Where to Eat in Northampton, Massachusetts

Northampton is the perfect college town: a charming, walkable cultural hub with a great art museum (at Smith College), boutiques, used bookstores, and indie bookstores—not to mention the ghosts of the new age, socialist, and women’s bookstores that thrived when I attended college there. Amazon’s tentacles now reach all the way into west-central Massachusetts, alas, and the bell tolls for quirky retailers just as it does for thee. Still, a little modernization has been a good thing for the town’s food scene: Once mostly tied to the whims of the 18-to-22-year-old crowd, it has so fully embraced the “eat local” ethos that it’s nearly impossible to find California produce anywhere, at least during the growing season.   

One noble example: Bistro Les Gras, an ambitious French farm-to-table restaurant owned by husband-wife team Beth and Daniel Martinez. Everything from the condiments to the charcuterie is made in-house, and chef Peter Bunce draws on local produce, seafood, and meat for his creations. There are terrines and oysters, tartare and pommes frites, but the menu isn’t rigidly French: Fried pickles spice up the appetizer menu, and mussels come not in the classic marinières style but rather in a fragrant yellow curry broth. It’s just the right blend of earnestness, good technique, and worldly sophistication to please the high-minded locals.