Jeanne O'Brien Coffey

Over a single week in March 2020, nearly every plan at Topsfield Bakeshop was wiped from the calendar. The 15-year-old store, which operates the wildly popular Whoo(pie) Wagon—a fixture at area festivals, corporate events, and colleges—saw its schedule vanish, including the bakery’s thriving wedding cake business, in an unexpected instant. This, at a time when owners Mary and Chris Bandereck were in the home stretch of building an expanded facility with extensive kitchen space on Route 1 in T...

Cocktails without the kick are gaining popularity. A few years ago, the choices for a nonalcoholic drink—even at an upscale bar—were mainly limited to sparkling water with a twist of lime or an insipid faux beer. These days, new zero-proof examples of classic spirits, from aperitifs to gins to whiskeys, seem to crop up every week. They’ve become so popular that Michelin-starred restaurants now offer nonalcoholic pairing menus.
According to a study done by Nielsen, mi...

The Saigon Cigar Club is a gorgeous cocktail. Tropical yet also warming, the mix of bourbon and banana syrup, scented with cardamom and cinnamon, then enhanced with a smoky banana leaf, defies the seasons, making it perfect to sip in high summer or in the depths of winter. So perfect, the drink became an instant classic on the menu at Nightshade Noodle Bar in Lynn.
The cocktail is also insanely complicated to make—you need to simmer Thai bananas with a bunch of spices then strain to make a sy...

Maple trees sense spring before the rest of us. In February, snow may lie deep on the ground and the nighttime temperatures may plunge below freezing, but as soon as the thermometer starts to rise above 32 degrees during the day, sugar maples awaken. They draw moisture from the softening ground and convert starch stored last season into sugar to feed new growth.
Growing up in New England, hearing the drip-drip as icicles started to thaw and noticing slush melting into mud meant a visit to a s...

Not everyone gives that much thought to kitchen appliances, but Barbara Lynch loves her fridge. The Boston restaurateur says her Samsung Showcase Side-by-Side makes cooking easy and organized. And that’s important. Despite a lifetime in the kitchen, and running seven successful Boston restaurants with a staff of more than 200, Lynch still finds cooking and entertaining at home relaxing. Built-in floor-to-ceiling shelving (with a ladder to ...

Ever since Seedlip burst onto the scene a few years back with the world’s first distilled nonalcoholic spirit, the options for crafting serious cocktails without the booze have expanded seemingly exponentially. It’s a good thing too – the choices have been too few for too long, limited to Shirley Temples, sweet fruity virgin daiquiris and perhaps, if you found a particularly creative bartender, a virgin mojito. These days, whether you prefer bourbon, gin or a bitter digestif, there are multip...

Bridge House mixes net-zero sustainability with luxurious design

Back in March, when restaurants were abruptly shut down in the midst of the public health crisis, Jay Murray, executive chef at Ellis Square Social in Beverly, knew he needed to make a change. With a menu that consisted primarily of small plates of delicate, pretty food, offering it as takeout was just not in the cards. “Our old concept was very precise and labor-intensive, and we wouldn’t have been able to execute it properly,” Murray says. “It simply wouldn’t have translated to in-home dini...

Joe Faro, “chief food taster” for Tuscan Brands, pretty much grew up going to the Black Cow. After all, the restaurant has been a staple of the Newburyport waterfront for more than 20 years. So when the Black Cow moved to a new location, Faro couldn’t pass up the opportunity to open the next installment of his growing Tuscan Brands empire in the iconic building.
“It’s a place I’ve always dreamt of opening a restaurant,” says Faro, who grew up in Lawrence. “I’ve always loved Newburyport. Me, m...

Plunging into Lake George literally took my breath away – gasping both from the chilly water, and from the sheer joy of swimming for the first time in three months. After eons of home-schooling two tweens, and only heading out for walks in our hometown and trips to the grocery store, the whole family was desperate for a change of scenery—me most of all.
So we packed the car and drove to the Sagamore Resort, a grand dame of lakeside inns at the southern edge of the Adirondacks.
The first hurdl...

Back in March, Ian Hunter, co-founder of Deacon Giles Distillery in Salem, Massachusetts, started getting dozens of requests for a product he had never made before. Hand sanitizer was suddenly desperately needed by everyone from first-responders to emergency daycare centers, and Hunter was uniquely qualified to provide it.
“We were getting phone calls more than hourly,” Hunter recalls. “People were looking for thousands of gallons.”
Everyone was turning to Deacon Giles because the most import...

Do you miss your favorite bartender? They miss you too. And with the coronavirus shuttering restaurants across the country, they also miss their jobs, which they really can’t do from home. In the meantime, Privateer Rum has come up with an innovative plan to put some money in pockets and give you the satisfaction of watching a talented bartender prepare a perfectly crafted cocktail – ideally using ingredients you already have at home.
Since St. Patrick’s Day, the Ipswich, Mass.,-based distill...

Matt O’Neil is a glass half-full kind of guy. Last week he turned his restaurant, Ledger Restaurant & Bar, a beautiful fine dining spot in a historic former bank in Salem, Mass., into Ledger Basket. Borrowing the moniker from a popular New England supermarket chain, he is now offering prepared foods and pantry staples.
“It’s like being given the opportunity to open a different restaurant, with nothing to lose,” O’Neil says of the order to shift exclusively to take-out in Massachusetts – and j...

Matthew Morello is the first to admit that his interest in oysters borders on obsession. He makes an 80-mile round trip at least twice a week—and sometimes at the drop of a hat—from his restaurant, Elm Square Oyster Co. in Andover, to Taylor Lobster in Kittery, Maine, to make sure he gets dibs on new, unique bivalves from small producers along the coast. He’s developing his own line of barrel-aged hot sauces because he thinks Tabasco is an insult to a pristine oyster. And he even traded in hi...