Seeing just the right ticket for coastal meals

In a recent column, we imagined a restaurant called Mad Mike’s Auto Repair and Seafood Emporium, where you could have your oil and filter changed, your tires rotated, and your car washed and detailed while you enjoyed an hour or two savoring a fine dining meal. One of our readers wondered what the latter might entail.

A typical, fully-loaded dinner would feature Ford-oeuvres to start, then a Kaiser salad, followed by a choice of entrée (either the supercharged turbot or the tailfin tilapia) and a Hyundai sundae for dessert. As for beverages, there would be an assortment of model teas, regular and ethanol-free coffee, and a variety of Skodas.

Incidentally, if you go to the Emporium on the weekends, you may be lucky enough to be shown to your table by maître d’ Otto Bahn.

Mad Mike’s is just one example of how the food world has taken hold of, indeed defined, the Coast region. From La Fable, which has received recognition as one of the 100 most romantic restaurants in the nation, to Seaford Elementary School, whose Cooking with a Star program was recently awarded a $750 grant from the Sussex County Council — just one of the many ways that august body makes our lives better — this area has become a meal mecca.

We may, though, be literally and figuratively just scratching the culinary surface, or plate. Recently, inthe City by the Bay — San Francisco not Rehoboth Beach — Dogue restaurant opened its doors to much tailwagging.

Named to rhyme with the magazine Vogue, Dogue provides upscale cuisine for man’s (and woman’s) best friends. With meals commanding $75 or more per sitting, or more likely standing, this is a culinary adventure probably best left to owners of canines with pedigrees from the American Kennel Club.

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Needless to say, at that price, there are no doggie bags, although rumors abound that “owner sacks” are being requested by the designated drivers of the restaurant’s four-legged customers. While we wait for such canine cafes to make their way east to the cities by our Bay, we can enjoy the growth of another restaurant trend — outdoor dining.

Just last month, several Dewey Beach restaurants secured approval for al fresco dining, following a practice begun earlier in Rehoboth Beach and elsewhere. It will become hard to forget The Forgotten Mile when you’ve spent an hour or two eating beside it.

However, there’s outdoor dining and then there’s a restaurant located in the great outdoors. The two can be viewed quite differently.

Coastal Delaware invariably welcomes new and innovative food establishments. Nonetheless, public response to a recent proposal to open a restaurant in the midst (and sometimes mist) of Cape Henlopen State Park was downright chilly.

A recent web poll of over 1,000 people indicated that fully 60% of those responding were willing to spend more on park fees “to keep them preserved,” i.e., restaurant free. Only 30% were unwilling to do so.

Curiously, 10% of the poll responders indicated that they “don’t go to parks”. Mmmm. Difficult to know what to make of this last group, except to note that in any case they won’t be dining in the park.

In a region where taxpayers are not generally disposed to support increases in state levies, especially those that only maintain the status quo, the poll percentages are rather amazing and indicative of the strength of the opposition.

Regardless of the outcome of the park restaurant proposal (Delaware shelved that proposal), it begs the question of how one chooses among the varied food options offered in the region. It would be nice if we had one trusted source for restaurant reviews, a culinary Consumers Reports of sorts. Unfortunately, we do not.

Craig LaBan, the food critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, once used a system of four (or fewer) bells to differentiate among the restaurants he reviewed. These four bells are not to be confused with the “four alarm” designation usually associated with the spiciness of chili.

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Although LaBan no longer assigns bells to indicate the quality of a restaurant, one could argue that we are not the Philadelphia of the South (trust me on that) and could benefit from such a rating system. What symbol might be appropriate for restaurant reviews in our region? Well, perhaps a system of six sea shells, as in “she sells sea shells by the seashore,” might make sense, especially given our culinary love of everything in the mollusk family.

Crab shells, oyster shells, clam shells, mussel shells, even scallop shells, might get into the act, or rather come up from the ocean floor, to portray these culinary ratings. In fact, the shells depicted in the review might vary, depending on what’s “in season” at the time the critique is written.

Mike Berger is a freelance writer and retired university administrator with a home in Lewes. Contact him at edadvice@comcast.net.

This article originally appeared on Salisbury Daily Times: Seeing just the right ticket for coastal meals