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and cheese sandwich on toast, but most orders are for hot dogs or hamburgers. The dogs are plump and pink, served in soft steamed buns, available with chili and all the usual condiments. The hamburgers are modest-size patties, available from plain to deluxe (lettuce, tomato, mayo, etc.), but devotees of junk food get a double cheeseburger with the works, which includes every condiment in the house plus bacon, cheese, and chili. Side that with cheese-glopped French fries and you have a seriously satisfying sidewalk feast.

The most popular beverage at Haven Brothers is coffee milk, which is like coffee, but with much more milk than coffee. Or you can get what Rhode Islanders call a frappe (known elsewhere as a milkshake) made from ice cream, milk, and the flavoring of your choice.

Mike’s Kitchen

At Tabor-Franchi VFW Post 239

170 Randall St.

401–946–5320

Cranston, RI

LD | $$

If you happen to drive past Mike’s Kitchen, you won’t notice it’s a restaurant. Located in a VFW hall with no sign outside other than the post number, Mike’s doesn’t need to advertise. To those who seek out great Italian food at low prices, it is an appetite-stirring magnet. At mealtimes, its tables are always crowded. (Tuesday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, it is generally closed to the public; that’s when the vets meet and when private functions generally are held.)

The menu, posted on the wall, is extremely appetizing: a catalog of dishes that are mostly Italian, a little Portuguese, and very Rhode Island. You can begin a meal with a stuffie (a stuffed quohog clam) or the unique Ocean State snail-salad appetizer, then move on to perfectly broiled swordfish or scallops, or indulge in such delectable old world favorites as sautéed broccoli rabe (or a rabe and provolone sandwich), sole Florentine, and chicken with cannellini beans. On the side of anything, you want polenta—a cream-soft block of steamy cooked cornmeal available with fennel-spiked sausage, meatballs, or a blanket of thick marinara sauce.

Many of the Italian dishes are familiar: veal cutlets in a variety of sauces, parmesans galore, scampis, and even spaghetti and meatballs and linguine with nothing but oil and garlic. Seafood pastas are especially wonderful, offered with a choice of red or white sauce; the top of the line is seafood diablo—lobster, scallops, and shrimp in spicy tomato sauce on a bed of noodles.

To drink with your meal, wine and cocktails are available from a bar at one side of the dining room. You will pay for these separately, as the bar is run by the veterans who own the building.

Olneyville N.Y. System

20 Plainfield St.

401–621–9500

Providence, RI

LD | $

Rhode Island’s distinctive New York System hot dog, known also as a hot wiener, is a small, pink, natural-casing, pork-beef-veal frankfurter nestled in an untoasted bun, topped with yellow mustard, chopped raw onions, and a dark sauce of ground beef plus a sprinkling of celery salt. It’s the sauce that makes the dog unique—spicy but not hot, the meat ground as fine as sand, the flavor vaguely sweet, reminiscent of the kaleidoscopic flavors that give Greek-ancestored Cincinnati Five-Way chili its soul.

Indeed, most New York System restaurants are Greek-run. Olneyville was opened in the 1930s by the Stevens family, Greek immigrants who came to Rhode Island by way of Brooklyn, New York. It is still a Stevens-family operation, now with a second location on Reservoir Avenue in Cranston. The countermen use the old-time wiener-up-the-arm technique of preparing the hot dogs, lining up six to eight bunned ones from wrist to elbow and spreading sauce, onions, and mustard on all of them in the blink of an eye.

One very curious item on the short menu is beef stew, which is not beef stew at all. It is an order of salted French fries spritzed with vinegar and ribboned with ketchup. The beverage of choice is the Rhode Island favorite, coffee milk—like chocolate milk, but coffee flavored.

Vermont

Baba à Louis

Route 11

802–875–4666

Chester, VT

BL | $

While scarcely a restaurant—no