EYW Blog

Rhode Island chef Tim McGrath (right) at the Taste of Providence event

We’ve always known Rhode Island has great local food—over several visits, we’ve sampled the excellent stuffed quahogs and tangy pizza strips; we’ve dug into doughboys and sipped coffee milk with hot wieners. But the vibrant food scene in the Ocean State certainly doesn’t end at the quirky regional stuff; there’s a wealth of chef-driven, locavore-centric restaurants in Providence and beyond—and we were lucky enough to have them come to us last week.

The Taste of Providence NYC media event featured a trio of chefs from three Providence restaurants cooking a multicourse lunch at the Institute of Culinary...

Housemade charcuterie from Chef Joe Sparatta/Heritage

Nothing beats eating the local foods of a region while you’re on the ground in that region—tracking down the traditional dishes, tasting the modern updates, drinking the local beer, perusing the markets, trying what you cannot try “back home.” That is, after all, the founding principle of this website. But we’re grateful that here in New York City, sometimes the local foods of far-flung places—and the chefs who work magic with them—come to us. Lately we've been on a kick with the regional foods of small(ish)-town America, which actually makes it all the more interesting—cities we’d never before considered in a culinary sense are...

The “Best of Bentonville” chefs at work in the James Beard House kitchen

We’ll be honest: Ozarks cuisine was never really at the top of our want list. When we thought of that rural region, which extends across southern Missouri into northwestern Arkansas and parts of Oklahoma and Kansas, we mostly thought of Walmart (it has its corporate headquarters in the area) and that depressing Winter’s Bone movie. Maybe they hunt squirrel there?

But then we were invited, on behalf of Bentonville, Arkansas’s esteemed Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, to the James Beard House, in the West Village, for a showcase of regional food from the area, featuring chefs from four downtown...