Purdys Farmer & the Fish

Believe the name of this restaurant. The salad you eat is grown in a terraced field out back. The fish comes from a co-owner’s seafood business, most of it from nearby waters. Describing itself as a “community oriented restaurant where people can meet and enjoy reasonably priced, locally grown food and high quality seafood,” Purdys Farmer & the Fish is a casual destination for anyone who appreciates the freshest possible food made with skill and style and served in helter-skelter dining rooms that ring with cheer. Located in an old farmhouse and surrounded by effulgent blossoming plants, it has earned tremendous kudos (and sometimes long waits for a table) since opening in 2012.

On the Roadfood scale, the “reasonably priced” meals are a splurge. Entrees go for $25-30; but you can get a soft-shell crab sandwich or Big Eye tuna burger for under $20. A block of Scottish salmon, perched atop a base of black barley with a subtle sweet twist, along with baby beets, turnips, and carrots, seems worth every penny of its $24 tariff. The impeccably fresh salmon, cooked medium rare as ordered, is velvet-soft except at its well-seasoned, crusty edges – a true melt-in-the-mouth dish. A lobster roll, available either cool with lemon aioli and cucumbers or warm with only butter, contains massive chunks of juicy meat from tail, claw, and knuckle. The bun is a bore, but who cares? The meat is ocean-sweet. On the side come glorious steak fries – great logs of spud that are crisp-skinned and creamy inside.

Among hors d’oeuvre, I was particularly impressed by calamari veiled in an elegant thin crust, each little circle shockingly tender (no rubber here), delivering that subtle seafood taste that even a fish frowner could love. An order of Buffalo shrimp is three breaded colossals on a field of piquant hot sauce scattered with blue cheese, presented with a ramekin of cool ranch dressing. One of the most amazing starters is cucumber salad, an off-the-menu special in which the bright, sunny flavor of just-picked cukes is tangled with other garden greens in a pool of cucumber squeezin’s that is like high-proof vegetable liqueur. On the subject of appetizers, a full raw bar menu offers East Coast and West Coast oysters, clams, shrimp or lobster cocktails, crab legs and cornucopic “seafood towers” for two or more people.

There is a nice card of desserts with some wild chocolate creations, but if it’s summer, I am going for freshly-picked berries with just-whipped cream – a fitting end to a truly farm-fresh meal.