The Best Things Our Food Editor Ate (and Drank) Last Month | August 2024
From scallop tacos to a fun spin on Dole Whip, Yankee’s Amy Traverso brings you the best eats of August 2024.
As food editor of Yankee and co-host of Weekends with Yankee, it’s my job to travel around New England trying all the great food that our region has to offer. In this regular column, I’ll share my favorite discoveries, from New England-made products to cheap eats to fine dining meals. Come along for the food crawl!
I spent a lot of the month of June at home in Boston, so as soon as July came around, I was excited to hit the road. The month began with a trip up to Mid-Coast Maine, where we filmed a segment for the 2025 season of Weekends with Yankee and I was treated to the first great bite of the month.
1. Scallop Tacos with Cucumber Pico de Gallo at Dos Gatos Gastropub in Belfast, Maine
Photo Credit : Amy Traverso
Dos Gatos Gastropub opened this year in downtown Belfast, filling what owners Adam Roberson and Jesse Soto saw as a gaping hole in the local food scene: a place to get great tacos and cocktails. Soto grew up in Texas, where his mother, Julia, made homemade flour tortillas every morning, and he wanted to bring that from-scratch deliciousness to Belfast. Having mostly enjoyed my tacos in corn tortillas over the years, I was new to Soto’s Tex-Mex style. Call me a convert. Every taco I tried was phenomenal. Chef Gary Cooper developed a special taco for our visit, topping seared local Maine scallops with a cucumber-tomatillo-lime pico de gallo, an aioli warmed with aji amarillo chiles, and a sprinkling of Tajin. It’s not a regular menu item, but Cooper plans to put it on the menu next spring to coincide with the premiere of Weekends with Yankee’s tenth season. In the meantime, the regular menu will delight you, I promise.
2. Pineapple-Lavender Whip, The Lavender Fields at Pumpkin Blossom Farm in Warner, New Hampshire
I regret that I failed to get a photo of this creamy frozen treat. We were filming another episode of the show, it was extremely hot, and I wolfed it down. But look at the adorable converted camper/sweets shop where I got it:
If you’ve ever enjoyed a Dole Whip at Disney World, I can assure you that this one is even better. We visited this gorgeous lavender farm where the air around us was perfumed with flowers. And even as the blooming season has now ended, there are still many great reasons to visit the farm, including yoga, cooking, and crafting classes. Call ahead to find out what’s on offer before your visit…and be sure to spend a day there next July when the flowers are in full bloom.
3. Tres Leches Donuts at Cafe Louis Costa Media in Camden, Maine
This Mid-Coast Maine restaurant is the sister restaurant of popular Cafe Louis in South Portland. A few of Cafe Louis’s best dishes, like the smashburger and the cebiche, are on offer in Camden, but the menu here is a bit larger, with terrific additions like coconut-steamed mussels with green curry and smoked achiote chicken. To finish: freshly made donuts soaked in just enough tres leches sauce to make them perfectly decadent.
Amy Traverso
Amy Traverso is the senior food editor at Yankee magazine and co-host of the public television series Weekends with Yankee, a coproduction with WGBH. Previously, she was food editor at Boston magazine and an associate food editor at Sunset magazine. Her work has also been published in The Boston Globe, Saveur, and Travel & Leisure, and she has appeared on Hallmark Home & Family, The Martha Stewart Show, Throwdown with Bobby Flay, and Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Amy is the author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, which was a finalist for the Julia Child Award for best first-time author and won an IACP Cookbook Award in the “American” category.
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