Captain Jack’s Roadside Shack, located on Northampton Street (Route 10) in Easthampton, features fried whole-belly clams. STAFF PHOTO/KEVIN GUTTING

Fried oysters at Eastside Grille in Northampton. These Gulf-style delights are “not too briny, with a pink rémoulade that gets some peppery heat from Tabasco and stands up to the deeply flavorful batter.” Robin Goldstein

My dad, Barry, was born in 1943. He grew up in a Jewish community in Dorchester. His parents lived on the barest of budgets. His father, Papa Bob, worked at a liquor store where stick-ups were routine. To make enough to feed his wife and three sons, Papa Bob spent almost all his time at the store, coming home after the kids were sleeping.

Papa Bob died before I was born. But if you read my last column, you’ll be pleased to know that his real name was Reuven, and I was named Robin after him. So basically if you put it all together, I’m a Reuben.

For my dad’s whole childhood, going out for dinner was the rarest of treats, an automatic holiday every time it happened. As an added bonus, kosher rules didn’t apply when the Goldstein family was eating out — so the forbidden kingdoms of pork and shellfish were suddenly revealed to them all for one night. Mostly the family would go for Chinese, where they would order fried rice, chop suey, and “Chicago chow mein.” Then they would mix them all together in the middle of the table and dig in.

But a few summer days a year, his parents would take my dad and his brothers on a day trip to Wollaston Beach, in Quincy on the South Shore, where the air always seemed to smell of low tide. Along the way, they would always stop at 7E’s of Quincy, whose giant roadside sign a few minutes before the beach proclaimed “Famous Fried Clams Hot Fish & Chips.” It was a giant seafood shack, mostly take-out, that sold affordable bags of fish, clams, scallops, and shrimp in prodigious quantities. All of it was freshly hauled in from the nearby shores of the Atlantic, thickly battered, and lusciously deep-fried to golden brown. Heaven was a bag of fried seafood and a day at the beach with the family.

Fried seafood is one of New England’s greatest culinary gifts to America, especially in the summer. New England fried seafood is impressive not only for its freshness and its consistent quality across a broad range of fish and shellfish varieties, beginning with the cold-water fried-fish basics: haddock and cod.

I grew up taking for granted that fish and chips were pretty good everywhere. It turned out this was only true because I grew up in Massachusetts. When I moved to the West Coast for a few years, I quickly learned that you couldn’t get a single decent plate of fish and chips in all of California. At first this surprised me, but it makes sense: we’re closer to the United Kingdom — global fish-and-chips HQ — than we are to LA. This is New England, the British part of America. The downside is that many of us grew up eating egg-salad sandwiches, brittle cookies and bland holiday roasts. The good news is that the British know how to fry fish as well as anyone in the world, and so do we.

When I think of fried seafood in my hometown, the first place that comes to mind is Eastside Grill, a restaurant that opened in 1985 and has aged with exceptional grace under the leadership of a management and culinary team that’s been around for decades. Inside a gracious old white house, a series of warmly lit rooms draw you in with a pleasant buzz every night, and a kind and informal staff that treats every customer like family.

But there’s so much more than the indoors. Over the past two years, Eastside has helped spearhead the Summer on Strong program, which for several months transforms Strong Avenue in downtown Northampton into a giant pedestrian-only piazza, an outdoor-dining block that rivals Boston’s North End for vibrancy.

Beyond Eastside, Summer on Strong includes its neighbors Local Burger, Homestead, Familiars Coffee & Tea, the Tunnel Bar, and Progression Brewing. This year, Summer on Strong kicks off this month and will continue until Oct. 10—more than a month longer than last year. This is great news.

On a warm spring or summer evening, Eastside’s lamp-lit alleyway behind the building, spread with tables, gives off an aura of romance that evokes New Orleans. This dovetails well with the restaurant’s unique culinary concept, which is to cross New England seafood with New Orleans-style creole and cajun. This might not seem like the most obvious move, but the northeast Atlantic and Louisiana Gulf coasts happen to be two of the greatest seafood-frying regions in the world, so it’s no surprise that Eastside is a champion at this.

Best of all are Eastside’s fried oysters: big, indulgent Gulf-style delights, plump and well-seasoned, not too briny, with a pink rémoulade that gets some peppery heat from Tabasco and stands up to the deeply flavorful batter. Oysters are also great on the half shell — if you sit at the bar, you’ll be treated to a full frontal shucking. Fried popcorn shrimp, like fried oysters, are well crisped and bubbled hot and fast enough to preserve the moistness of the meat inside.

There’s a wonderful world beyond seafood here, too. I would challenge you to find a better gumbo anywhere on the East Coast than Eastside’s smoky sausage-and-andouille version. There are expertly blackened steaks and sultry sweet-potato ravioli, which like several other entrées is also available in a half-portion for smaller appetites.

The kitchen also has a way with Gorgonzola, from the wonderfully acidic signature vinaigrette on their house salad to their famous Gorgonzola garlic bread, which absorbs tangy cheese crumbles, melted butter, and garlic so richly that they penetrate every bite of bread. Wash it all down with a well-mixed bloody mary (the house version comes with two juicy cocktail shrimp), a generously sized dry martini, or a local draft beer, or order from one of Northampton’s best-value wine lists.

It’s fun when culinary delights spring from the most unlikely places. The Deck, with its lively beer garden, outdoor bar, and dangerously refreshing frozen drinks in plastic bags, is known as a fun place for getting wasted all afternoon in the sun, making new friends, and stumbling home happy. But it’s probably not the first place that comes to mind when you think about top-notch fried seafood.

So I was surprised to learn and confirm upon repeat visits that the Deck — amid fierce competition from Eastside, Captain Jack’s, Fitzwilly’s, Northampton Brewery, Smithsonian in Hatfield, Williamsburg Snack Bar, and others — is currently serving fish and chips as delicious as any in western Massachusetts. Their Atlantic cod is thickly battered in a really authentic British style, silky on the inside, with an addictive richness deep within its mega-faceted golden crust.

In America, the availability of malt vinegar with which to douse your fish and chips can never be taken for granted. The Deck (like Eastside) has got it; it comes in very small plastic cups, but you can ask for as many of them as you want. Given how well the cod’s crispy crust stands up to the vinegar, and given the generous serving of fries, I can go through four cuplets with one plate. But I’m a vinegar fiend. Maybe someday, when COVID is a distant memory, they’ll bring out the whole bottle of malt vinegar and just slam it down on the table, like yesterday’s taverns did with whiskey.

Lawrence “Chubby” Woodman of Essex, on the North Shore, was the first to batter and deep-fry fresh clams — soft-shelled ones from the mud flats of the Essex River — on July 3, 1916. Granted, this bit of information comes from a biased source: Woodman’s Restaurant of Essex, which is still in operation today. But around the internet, among sources from sketchy to respectable, there’s a surprising consensus on Chubby’s claim as the founder of fried clams. These were whole-belly clams: the whole clam scooped out of the shell, lustily battered, dropped into a deep-fryer, and devoured by the lucky customer.

Clam digger and traditional Greek singer/guitarist Thomas Soffron of Ipswich (1907–2004) is universally credited with the invention of the clam strip, the whole belly’s cheaper cousin, made from the foot (the part that attaches the belly to the shell) of hard-shelled sea clams from the ocean floor. Apparently Soffron actually preferred the foot to the belly, because he found it more sanitary. That’s a deeply disturbed point of view, but we all have our vices: I prefer canned peas to fresh. The Soffron Brothers Clam Company made a small fortune with an exclusive deal to sell thousands of pounds of strips to the Howard Johnson chain, and the rest was history. Today you can find clam-strip platters and clam-strip rolls all over New England and sporadically around the rest of America too.

But this is Best Bites, so I’m not here to recommend clam strips. I hold out for the whole bellies, and these days, they’re pretty hard to find even in their home region of New England. In the Pioneer Valley, there’s nowhere better for fried whole-belly clams than Captain Jack’s Roadside Shack on Route 5 in Easthampton, an open-air favorite that’s been open seasonally since 2011.

Captain Jack’s is probably best known for its excellent, generously meaty lobster roll and right-on-the-money fish and chips. To my father’s delight, they also deep-fry scallops. But to me, whole bellies are the biggest revelation here, with a crispy batter fried to a deep copper color concealing a soft, custardy middle. I’d pit these beauties against any in the state. The giant heap of hand-cut fries on the side are so crispy and skinny that there’s almost more edge than potato. You will grab and stuff them in your mouth in big bunches, to great effect.

Like my last two picks, this is yet another great place to dine outdoors. A big, open array of simple, inviting picnic tables are set out in the sun or shade, and there are also indoor tables in the café of the adjacent River Valley Co-Op. Note that Captain Jack’s is only open in daylight hours (Wednesday to Sunday 11:30 a.m.–7:30 p.m.), and you can’t drink alcohol on the premises.

Whole-belly clams are expensive at Captain Jack’s, just like they are everywhere else. These aren’t the early ‘50s, when Papa Bob/Reuven could still afford (on occasion) the 55 cents that it cost to buy my dad a big bag of whole bellies and fries at 7E’s by the beach. In today’s inflation-adjusted dollars, that would still be less than $6 bucks.

You’ll spend at least three or four times that much for the same meal even at today’s simplest counter-service descendants of 7E’s. Good restaurant food is not cheap these days. But it’s important to remember that this is not the restaurants’ fault. It’s far more expensive and difficult than it’s ever been to run a restaurant. They are charging prices barely above what they need to survive.

So eating out is not just spending on your own pleasure, on your date or on your loving family — it’s also philanthropy. It’s a way of helping out your hardworking neighbors who have endured two years of unimaginable hardship — and through it all, have somehow managed to keep their doors open, our economies thriving, and our shopping streets vibrant. Thanks to all of the cooks, dishwashers, servers, managers, maintenance workers, and small business owners who have weathered a perfect storm and continue to feed us so well, every single day.

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