My favorite place to be during the summer is on Cape Cod. And as a food writer with family roots on the Cape, I love eating on Cape Cod.
The best thing about dining out on the Cape is that there is no shortage of casual, family-friendly restaurants with fresh, local seafood. From simple fry shacks to five-star restaurants, fish, clams and lobster are impeccably fresh almost everywhere.
Restaurants serving up amazing renditions of classic New-England cuisine are one of the reasons we return to the Cape annually. In our many years of dining out here, we’ve only had a handful of bad meals.
Here are the foods Cape Cod is known for and some of my favorite restaurants for enjoying them with a teen and small child along for the ride. Plenty of kids will eat simple grilled or fried fish and shrimp, and even fried clams. But in case your kids are feeling finicky, all of these places have kids’ menus with familiar chicken fingers and pasta.
I do suggest a couple of date-night spots, too, should you find a sitter.
• Read more:
• 11 Easy, Inexpensive Things To Do on Cape Cod With Kids & Teens
• The Best Ways To Spend a Weekend in Newport, RI With Kids.
• What To Do, See & Eat On A Mystic, CT Weekend With Kids
The Best Family-Friendly Restaurants For Sampling Cape Cods Best Foods
Start With Clams
Here is my first essential rule for eating Cape Cod: Clam bellies or bust. Whole bellies offer a juicy, briny taste of the sea that will make you reel. Clam strips are more breading than clam and merely a way to carry tartar sauce from plate to mouth. Don’t, under any circumstances, order these.
We favor Seafood Sam’s in Falmouth, Kream N Cone in Chatham and Captain Frosty’s in Denis. We’ve actually managed to hit all of them in one hedonistic day. Try them all and lend your voice to the age-old local debate over who has the best.
They’re all fast casual and have other options if your kids are less crazy than you about clams. We recommend you always eat in, though. Hot fried clams will steam and lose their crispiness if you wrap them up to go.
They all have soft serve ice cream which is fine for keening the kids content while you finish your dinner, but there is way better ice cream on the Cape. Read on!
• Don’t leave the Cape without a cup of real New England clam chowder. The creamy chunky chowder at the collegiate Chatham Squire is a must. It’s a local favorite and the one we compare all the others to.
• One of the region’s best treats are steamer clams, which have thin “soft” shells (more like mussels). They’re usually only available in summer, so they’re usually a daily special rather than a menu item.
Pluck a steamer from its shell, take the rubbery sheath off of its tail (no jokes please, there are children present). Swish it through clam juice to remove stray sand and then through melted butter and eat it. Summer bliss!
Rock Out With Lobster
Don’t focus so much on clams that you neglect the rest of New England’s seafood bounty, starting with lobster.
If you don’t want to mess with cracking open a whole lobster, just go for a lobster roll. Good ones aren’t hard to find. Look for a toasted, buttered top-split roll with lobster piled high.
Don’t miss Sesuit Harbor Café in Dennis, which is really another fish sack and my favorite place to eat on Cape Cod. Grab a picnic table on the outdoor patio, which ends about 20 feet from the water. While you wait for your order, you can watch the boats go by, and your kids can climb around on the rocky beach.
Sitting under one of their umbrellas on a sunny day with a lobster roll in hand and a cold local microbrew within reach is the perfect summer day for me.
Lobster rolls have gotten pricey in recent years, even at the most casual places. I justify the once-a-summer splurge because they do all the work of cooking, shelling and dressing the lobster for you.
Tip: I think most boiled lobster dinners are overpriced. If you are staying in a rental and the house has a large-enough pot, it’s easy to buy them live and cook them yourself.
Steam some quartered potatoes in a small amount of water and when they’re halfway done add lobsters, corn and maybe some clams. Melt plenty of butter and slice some lemons and wait ten to 15 minutes.
You have a personal lobster boil for easily a third of what it would cost in a restaurant. And you don’t have to be dainty when you’re eating them in your own backyard. You can crack open every tiny joint to get every bit of yummy lobster meat.
Then There’s All the Other Seafood
• Make a point of getting to The Oyster Company in Dennis Port before 6:30 on any day of the week for half-price local oysters from its raw bar. This great deal and its outdoor seating make it one of our favorite spots for a laid-back Sunday lunch, where we can share some raw oysters along with fish tacos and shrimp or lobster flatbreads.
• Brewster Fish House on 6A in Brewster is a bistro that prides itself on sourcing locally. It’s been a consistent source of fabulous meals for us and their prices aren’t bad, by Cape Cod standards, for the creative dishes they turn out.
Clancy’s in Dennis Port serves American-cuisine classics like shrimp cocktail, baked scallops and shrimp scampi, along with trendy items like bang bang shrimp or grilled salmon with pineapple salsa.
The kids’ menu has fish & chips as well as the usual items. And they have a wide variety of non-fish items for the adults, too, making the place an easy crowd-pleaser.
It’s popular with both locals and tourists, so there’s usually a wait, but they’ll offer crayons to the kiddos and speed your kids’ order once you sit down, if they look hungry.
Further up the Cape, catch the oyster happy hour at Winslow’s Tavern in Wellfleet. Order raw, broiled or roasted oysters for a discount over the lunch or dinner prices.
It’s also a good place when you want a change of pace from casual decks and clam shacks, but still want a place that’s casual and kid-friendly.
Provincetown Portuguese Food
If you make it as far as P’town, stop at the renowned Provincetown Portuguese Bakery on Commercial Street for kale, bean and linguica soup for lunch or the linguica roll or chorizo and cheese croissants for breakfast.
Your kids might not go for the savories but you can treat them to malasadas,fried dough with sugar and cinnamon, which my kiddos love. The Portugese doughnuts and custard tarts are an easy sell, too.
Our main meal in P-Town is always at the Lobster Pot, a legendary place that serves up seafood with a Portuguese accent. The with-dinner salad (with homemade dressing) makes up for the calorie-busting breadbasket (awesome pumpkin bread!) and linguica-crusted cod.
If you have small kids though, be forewarned that it’s often crowded and cacophonous with surly service, especially during prime lunch and dinner hours.
What You’ve Been Waiting For: Local Ice Cream
My other essential Cape Cod food rule: This is homemade-ice-cream territory; Take advantage of it.
• The Kennedys put Four Seas on the map. You can don large sunglasses and order fresh peach ice cream to make like Jackie O’. Or follow the locals, who seem to go for the penuche (a brown-sugar-and-milk fudge) and rum and butter.
I think pistachio, pineapple, strawberry, and peanut-butter-chocolate-chip are all just short of a religious experience. The homemade hot fudge is a must on almost anything, but I especially like it with the banana ice cream.
The shop is in Centerville (near Hyannis). But you can find their ice cream in grocery stores all over the Cape.
• Sundae School serves up particularly rich and creamy ice cream from shops in Harwich and Denis Port. Flavors range from classic (butter pecan, creamsicle, chocolate chip) to more exotic (Australian ginger, amaretto nut) to kid favorites like cookie dough and Nestle crunch.
• Cape Cod Creamery ice cream is easy to find, which is handy because it is fantastic. They stick to classic flavors, no gimmicks, and they do them well.
The original South Yarmouth stand has an inviting wraparound porch and comfy lawn chairs where we sit and enjoy pistachio (me) and Caramel Crunch (my husband).
They have shops in Hyannis and Denis, too, and you can find pint containers in local shops.
More Cape Cod Sweets
Stop by Chatham Candy Manor. You can buy gummy lobsters and sharks for the kids while you treat yourself to dark-chocolate-covered cranberries and assorted filled chocolate. We also buy some fudge to take home, too.
Outside of South Yarmouth, Cape Cod Salt Water Taffy’s roadside stand is hard to miss. Just look for the red-and-white striped awnings on route 28. A stuffed box will run you about $15.
Even if you think you don’t like taffy that much, pull up in the gravel parking lot and try a few of the more than 30 flavors. They’re generous with samples. And you’ll quickly discover that freshly made taffy is soft and chewy and not overly sweet. Nothing like the hard, overly fake cheaper stuff that gives taffy a bad name.
Cranberry is my favorite, but they don’t always have it. And the always available fluffernutter is my husband’s.
Best Bets for Breakfast
Thanks to its shady back porch, Chatham Cookware Café is our favorite spot for reading the morning news over an iced coffee (when the kids cooperate). It’s also our place for grab-and-go breakfasts, including egg sandwiches on Portuguese muffins, buttery kouign-amann and sweet, gooey Chatham buns.
• In Dennis Port, the Wee Packet is a good bet for from-scratch breakfasts, including a “full Irish” if you want it.
Or make your eggs benedict more indulgent with crab meat or chunks of lobster. Kids go for French toast or waffles with fruit and whipped cream. Sharing is a good idea with these. They also have house-made sodas that your kids will want, even at breakfast time. I say, shat the heck; we’re on vacation.
Cape Cod Date Night!
The Ocean House has white tablecloths and big windows overlooking the water in Dennis Port. The Pheasant in Dennis is upscale, rustic in a Colonial-style building. They are both way much of a fancy splurge to bring the kids. But they are my top choices when we manage to swing a vacation date night.
At the former you can indulge in ahi tuna tartar and lacquered sea bass while you enjoy live music. At the latter, you can have a quiet meal where you linger over blood-orange cheesecake and other dishes your kids wouldn’t go near.
No matter where or what you eat, enjoy Cape Cod. It’s almost impossible not to.
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Lisa Antinore is a food writer from Queens, NY. Her family owned a motel in Truro, Cape Cod, for 30 years.
* Photos: Courtesy of Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce except Sundae School, Cape Cod Creamery, Chatham Cookware Cafe and Cape Cod Salt Water Taffy, courtesy of the restaurants/shop.