Restaurants

# The Griswold Inn: Two and a Half Centuries on the Connecticut River Essex sits where the Connecticut River widens toward Long Island Sound, a village of white clapboard houses and a harbor full of sailboats. At its center, on Main Street, stands a building that has been serving food and drink since 1776 — […]

# At The Essex, the Menu Changes Before You Can Memorize It Chef Colt Taylor numbers his menus. By the time a regular at The Essex gets used to one, it has often already given way to the next — diners who visited a few weeks apart can find themselves comparing notes on entirely different

# At Louis’ Lunch, the Same Broilers Have Run Since 1898 The hamburgers at Louis’ Lunch come out vertically. The patties hang in cast-iron gridirons inside vertical gas broilers, cooking on both sides at once without a flat-top griddle anywhere in sight, a setup the restaurant has used since the broilers were installed in 1898.

# Abbott’s Lobster in the Rough Closes Every Winter, On Purpose There is a particular morning each spring when a line forms outside a shack on Pearl Street in Noank before the order window even opens. Abbott’s Lobster in the Rough has no off-season presence to speak of — no winter hours, no skeleton crew

# At Lobster Landing, a Crooked Sign Stays Crooked on Purpose The “O” in the Lobster Landing sign has been tilted into the “L” next to it for years. Owner Enea Bacci once went to straighten it, and his wife, Cathie, stopped him — she felt the crookedness gave the place more character, and the

# Modern Apizza Never Left State Street, or Its Name New Haven’s pizza rivalry usually plays out on Wooster Street, where Frank Pepe’s and Sally’s Apizza sit a few doors apart and have spent decades trading regulars. Modern Apizza isn’t on Wooster Street at all. It’s on State Street in the East Rock neighborhood, a

# Blackie’s Has Never Served French Fries, and Never Will Order at Blackie’s and you’ll quickly learn what isn’t on the menu. There are no french fries — there never have been, and the people who run the place don’t seem inclined to explain why beyond the fact that it’s simply not done. There’s no

# Rein’s Deli Started Because Two New Jersey Transplants Missed a Decent Corned Beef Sandwich Bob and Betty Rein moved to Connecticut from Elizabeth, New Jersey for work, and once they got settled, they ran into a problem they hadn’t anticipated: nowhere in the area served a corned beef sandwich that met their standards. Rather

# Two Off-Duty Cops Started Augie & Ray’s. Their Great-Grandsons Run It Now. Ray Hutt and Augie Bria were East Hartford police officers with no restaurant experience between them when they opened a hot dog stand on Main Street in 1946. What they did have was a sense of what the workers at nearby factories

# Capitol Lunch Has Moved Twice and Never Left Main Street Sophia Lampros didn’t set out to outshine her husband’s restaurant, but that’s roughly what happened. Peter Lampros had opened Oxford Lunch in New Britain after the family settled in Connecticut, and Sophia, working alongside him, had her own idea: a restaurant built entirely around