Your Chowder hounds have sniffed down the best culinary events in town. Check back every Thursday for your weekly prix-fixe of foodie festivals, cooking classes, wine tastings, and more.

July 30-August 3
Maine Lobster Festival
Harbor Park, 275 Main St., Rockland, ME
The focus, of course, is fresh, Maine lobster, but this family fair also features a big parade, art work by local artists, a 10K road race, cooking contests, and children’s activities.

July 31-August 8
Mystic Seaport Wine & Food Festival
Mystic Seaport, 75 Greenmanville Ave., Mystic, CT
This family event features local gourmet cuisine, cooking demonstrations, wine tasting, and seminars by celebrated local chefs, plus live music on the green. (more…)

There is still no opening date in sight for French chef Guy Martin’s hotly anticipated Sensing restaurant.

It’s been two years since the development team behind the $300 million Battery Wharf/Regent Hotel project announced that they had lured Martin to open his first American restaurant in their luxury digs.

In March, Martin did a quick PR tour through the city, promising a late spring launch. But in June, when we wrote about the project’s challenges in the face of the tanking real estate market, Sensing hadn’t yet opened.

Then, in mid-June, Regent Hotels & Resorts announced that they were pulling out of the nearly-completed project. So until a new hotel operator inks a deal, Sensing is stalled. (more…)

Keeping track of Boston’s dining scene can feel almost as impossible as getting a seat at the Cask’n Flagon during a Sox-Yankees game. Chowder scours the Internet for the latest good news, bad news, and deep food-related thoughts.

Good News
Has the high cost of food, or a diet, got you dining on less-than-extraordinary food? Sandrine’s Bistro now offers a Bistro Menu, available in both the dining room or at the bar, that “offers the same creative French cuisine, but in smaller portions, and at price points that encourage the sharing of multiple items.”

Chris Douglass’ Tavolo will open in the first week of August. The press release promises there will be no chicken parm, but the Dorchester eatery will have build-your-own antipasti and 12-inch pizzas starting at a reasonable $8.

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Come summer, there’s only one thing I look forward to more than sunning my vitamin D-deprived skin on a Cape Cod beach, and that’s lobster. Oh, and clams, and corn, and chowder, and watermelon… In other words, all the fixin’s of a down-home clambake. So I was more than a little excited to head down to Dennis this weekend for a friend’s 30th birthday fete, where just such a seafood feast awaited.

Of course, the Cape and islands play host to dozens of clambakes every year; the ones at Chatham Bars Inn and Ocean Edge Resort in Brewster are annual traditions. Many are big productions, where a staff goes through all the rituals of digging a pit, laying the coals, layering all the uncooked edibles with seaweed, and allowing the whole mess to steam on the beach. For better or worse—and I’m thinking way, way better—we did things the easy (lazy?) way, and ordered in. (more…)

Full of tasty recipes with New England flair and abundant color photos of island life—with not a single Black Dog to be spotted—the new cookbook from Edgartown’s Carol McManus, Table Talk (Vineyard Stories, $22.95, 114 pages), is about as gift-basket ready as it gets. Due out in mid-August, the vibrant paperback is just the sort of thing a host can send home with summering out-of-towners, with no fear of perpetuating Bay State tourist kitsch.

McManus, longtime owner of Espresso Love Cafe, teamed up with island-based Vineyard Stories, which boasts an impressive pedigree for a small custom publisher: Husband-and-wife team Jan Pogue and John Walter are veteran journalists with a combined resume that includes the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and USA Today.

They also have strong ties to the Vineyard, with Walter having served as editor and publisher of the Vineyard Gazette. Table Talk is their eighth book, and their second cookbook (the first being the charming Delish!, a collection of recipes inspired by local author Philip R. Craig’s fictional Vineyard detective, J. W. Jackson).

No surprise, then, that Table Talk comes off as warmly authentic. (more…)

Your Chowder hounds have sniffed down the best culinary events in town. Check back every Thursday for your weekly prix-fixe of foodie feasts, cooking classes, wine tastings, and more.

July 24, 6 p.m.
Robert Foley Wine Dinner
Excelsior
Robert Foley will present several Napa Valley notables, paired with five courses of Eric Brennan’s fare. Menu highlights include grilled paillard of ostrich with grilled peach, house-cured pancetta and Old Chatham’s Ewe’s Blue, and carved Ontario buffalo rib eye with vichyssoise gratin, speck, and horseradish.

July 26, 1:30 p.m.
The Munch Around Cambridge Scavenger Hunt
In Front of Charles Hotel
Everyone will get a taste of victory on this food-centric scavenger hunt. Along the way, foodies will sample cricket lollipops, bubble tea, jalapeno ice cream, and other tasty (and bizarre) local grub. (more…)

The next time Chowder accepts an invitation from Bostonista for an evening on the town, you can bet your bile duct it won’t be a weeknight. Especially if said evening involves the bar at Eastern Standard. More specifically, an evening at Eastern Standard that entails a flight of cocktails numbering in the double digits.

(To review: Bostonista, weeknight, Eastern Standard, double-digit cocktail flight, not happening again. Any. Time. Soon.)

Here’s how it happened. (more…)

Keeping track of Boston’s dining scene can feel almost as impossible as resisting a warm chocolate chip cookie. Chowder scours the Internet for the latest good news, bad news, and updates you on the latest salmonella scare.

Good News
You’d think you may have to travel far to find the World’s Best Chocolate Ice Cream. Not so, according to the judges as the World Dairy Expo, who bestowed the honor on Skowhegan, Maine’s Gifford’s Ice Cream.

Chowhound reports that L’Espalier and Sel de la Terre will open in the Mandarin Oriental on September 15.

Tastings Wine Bar and Bistro at Patriot Place is hiring staff for its opening in mid-August. The restaurant describes itself as “offering wines from around the world and an inspired menu of small plate creations.” Should be a great post-Pats game stop for men who need to placate their football-hating wives.

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As a gourmand, foodie, good food-advocate, whatever, I’ve lately been trying to eat as much locally grown food as possible. (It’s especially possible this time of year, as it’s the height of summer and Boston-area farmers’ markets are busting at the seams with fresh greens, ripe berries, and amazingly fragrant herbs.)

But every now and then, a hankering for things sourced from far, far away—San Marzano tomatoes, Gruyere cheese, Kona coffee—tests my limits (and usually succeeds). This week, thanks to a recent Bahamas getaway, I’m craving Caribbean.

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New England, sadly, isn’t exactly known as a beacon of barbecue. Sure, we do hamburgers and hot dogs just fine, but the big time, macho BBQ, the kind that involves pitmasters with smokers and lots and lots of pig fat and bone? Not so much. (The folks behind Phantom Gourmet’s BBQ Beach Party actually import talent from down south).

While our palettes are definitely up for the challenge, most of our backyards simply aren’t. So it warmed Chowder’s heart when we heard that two of our own nabbed second place in an amateur rib standoff below the Mason-Dixon line last weekend. (more…)