Dining and Dancing
Essentially, anywhere you go there will be good eats, especially seafood. We are on an island in New England. On holiday weekends, be prepared to wait an hour for a table. Most places, like Harbor Grill have a lounge area where you can order a few drinks, kick back and wait for your table.
Some of my favorite places are Finn’s and Harbor Grill for dinner, Mohegan Café and Three Sisters for lunch and 1661 for breakfast. There’s another great place for breakfast which is next to Finn’s but I can’t recall it’s name. The smell of sausage sent me floating there one morning.
The airport also has a cozy diner. Whenever I ride by the airport, I always expect to see Lowell pop out.
Hotel Manisses and Spring Hotel are great romantic dining establishments but a little pricey. Personally, when I’m on the island, I like the casual comforts of a Big Sister sandwich, with chips and drink eaten on one of their cute picnic tables. If I were to get out of the rat race, I’d open up a cute eatery, such as Three Sisters.
If you have a kitchenette and want to try your hand at cooking some fresh seafood, you should stop at Finn’s Fish Mart for some fresh seafood. The main grocery store we frequent is Block Island Grocery. They have a deli that a New York City girl can appreciate. Nothing beats a roast beef melt after a long swim.
Usually, I pack all my kitchen essentials and just pick up perishables on the island. The prices as you may expect are a little high.
Nightlife on the island for me consists of sitting at a local bar, like Sharky’s (He's a Brooklyn native. Go Yankees!) and watching the crowds of people try to squish onto the deck at McGovern’s. I’m not into crowding myself into clubs like McGovern’s and Ballard Beach. First of all, you can hear the cover band perfectly fine across the street. Secondly, I’d prefer to lounge in a deck chair than stand in a crowded deck balancing my drink and avoiding someone’s back sweat. On a personal note, McGovern’s drinks are a little watered down for my taste. A pina colada there left such a weird aftertaste in my mouth, I found myself sucking on limes just to mask the furry tongue. My brother kept singing, ‘Lime in the coconut’ after that.
If you want to see cover bands, you need to go to Captain Nick’s which is directly across the street from BI Grocery Store. While we were there they had an Abba Tribute band (They really dressed up like Abba, men and women) and a Rolling Stones cover band. Once, I saw a man dressed as a cow and one as a pig doing a jig by the band. It was 4pm.
The party starts early on BI. Where nightlife in NY doesn’t start popping until the wee hours, BI bars close at 1am. Some establishments will even close around midnight/12:30 to avoid the mass exodus.
Here is Pantrygirl's PSA: If you plan to go to a bar or club in the evening, you plan to drink towards the tipsy end of the scale and it’s not within walking distance of your hotel, hail a cab. Don’t try to bike it or moped it. For your safety and the safety of others, do no attempt to bike home. There are no street lights on the island, at least not on most of the island. The streets are narrow and curvy and many don’t have signs. Heck, the buildings don’t have street addresses. Play it safe and hail a cab. "The more you know... Da da da da..."
