The Best Things Our Food Editor Ate (and Drank) This April

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!

Pork Bulgogi (Dwaeji Bulgogi) at Somaek in Boston

Jamie Bissonnette was part of the team (along with Ken Oringer) that brought Boston some of its greatest restaurants: Toro, Uni, Little Donkey, Coppa, Faccia a Faccia). The pair announced a professional split last fall and now Bissonnette has opened his first restaurant with new partner Babak Bina, another Boston hospitality veteran. 

Their new venture includes Somaek, a Korean restaurant focusing on the home-style cooking that Jamie learned from his mother-in-law. “People would ask me what my favorite Korean restaurant in Boston was and I’d say it’s my mother-in-law’s house,” he says. I’ve been craving Korean flavors like kimchi and gochujang lately, so I jumped at the chance to check it out. We loved the pork and kimchi dumplings (mandu), the seafood and scallion pancake (pajeon), and the jabchae, clear potato starch noodles stir fried with mushrooms, burdock root, and spinach. But the warmth of the pork bulgogi with peppers, soy, and gochujang was the perfect dish for a rainy spring night. Cocktails are great, too. I tried the Jeu-Do, a citrus, coconut, and vodka delight and so should you. 

A Maple Latte at The Maple Station Market in Temple, NH

Ben Fish has been gradually building a mini maple empire around New Hampshire. He recently opened The Maple Station Market in Temple, where you can buy local produce, pantry staples, lots of maple products, maple donuts, sandwiches, waffles, breakfast burritos, and the like. On a recent morning, I relished the simple joy of a morning latte sweetened with Ben’s pure maple syrup. 

Venison with Morel Mushrooms at Aurelia at the Castle Hill Inn, Newport, RI

This one is quite fancy, but I can’t get the dish out of my head. As part of Aurelia’s tasting menu, this course offered venison, mild in flavor and perfectly medium rare, with morels, white asparagus, and an umami-rich sauce.

Loon Chocolates (Made in Manchester, NH)

I love all kinds of chocolate, but there’s something very special about bean-to-bar chocolate, which begins with cacao beans and ends up in delicious bars and confections. It has a much wider spectrum of flavor and it’s fun to approach it like you would wine, teasing out a hint of coffee or some cherry notes. As more and more New England chocolatiers are now making their goods from scratch, it’s always great to discover a new one. Loon Chocolate is produced out of a converted mill building in Manchester, New Hampshire and comes in a range of bars, from single-origin varietals (made exclusively out of beans from Haiti or Ecuador or Bolivia) to fun flavored bars, with added sea salt, almonds, or “Rainbow Crunch” (think Fruity Pebbles. You can order bars by mail or look for them in gourmet markets around Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. 

Amy Traverso

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