Great Ingredients Are Fueling Connecticut’s Next Big Food Scene

Charles Mallory has a deep connection to Mystic, Connecticut’s maritime heritage. His namesake arrived in Mystic, Connecticut, as a sailmaker’s apprentice in 1816. His grandfather, great uncle, and father have all served as presidents of the Mystic Seaport Museum, a major tourism draw for the coastal village. But recently, food has crept into Mystic’s top selling points — and not just because of the 1988 Julia Roberts film Mystic Pizza. “Mystic has become a bona fide foodie destination over the last dozen years,” Mallory says, “and we are delighted to become a part of that scene.”

The founder and CEO of Delamar Hotel Collection, Mallory will open Delamar Mystic this fall, adjacent to the Mystic Seaport Museum on the Mystic River. The latest in his line of luxury boutique hotels will host the restaurant La Plage Restaurant & Oyster Bar. “We have already built strong relationships with local seafood vendors like Norm Bloom of Copps Island Oysters,” says Mallory, and he and chef Frederic Kieffer look forward to working with many more as they celebrate incredible local seafood and produce alongside places he admires like Sift Bake Shop and The Shipwright’s Daughter.

“The quality and availability of the products that are the building blocks of so many of the menus in the area are second to none,” echoes David Standridge, who just won a James Beard Award for Best Chef: Northeast thanks to his work as chef and partner at The Shipwright’s Daughter, the restaurant inside The Whaler’s Inn in downtown Mystic. He partners with local fishermen to showcase a much wider, and therefore more sustainable, variety of seafood than you’d typically find on menus, from invasive green crabs to his favorite summer specialty: sweet native sea snails called slipper limpets. “Like many things we use, they’re everywhere along the coast but also very hard to get because no one harvests them,” Standridge says. This time of year, “We serve them in the shell like escargot and preserve them in jars for a fun pasta to remember the summer when winter rolls in.”

Standridge also speaks to Mystic’s “beautiful community spirit, especially among restaurants.” Like Mallory, he eagerly calls out other businesses he loves within the tight-knit community, including the roof deck at Mix, chef Adam Young’s restaurant above Sift Bake Shop; Pearl, “a new fun spot with a fellow Robuchon alum helming the kitchen”; Whitecrest Eatery, “the sleeper that shouldn’t be, where one of our former chefs is the co-chef,” tucked away in the Velvet Mill in nearby Stonington; “and of course The Port of Call.”

The Port of Call is another of Mystic’s newer marquee restaurants, and the group behind it, Dan Meiser’s 85th Day Food Collective — which also runs Engine Room in Mystic and the new Haring’s just down the road in Noank — ignited Mystic’s modern dining renaissance with the opening of Oyster Club in 2011. As executive chef and partner at The Port of Call and Oyster Club, Reneé Touponce was a finalist this year for the James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef, and she’s making magic with produce from some of North America’s oldest family-run farms and seafood from what she describes as “one of the healthiest and most diverse fisheries in North America.”

In August, sweet corn reigns. She calls hers “Colonel’s Kernels” as it comes from an 82-year-old retired Army Colonel “growing the best corn around just for us.” She’ll grate it raw and make it into a warm polenta garnished with raw cherry tomatoes, basil, and The Gray, a Cheshire-style cheese from Mystic Cheese. She’ll make corn butter sauce to serve with roasted oysters and charred bell peppers, or a corn-coconut curry with fried monkfish.

When she’s not at work, Touponce fuels up at another of the newer Mystic establishments that any city would be lucky to have: Nana’s. “I’m a coffee nerd, and Nana’s Canyon Coffee is hands-down the best in town,” she says. Nana’s pizza and fried-to-order doughnuts, both made with sourdough and regional grains, “are incredible too.” She serves Nana’s breads, made by baker and co-owner Dave Vacca, at her restaurants. James Wayman, chef and co-owner of Nana’s along with Vacca and Aaron Laipply, opened Oyster Club and started developing Nana’s with Meiser when he was still a partner in 85th Day. Now, he owns Nana’s Mystic, two restaurants in Westerly, Rhode Island (Nana’s Westerly and the new River Bar), wholesale Stone Mill Bakery, and Moromi, a traditional Japanese soy sauce and miso producer operated by co-founder Bob Florence.

Wayman, too, cites Mystic’s access to fresh goods as a driver of the scene’s success: “Great food starts with a great product.” He also points to two Stonington institutions as inspirations for Oyster Club and everything that has come after: Water Street Cafe, where Walter Houlihan “was the first guy to bring any sort of modern farm-to-table food to this region” from New York City, and Noah’s Restaurant, where John Papp “was making sourdough back in the day.” At Nana’s, he’s bringing the flavors of fermentation and koji into a casual all-day cafe. For example, pressed soy sauce lees get dehydrated and added to Parmesan atop the pizza, while the pizza sauce is “simply really good tomatoes and something called shio koji, which is lacto-fermented rice koji with water and salt,” Wayman says. “One of the things koji does is make things taste more like themselves, so it’ll make a tomato more tomato-ey. Plus you get those lactic flavors and all the nice sweetness when the rice koji turns starches into sugar.”

Eat your way through Mystic before this poorly kept secret gets even less hush-hush. “Especially with David winning the Beard Award and Renee’s nomination, it just keeps getting busier,” Wayman says. “We’ve had a spectacular year this year.”