giant Termites and Six-Foot Mr. Potato Heads, has long loved its kitsch. Somewhere inside most homes you are liable to find one of the following: Pope-on-a-Rope Soap, Smoking Monkey, Yodeling Pickle, Boxing Nun puppet, a Buddy Christ Dashboard Statue or something equally cheap and tawdry that indulges the bad taste impulse in all of us. (Full confession: My thing is plastic lobster. One crustacean lives in the kitchen; the other’s on a bookshelf.)

Like the circles of hell in Dante’s “Inferno,” there are levels to tackiness. At one end you have pink flamingoes and garden gnomes, deserving induction in the first class of the Kitsch Hall of Fame. Somewhere lower you’ll find the Crazy Cat Lady Action Figure, a pajama bottom-wearing, slipper-clad, wild-eyed, sloppy-haired elderly woman crawling in cats. Or Fred Toothpick Holder, a bulbous, vaguely man-shaped figure, stuck mercilessly in dozens of toothpicks, like an acupuncture session gone horribly wrong, available in “Ouch Gray.” Or a Lookin’ Good for Jesus mini-makeup kit, a selection of Tattoos for the Elderly or Instant Irish Accent Mouth Spray, all novelties in the marketplace of ideas that make you go “hmm…”

So where is the tackiest yard in Rhode Island?

The Daffodil Man

I’ve never met the Daffodil Man, but I’d like to thank him. Ronald Lee Fleming, a city planner and urban designer, was honored by members of the Alliance for a Livable Newport recently for his generosity and vision. Fleming is the man responsible for funding the Daffodil Project, in which more than 120,000 daffodils have been planted throughout Newport over the last seven years. As quoted last week by Sean Flynn of The Newport Daily News, Fleming envisions “a gold necklace from the city’s entryways right down to the water.”

As our communities asphalt and concrete and sprawl themselves into one homogenous, gray Blobville, we take pleasure in what little grace notes of beautification are left in the landscape. It improves the drive to Newport, for example, on a late March/early April day, to notice satellites of daffodil clusters streaking yellow at the Rotary, in the field along Admiral Kalfbus Road and next to two burying grounds on the aptly named Farewell Street. Somehow civilization doesn’t feel so drab when bulbs are in bloom.

A few daffodils at a time, Fleming has transformed Newport. His contribution to Newport’s charm is reminiscent of local heroes in other communities – such as the late Antoinetta Goodwin, better known in South County as The Chicken Lady, for the Rhode Island Red figures that adorned her automobile and mailbox along her Route 138 property. (Her son has carried on the chicken mailbox tradition, with the birds decked out in Red Sox garb or seasonal decoration, amusing commuters along the route that once connected Tower Hill to Little Rest.) Goodwin made it her mission to plant flowers in many of the roadside and rotary medians in the villages of South Kingstown, bringing color and a sense of tranquility to the increasingly noisy, suburbanized space.

People my age who grew up in Barrington may remember Karl Jones, who tended what was thought to be the country’s largest private rose garden at his property along Nayatt Road. Jones was a cranky, Yankee iconoclast, but his cultivated roses and landscape were beautiful, drawing visitors from around the world in June. Each year he donated his land to Barrington High School for a day, so the graduating class could hold its Friendship Service on the grounds, while the roses were in bloom. When he became too old to take care of the garden, he approached the town for help, hoping his flowers, with a little care and tending, would have new life in posterity. Barrington balked. Jones sold to private developers. The property was split up and turned into a cul-de-sac of homes with an address of Jones Circle. A trellis with a few thorny vines is all that remains visible to the public along Nayatt Road, an echo of what once was the town’s quirkiest and most beloved attraction.

So Barrington lost its rose paradise, and much of its character and charm in the process. Newport is still building its Brigadoon of daffodils. If it takes a village to raise a child, perhaps it takes a villager who sees the world with the eyes of a child to save it.

What would be one way to transform an ugly part of Rhode Island?

Waiting for 'Moonrise'

Quint drinks a can of Narragansett in “Jaws.” Bluenote was the name of the horse that wins the fourth race at Narragansett Park in “The Sting.” Miss Rhode Island wins the Miss America crown in “Miss Congeniality,” and when pageant host William Shatner asks her to describe her idea of a perfect date, she says “April 25, because it’s not too hot, not too cold.”

These are a few of the sterling Rhode Islandisms in Hollywood films. Despite the best efforts of the Farrelly Brothers, and the fine work of some exceptional actors – including Richard Jenkins and Viola Davis – the Ocean State still comes up a bit short on the Silver Screen. More movies are being made here, but few of them have been very good, so Rhode Islanders have contented themselves with lapping up appetizers of scenery or Rhody references while mostly cringing at the dialogue and plot contrivances.

But that could change in May, when the quirkiest of film directors, Wes Anderson, opens the Cannes Film Festival with a new movie filmed in the quirkiest of states, Yours Rhody.

“Moonrise Kingdom,” featuring a stellar cast (Edward Norton, Francis McDormand, Bill Murray, Bruce Willis, Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman, Harvey Keitel and Bob Balaban), tells the story of a 12-year-old boy and girl in a New England village, circa 1965, who fall in love, make a secret pact and escape together on the eve of a impending storm, with the villagers in pursuit. If the trailer is a true indication of the film’s verbal wit and visual enchantment, “Moonrise” may end up being the movie that stamps Rhode Island in the minds of film buffs in the manner of Martha’s Vineyard in “Jaws” and coastal Scotland in “Local Hero.” Much of it was filmed at the South Kingstown Land Trust conservation easement Bayfield Farm, and advance scenes suggest that Anderson has captured the fairy-tale atmosphere of its sloping fields and tangled woods.

Leading us to this week's question: What Rhode Island location would you like to see filmed in a movie?

Rhody Universe: Soupy Sales
Last December I wrote an article about the art of making soupy, a family tradition in the villages of Westerly that originated in parts of Italy in which spicy sausages are made before Christmas, hung over winter, and distributed to kin and close friends around Easter. The article, posted on our Web site, prompted an e-mail from a reader, who wondered how to acquire soupy, which he had enjoyed years ago. I passed on a couple of suggestions – Ritacco’s Market, Dipollino’s Packing Co. – and didn’t hear from him again until recently. He’s having his bathroom remodeled and talked to “the guy that is putting in the flooring.” Turns out the flooring guy goes to Westerly every year to make soupy. So now he has a soupy source. The universe that is Rhode Island works in mysterious ways.

Ode to a Greasy Spoon Diner

I belong to the counter culture, the kind of person that prefers sitting in front of a bartender, waitress or short-order cook than in a booth or at a table. Cafes are nice, but sometimes they can have too much milieu. When I want an environment without the fancy French vocabulary attached, I head for pubs and diners.

Growing up in Rhode Island, the birthplace of the American diner, I always looked for the dives and greasy spoons – for the food, yes, tasty, cheap and served in big portions, but also for the conversation and the characters. You could run into anybody. Millionaire. Fisherman. College professor. Stripper. The diner seemed to be a safe haven for all walks of life. Some of my strangest conversations have occurred in diners. Today it was a thread about whether you could eat another human being to survive if you had to. The consensus was it depended on how much Tabasco was available.

(I remember a conversation at the old Jigger’s Diner in East Greenwich about how the town had an unusual number of wedding shops. One man at the counter was from a college town in New Hampshire. He said you couldn’t turn a corner without running into a pizza house. Another guy was from Brockton, Mass. He said, “Our thing is funeral homes.”)

Working now from our Newport Daily News offices above the slots, I can tumble down the hill anytime to Bishop’s 4th Street Diner at the Rotary. It’s the kind of rough-and-ready place where a frappe is advertised as a “Great Hangover Cure!” on the menu. Rhody food figures prominently. There are R.I. Johnny Cakes and stuffies, meatball grinders and clam strip rolls, and plenty of items featuring “Portuguese” in the name, including Portuguese breakfast sandwiches, Portuguese Sweet Toast and even Portuguese French Toast. The Portuguese Omelet includes the signature twist in all Rhody food described as “Portuguese,” a spicy sausage called chourico (it is combined with onions, peppers and cheese in the egg). At Bishop’s, a waitress scrawling shorthand on a receipt pad might yell out, “Drop a fry, Mikey!,” indicating in diner lingo that a particular order has been placed. The customers are mostly locals and regulars, and everyone seems to use a lot of ketchup.

Sometimes even the names of diners create a feeling of Rhode Islandness. The Hope Diner in Bristol. The late and lamented Wampanoag Diner in East Providence, where Mama Dot and her family worked. Like Champs Diner in Woonsocket and many others, the Wampanoag lingers only in the haze of nostalgia and the eternal scent memory of cigarette smoke, infiltrating every fabric of clothing.

The tourists come to see our lighthouses, but the locals prefer the diners. There is Snoopy’s in North Kingstown, the Middle of Nowhere Diner in Exeter and Haven Brothers in Providence. There’s also the Modern Diner and Right Spot Diner in Pawtucket, Seaplane Diner and Liberty Elm Diner in Providence, State Line Diner in Foster, Beacon Diner in East Greenwich and Miss Cranston Diner in Cranston, among others, calling on all souls. Because the average Rhode Island diner always felt to me like the kind of place where the angels and demons might show up after midnight, meeting behind windows and chrome reflecting rain-streaked neon. The winged and horned, mostly invisible to the rest of us, sitting at the counter to square up the previous day’s soul-stealing and soul-saving over coffee and hash. Loser pays the tab. Winner leaves the tip.

What is your favorite Rhode Island diner?