This Week at the Herdic House
With the arrival of strawberries and somewhat reliable sunshine, we’ve decided we can go ahead and certify this week as the beginning of Wilpo summer, despite the ghastly Memorial Day weather this past weekend. And summer has brought with it a bevy of lettuces and green vegetables here at our House, but also a bevy of bus tours…two of which we’ll be hosting tonight and tomorrow. We’ll still be serving the Blue Plate this evening (we wouldn’t do that to you with no notice!), but we’ll have less space than we usually do, and much of our dining space will be outside (where it’s predicted to be lovely) this evening. Please call down to book a table if you’ll be joining us for dinner tonight!
Our Blue Plate will be a wedge of Misty Mountain bacon, broccolini, scallion and zucchini quiche, served with a side of baby lettuces with lemon vinaigrette. (Liz’s quiche is a house favorite, so if you don’t eat it up, we all will!) The Blue Plate, as always, is $18 at our House and $20 to go, and you can reach us at 570-322-0165 to book a table! We’ll also have gazpacho with grilled spicy shrimp as our soup, and fresh strawberry shortcake for dessert…
Come join us for our Thursday happy hours at the bar, from 5-7 pm, with $1 off all beers and $2 off wines by the glass. Plus we’ll be serving lump crabcake sandwiches with horseradish dill mayonnaise and a caper-cucumber slaw, with a side of our sweet potato chips…
But Friday is our real event this week, as all good friends of the Herdic know: we postponed our classic shad-smoking, patio-opening celebration by one week so that Liz could galavant up to Providence, and boy, are we glad we did, because this Friday’s weather (unlike last Friday’s) looks perfect for hanging out around the smoker, slinging back a couple of cocktails, and enjoying some delicious smoked fish. Sid Furst, our shad guru, has been malingering around the Herdic with increasing frequency as the date has crept closer, and stepped in last week to save our butts when our trusted shad source fell short.
Sid’ll be there Thursday evening setting up his shad-smoke shop, and then back Friday morning to start the fires burning—this is a man with dedication, to both an idea and a good time, and we love him for it. Then, on Friday afternoon, the Shad Smoking Crew will gather (the smokey glass ceiling was shattered a few years ago when Sid’s daughters Esther and Maggie got involved, so the Crew is a ragtag band of men and women now), and they’ll smoke fish and spin yarns until the late evening, spurred on by their cooler of beer and Arnold Palmers.
All in all, you can see why we at the Herdic, often accustomed to stuffy Victorian indoor dining, thrill so much to the idea of a lawless, slightly singed band of stragglers smoking fish out of doors for an evening, and why we’re excited to begin our delightful outdoor season with the Shad Smoke yet again this year. We still have a couple tables left, so call down to book your reservation for Friday evening…
- New England clam chowder with chowder clams, Misty bacon, thyme and a little sweet corn
- Crispy calamari with lemon-chipotle aioli, fresh arugula and slivered scallion
- House-smoked shad (filleted by Bob Helmrich, with both Caribbean and Atlantic varieties available this year), served simply with horseradish dill mayonnaise, herbed potatoes and buttered asparagus
- Key Lime pie, with fresh strawberry coulis and lime whipped cream
We’d be remiss if we didn’t point out that this year’s Smoke will be missing one very important member: our friend (and passionate fisher- and outdoorsman) Bill Worobec passed away this past week. Bill’s influence on our area can’t really be overstated (among other things, he taught Liz what little she knows about fishing, and nearly everything she knows about municipal finance—but that’s just the tip of the iceberg when you look at the impact of both his work and his conservation efforts). The hole he’s left will be hard to fill…and we’ll be thinking of him as we smoke several of his favorite fish this Friday evening. Rest in peace…