Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [9]
In 2006, Pepe’s Pizzeria opened a second store in Fairfield, Connecticut, where the family has almost exactly duplicated the old New Haven kitchen and oven and where, to our amazement, the pizza can be every bit as excellent if not, on occasion, even better. One big difference is the Fairfield waitstaff, which actually is courteous rather than New Haven brusque. Still, they’re all business. Our waiter virtually sprinted to the table three minutes after we were seated. We hadn’t looked at the wall-mounted menu but he nevertheless demanded to know what we wanted. “Order now,” he commanded. “They’re backed up on pizzas in the kitchen.” Toward the end of the meal, after he decided we were okay because we ordered the right things and ate them all, he confided, “We must have a lot of good New Haven people here today. They’re ordering the classics—white clam, plain tomato. You know someone is a novice when they ask for bacon with their clams or for extra mozzarella.”
The Pepe’s dining experience has no amenities. Pizzas arrive on metal trays and silverware is flimsy and useless. When two people order the same soft drink, the waiter suggests a quart, which is brought to the table, along with tumblers full of ice, for customers to pour for themselves.
The Place
891 Boston Post Rd.
203–453–9276
Guilford, CT
D (summer only) | $$
Harold “Whitey” Miller was a Connecticut clam digger who sold littlenecks off the back of a truck in New Haven County. One cold day in the mid-1940s, he laid some clams on a metal grate and put the grate over a hardwood fire he had lit in an oil drum to keep warm. As heat opened the shells and the air filled with a briny smell, passersby offered to pay Whitey to eat some of his fire-cooked clams. Soon, he set up shop as a grilled-clam stand, and in 1966 he opened an al fresco restaurant in a grove of trees by Route 1 in Guilford. Informality ruled. Plates were paper; customers had to bring not only their own wine and beer, but also bread and salad if they wanted some. In lieu of chairs around the picnic tables, Whitey offered seats made of tree stumps cut smooth on top. To let passersby know he was there, he put up a sign that said, “There’s no place anything like this place anywhere near this place so this must be the place.”
Route 1 has gone from an ambling country road to a congested, mall-lined shopping strip, but at The Place, you still sit on tree stumps in the open air and eat clams, lobsters, and corn-on-the-cob cooked over an open fire. “Magic happens when you roast clams on a wood fire,” says Vaughn Knowles, who began working for Whitey as a high-school student and, with his brother Gary, bought the business in 1971. It is such an appetizing moment when the clams pop open on the grate above the flames that many customers stand around the 20-foot-long fireplace just to watch. The Place’s Specials are to die for: as soon as the clam opens, the hollow half of its shell is removed and the clam is dabbed with cocktail sauce and margarine. It is then returned to the fire long enough for the sauce to darken and the clam to free itself from the shell. Specials are served with a wooden fork to pluck the clam. Once the meat is eaten, true joy is slurped from the bottom of the shell: an elixir of clam broth, sauce, and margarine.
Corn also is transformed by direct-fire cooking. The husk turns dark and brittle; its surface dimples from the imprint of the kernels inside. The charred husk and silk easily slip away