Providence's East Side

Personally, I'm not a fine dining guy. It's not that I don't like good food, because I do. Maybe I would be if I were sitting in a corner office somewhere, raking in six figures instead of driving a truck for a living then I wouldn't mind dropping a huge wad of cash down onto a restaurant's table. When a big bill hits the table my mind immediately goes to just how many hours I had to work to pay for that and how it totally wasn't worth it. So while Federal Hill gets all the credit as the best neighborhood in the state of Rhode Island to go for a bite, I'd prefer to pass up Atwells Ave and head to Providence's east side.

A recent episode of Best Thing I Ever Ate on the Food Network had us wondering if there were a place where we could get a good bowl of noodles in the area. After a quick search on Yelp it seemed as if Noodles102 on Ives St was the place to go. I'm no expert on noodles. In fact, I made only one or two half-assed attempts at using the chopsticks before digging in with a fork. I am, however, an expert on delicious lunches and that's exactly what we found here. My only regret was that we didn't realize that the place was BYOB. The next time we go, and there will certainly be a next time, we plan on taking advantage of that.

While we were still on the east side we hit a couple of stores to get the makings for a night at home. Our first stop was Bottles, in the Eastside Marketplace plaza on Pitman St. The five second rule is upped to the fifteen second rule in a place that clean. It certainly isn't your typical dirty neighborhood liquor store. The shelves are stocked with quality products, organized in a way that actually makes sense. If you're looking for an IPA, all the IPAs are in one cooler. All the Belgians are on one shelf. The Sam Summer isn't packed with the rest of the Sam Adams beer. No, the Sam Summer is packed along side other varieties of summer beers. It makes it very easy to find what you're looking for and avoid what you don't want. They also have the most comprehensive section of local Rhode Island beers that I've found. They have Grey Sail, Narragansett, Bucket, Fool Proof, and Revival making Ravenous is the only RI brewery they don't stock. I even went home with a growler of Bucket Pail Ale. As far as I know, Bottles is the only liquor store in the state to carry that. The girlfriend bought a couple nice bottles of wine, one of which would be opened later on with dinner.

Our next, and final, stop on our east side tour was Farmstead. Still full from our lunch we didn't sit down to eat, but we did peruse their selection of fine cheeses. I had heard of this place before and was expecting it to be bigger, but what space they do have is crammed with things that I want to buy and try. We wound up with a soft goat cheese, a smoked gouda, and some local sopressata from Daniele Inc of Burrillville fame. I didn't think that cheese, wine, and sopressata would count as dinner, but I thought wrong. It turned out to be a delicious dinner served at a place with impeccable service, al fresco dining, and a relaxing atmosphere; our place.

It was a successful trip filled with delicious food. It was my first time hitting all three of those places, but it won't be the last.

The Pawtuxet and the Narrow

I recently bought a couple of kayaks and started to hit the waters of Rhode Island. We went to a couple of places last weekend, one of which is pretty well known and I highly recommend, the other of which...well, it kinda smells like sewage.

When we were trying to think of places to go I remembered seeing a boat ramp at one point in my travels, so we headed there first. At the end of Knight St in Warwick there's a small parking lot that gives you access to the Pawtuxet River. It had the potential to be really nice and it probably was last summer. You could hear traffice buzzing by in nearly every direction, but it still had an isolated feel to it. The woods were thick on both sides and we even saw a deer coming down to the water. But thanks to the epic flooding that hit RI a couple of months ago, it was pretty bad. There were old tires, bleech bottles, and other various bits of trash along the banks, some of it high up in the trees from when the water was ten feet higher. The stench was pretty bad because of the sewage overflow during the flood. We even saw a shed that had floated down the river and a Target carriage that came from the mall a mile away. Maybe by next summer it will be a little cleaner, but I think a pretty serious cleanup effort would be needed to turn the river back into something worth paddling down.

The Narrow River, on the other hand, was great. We parked at the end of Boston Neck Rd in Narragansett and headed away from the ocean into the river. It was a busy place with motor boats zipping by and other kayakers all over the place, but it's big enough where all of the other people weren't really an issue. There's a kayak rental place on Middlebridge Rd so it's a pretty popular spot. Between the main channel, lined with houses I wish I own, and all the little inlets to explore, there was plenty to do. The salty water was the perfect temperature and clean enough to get out for a swim or a walk on one of the sand bars. My only word of advice is to make sure you time it right with the tides. The current will go in or out depending on the tide so you don't want to be fighting it both ways like how we wound up doing.