Sunday, January 31, 2010

The Rocky Point Shore Dinner Hall

Blame it on the cold weather, but all day my thoughts kept returning to memories of eating clam cakes and red chowder in the Shore Dinner Hall at Rocky Point Park. Located on Narragansett Bay in Warwick, Rhode Island, the park opened in 1847 and closed in 1996. The Shore Dinner Hall served its last clam cake in 2000. (Check out the film “You Must Be This Tall” for more on the history of Rocky Point Park.)

Apparently my grandfather, a labor reporter for the Providence Journal-Bulletin, was quite the shore-dinner connoisseur. He used to take my dad to Rocky Point for clam cakes and chowder and Dad, in turn, took me and my brother. This usually occurred around the Fourth of July, when my father's childhood and college friends, with their children and spouses, annually reunited in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

I must have inherited this penchant for the shore dinner, as I remember the Rocky Point Shore Dinner Hall with its seemingly endless rows of tables, watermelon, and salty, battered clam cakes better than I do the Corkscrew or the Freefall or the House of Horrors (well, my eyes were probably unnecessarily closed for much of that last one).

Around 1989 or so I picked up the above postcard of the Shore Dinner Hall, complete with a description of the menu on its backside:


With the park and the dinner hall long gone, I will have to make “Famous Rocky Point Clam Chowder” for myself.


ROCKY POINT-STYLE CHOWDER

1/2 pound ground or finely diced salt pork
1 pound onions, cut in medium dice
1 gallon clam juice
1 pound potatoes, diced
Salt, pepper to taste
1 tablespoon paprika
2 cups canned tomato puree
1 1/2 quarts chopped quahogs
Water as needed
Pilot crackers, crumbled

Heat salt pork until the fat melts. Add onions; cook over gentle heat until very soft. Add clam juice, potatoes, seasonings, tomato puree and a little water.

Simmer until potatoes are soft, then add quahogs. Heat and taste for seasoning. Add water if needed.

It is best to use old, not new potatoes, because they thicken the chowder somewhat with their starch. Crush some pilot crackers and stir them into the chowder to thicken it further near the end of cooking. Makes 20 eight-ounce servings.


Note that the above recipe, located with others in a 1997 Providence Journal-Bulletin article, suggests that you make the chowder with pilot crackers. But like Famous Rocky Point Clam Chowder that, too, is a bygone food unless you make it yourself. (Nabisco discontinued Crown Pilot Crackers despite a concerted effort against this move by residents of Chebeague Island, Maine. But that’s another story.)

12 comments:

  1. how about the white chowder and clam cakes??

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    1. I don’t temember Rocky Point having white chowder. RP’s will always be chowda to me...not white nor Manhattan.

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  2. How about it! I miss it all.

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  3. I wish i could have been around when rocky point was still open i heard soo..much and i wish i could have been there to witness it!!!

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  4. mom and dad and other family members talked about rocky point.....I was only 3 months old when we moved to calif......wish I would have gone back to enjoy what many have enjoyed

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  5. dan i heard paul and al on hjy talk about in the morning the corkscrew at rocky point, i took a walk today looks like the place needs to be razed, to bad its was quite a thing in its day. lived in ri all my live never been. some one wrote a book called "you have to be this tall" by arcadia publishing the history of rocky point shore dinner hall has to be razed too bad 18 years its in neglect

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    1. It was an amazing place!!�� so missed by so many!!������

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  6. My ex-husband took me to the Shore Dinner Hall once in 1973. It was amazing to a girl from Denver. Never saw such wonder or ate such marvelous stuff. I have never forgotten it. Wish the state could bring it back to life. I am sad to hear that is not in operation any longer. Very sad. Barb in Albuquerque. : trixieandpepper@gmail.com

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  7. Fast forward 5 years on these comments and Rocky Point is now a public amenity for all to enjoy. 120 acres for all to enjoy.

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  8. I think there is a typo for the potatoes. It must be 10 pounds for that much chowdah

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  9. I think there is a typo for the potatoes. It must be 10 pounds for that much chowdah

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  10. I remember eating steamers in the big hall with watermelon.

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