Eating at Ceraldi: As Local as Local Gets on Cape Cod
By Ian MacAllen on Sunday, July 21st, 2024 at 5:06 pm
Ceraldi might be the best restaurant on Cape Cod. That’s not an exaggeration or hyperbole. It was named the best Restaurant on Cape Cod by Boston Magazine in 2022. Earlier this month, I ate here twice in a week, and both times it was a great decision.
The ten-year-old restaurant is in one half of a historic building in Wellfleet on the outer Cape. It’s not historic in the sense that it was built by Pilgrims, but historic in the sense that the squat two-story building has been overlooking Mayo Beach for as long as I’ve been alive.
I remember it as Uncle Frank’s, a coffee shop known as a gathering spot for locals. Once a summer, maybe, we’d get donuts for breakfast there. (We rented a cottage for two weeks at a time, first at Brown’s Landing, and then from an elderly lady across the sandlot when Peter Brown sold off the cottages as individual units).
The other half of Uncle Frank’s coffee shop had long been a summer stage theater. The Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre was founded in 1985 and operated there until relocating to a new building next to the post office and the old IGA on Route 6. The theater lost their their lease in 2012. But in 2016, a group of actors once affiliated with WHAT ended up opening the Harbor Stage Company in the space. Ceraldi and the stage company share a hallway and bathrooms and since the flushing toilets can be heard from the stage, one of these is closed during performances.
Uncle Frank’s donuts closed in 2004 after Frank Cain, the owner, died in a car crash. Soon after, John Arsenault opened Sol, a hyper-local seafood restaurant dedicated to preserving Cape Cod’s culture. Meanwhile, Michael Ceraldi was working in Del Posto and Felidia in New York, then in Kentucky under chef Edward Lee. He arrived on the Cape in 2010, where he worked at Dalla Cucina in Provincetown. In 2013, he started testing his concepts with popups.
Ceraldi’s first season was in 2014, and three years later had been named Best Restaurant for General Excellence on Cape Cod by Boston magazine. Around this time, my wife and I tried making reservations, but the restaurant was full.
Last summer, my brother and my sister-in-law made a reservation for dinner in early June. I agreed to drive them so they could also enjoy the wine pairing without worrying about getting home. Cabs are scarce on the Cape before July. They enjoyed their dinner enough that for Christmas, they gave my wife and I a gift certificate to use the following year.
Summer on Cape Cod begins on the July 4th weekend. The summer rentals are filled, the schools are closed, and the water is finally hitting the mid 50s. The 2024 holiday weekend was especially busy. New York was being consumed by another unbearable heat bubble, and with the extra long weekend, the outer Cape was full.
My parents couldn’t make it to the Cape. After four years of avoiding it, they had finally contracted COVID and were isolating at home. Instead, my in-laws came to stay. They arrived on Friday afternoon, and since my brother and his wife hadn’t left yet, we passed our toddler over to the grandparents and headed out to dinner.
Our first destination was Caroline’s where buck a Shuck oysters start at 3:30 p.m. at Caroline’s, and I’ve wanted to feast on these since last season. Despite the pseudo holiday, all of us had been working into the afternoon on Friday. We tried walking in at quarter to six like it was late May. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Caroline’s was full.
Even though the kitchen is open late, the hostess wasn’t taking even putting names on the waitlist. Caroline’s generally will keep the kitchen open as long as there are people looking to order food, so we found this a surprising turn of events.
Not a problem. We had a drink at Local Break, a bar that wants to be a gastropub but would be better as an actual local bar. When it first opened, we watched a man pay for his drinks with a fish he caught earlier in the day. Fish-as-currency is long over at Local Break, but we had a few beers and a soft pretzel. It’s a fine place to stuff French Fries into a toddler, but not such a great destination for a night out. We figured if we waited out the dinner rush we could head back to Caroline’s.
As we were walking back along the highway I spotted the Flex Bus. The Cape Cod Regional Transit Authority runs the local bus along route 6, with stops from Orleans to Provincetown. Everyone was a little bit skeptical, but I insisted we should flag it down. It was free on July 5, an added bonus I took as fate. Let’s see where the night takes us, I argued.
We took the bus as far as downtown Wellfleet. Wellfleet has a whole host of restaurants, and some of them are quite good, so we assumed we’d have more options for finding a place to eat.
Our first stop was Mac’s Shack. The food here is fresh and sourced mainly from local fishermen. We regularly buy seafood from the Mac’s Market near our house. However, when we stepped up to the hostess, she too refused to add our name to her list. Our concern grew when we walked over to the wharf where Mac’s on the Pier, had the longest line I had ever seen. The pier shop is an order-at-the-counter fried food stand. It’s delicious and casual, and another great place to stuff French fries into a toddler.
We were starting to worry there would be no place for us to eat. The line at Pearl’s was equally long. But then we remembered Ceraldi.
Ceraldi offers two seatings for a fixed 7 course tasting menu at 5:30 and 8:30. Both seatings are reservation only. But the restaurant also has what it calls Conivium: Enoteca. From the Ceraldi website: “As a testament to our commitment to spontaneity and conviviality, CONVIVIUM CERALDi operates on a no-reservations policy. Simply stroll in and let the evening unfold.” We were certainly letting things unfold.
The fixed menu seatings were full, but outside were a few patio tables available. We had arrived just as the first fixed menu seating was wrapping up, and Chef Michael Ceraldi was outside greeting guests.
He showed us to the best table on the patio – looking directly into the kitchen window where he and his staff prepare the food.
We ordered a tower, three tiers of plates filled with finger food inspired by the tasting menu. These towers are, like the tasting menu itself, changing daily. But also the contents of the towers vary as the kitchen moves through the set menu. Order, as we did, at the start of the menu, and the components of the tower will draw inspiration from the first courses. Order later in the tasting, and the tower will reflect the later dishes. The method keeps the kitchen on pace and uses up whatever surplus components of the tasting menu are on hand.
Our tower had oysters, the first course in the tasting, as well as small stuffed croissants, puff pastries, fried ricotta balls, and ceviche shots. All of these items were delicious, and we finished up our meal with a cheese plate. Since it was dark and we were at this point fairly drunk on wine, I didn’t take any pictures of this experience.
But we were also coming back for the tasting menu.
The next morning my brother and sister-in-law drove back to Manhattan. They didn’t get out quite as early as they expected but still made it to Yankee Stadium to catch the game. My in-laws were staying for the week, so my wife andI decided it was time to use the gift certificate for the tasting menu.
We arrived twenty minutes early. Ceraldi sits on the edge of Wellfleet Harbor overlooking a breakwater that protects the fleet. There is a strip of sand and the muddy bay beach. A few times as a kid I swam here, but as a beach, Wellfleet has many nicer ones. Between the water and Ceraldi sits a small grass area with benches overlooking all of this. There was also a bocce ball set and my wife and I played half a match. She won.
At 8:15, the doors opened and we were seated at the bar. The dining room is small. About a dozen seats along the bar face the Chef as he preps dishes for service. Around the edge of the restaurant are a few tables which maybe offer more privacy, but not nearly as good a view of the Chef.
We also ordered a wine pairing with the tasting menu. In addition to wine, it also included some non-alcoholic spritzes and juices to help refresh us during the tasting.
The menu starts with fresh, raw oysters. As much as the menu changes, it seems the meal always begins with Wellfleet oysters. These are sourced from Lucky Lip Oysters, farmed in the area around the Blackfish Creek on the south side of Wellfleet in slightly brackish water. They are some of the cleanest, most delicious oysters I’ve eaten.
The oysters came with three preparations. One was with a mignonette made from seabeans. The second had a dash of Farmer Friends hot sauce made from locally grown peppers, and the third, a touch of Black River caviar and creme fraiche. Caviar of course is not produced on the Cape and it’s the one product that’s not produced locally, although Ceraldi sources it from a family based on the Cape.
We had eaten a few oysters the previous week with the Farm Friends hot sauce. It had good flavor, and I would even consider buying a bottle. But the oyster with the creme fraiche stood out. It really did make the oyster taste creamier.
My wife doesn’t like oysters. This worked out great for me because I got six instead of three. She had an alternative: a few pieces of blue cheese topped with local honey. It was delicate in flavor, and just faintly blue.
This was followed by a salad of fresh lettuce, chunky goat cheese, and whole red pepper corns. Chef explained that we were eating the last salad for at least the next few weeks. The heat of high summer wilts the lettuce too much – and this explains why the lettuce heads in my raised bed were beginning to dry out and yellow.
The lettuce was tossed with a lovely mustard dressing. It worked especially well with the red peppercorns.
The third course was a beet sformatino. A sformatino is essentially a savory flan. It translates to roughly, out of the mold or small formed thing. It was served alongside roasted carrots on top of a pesto made from sea rocket.
Sea rocket is in the mustard green family, and Ceraldi picked it himself a few yards from the restaurant. The beet sformatino was perhaps the single most delicious component of the night. The texture was perfect.
That afternoon I had a premonition that the menu would include squash blossoms. They are such a delicate ingredient. I can find them often enough at the greenmarkets around the city, but they spoil easily and are not something I have had success making myself.
With every course, Chef Ceraldi explains the provenance of the ingredients and where he sources them from. Squash grow well on the Cape. These were stuffed with fresh mozzarella and fried, topped with quick pickled onions and served over a a green sauce.
There were several juice spritzes that arrived alongside our wine during the tasting. It makes me think offering a full non-alcoholic pairing would be a unique twist for the restaurant. This was the butterfly lemonade. The pink portion was sweet, while the tart lemon sat the bottom, offering a lovely balance to the fried blossoms. Earlier was a pink pepper fizz, and dinner concluded with a perfectly pulled espresso.
The risotto course followed filled with chunks of lobster. The lobster is a Packard Lobster, hand picked off the seafloor by Michael Packard. Packard dives into the water and fishes for the lobsters by hand, a process that is meant to keep the lobsters out of traps. Most lobsters are collected by dropping baited traps into the water, and the traps collected a few days later. But the lobster traps can stress the lobsters out, and the bait they eat can impact the taste of the meat. Packard swears the hand-fished lobster avoid these problems.
There are risks to harvesting lobsters by hand, as Packard found out in 2021. That’s when a humpback whale accidentally swallowed Packard up. The whale quickly spit Packard out. The story made the news despite Packard escaping unscathed.
The risotto was served with a chili oil around the edge. It was a divine addition to the dish, and a good trick for guests who may not like a little heat. It was easy to regulate how much heat each bite had.
The final savory course was a beef shank served over polenta. These arrived on Ceraldi’s famous pottery. The pottery is made in part with clay from Newcomb Hollow beach. The cow too was raised on the Cape out in Truro. There are apparently at least two beef farms in Truro, but it was not from the one I’ve seen.
The fresh blueberries brought a little sweetness to the party, and the beef highlight the savory components of the blueberry. It was a great combination. The stone-ground polenta was a bit grainy, but I took this to be intentional.
The final dish was a pistachio semifreddo. The bright green, softly-frozen dessert was drizzled with chocolate from Chequessett Chocolate, a local manufacturer. The local business was put up for sale last year, but Ceraldi bought up a big supply. The semifreddo was topped with biscotti crumbles, adding a nice texture. The dessert was a refreshing end to a warm evening.
The meal ended around 11pm, and we walked out into the darkness awaiting a cab. The chaotic hubbub of a week earlier had disappeared. The other restaurant patrons drove off. The wait time on Lyft wasn’t going down any faster. Eventually we gave in and called my mother-in-law for a ride. As we waited one of the staff rode off on an electric scooter silently into the night.
