The only thing cooler than eating in a cafeteria when you're a grown-up is eating in an Automat. Sadly, except for a few retro automats in New York they don't exist anymore.

Mimi Gregoire Carpenter is known as "The Seashell Lady." A children's book author and illustrator, she's perhaps best known for her book, "What the Sea Left Behind."

For detailed descriptions on the events listed below, visit www.artsintheinns.com.

Any restaurant in a college or university town is going to bring back some memories for those of us who've been through our four years of higher learning, but Franz's Food accomplishes this more than most.

The menu at Ristorante Massimo reads like a food lover's libretto, the names of the dishes deliciously Italian, the pronunciation liltingly musical — aragosta e avocado, tonno due sensi — followed by a short work of explanatory culinary...

The pub room in the lower level of the Garrison Inn, a boutique hotel in downtown Newburyport is cozy, with those rough-hewn stone walls that make me feel like I'm in a little cavernous French bistro somewhere far away from Massachusetts. The bar...

Friends have been raving to me about Green Leaves for a year now and I finally went in and sampled as much as I could, starting with the fantastic General Tso's Tofu, recommended by Seacoast Eat Local maven Sara Zoe, who described it (two out of...

PORTSMOUTH — The rumors brewed for months in restaurant gossip circles, but finally the word is out. Ray Guerin and Peter Dizoglio of Portsmouth’s historic Oar House on Monday announced the purchase of The Dunaway Restaurant at Strawbery Banke.

Foodies like to brag about the "authentic" ethnic food we find, sometimes to the point of pretentiousness.

I've noticed a pattern in my choice of restaurants lately. After a couple of months or so of hanging out in little neighborhood cafés and sometimes writing about them, I realized that I'm looking for some comfort in my current personal world with...

Geno's has been around for more than 40 years. There are pictures of George W. and Barbara on the walls — friends of the family — and those in the know pull up in their boats, dock and come in for a simple meal of chowder, lobster rolls...

Frozen Cosmopolitan from Academe at the Kennebunk Inn

While you're all engaging in Independence Day BBQs with your beer and your hot dogs and such, I'll be in Michigan attending a big four-day music festival with budding musician Teen Daughter Avalon.

Just so you know, I don't spend all of my dining time diving into big steaks and pork belly — all that big carnivore stuff. A few weekends ago I attended a workshop about raw food (sometimes called the raw food "movement") over at SoBo Book &...

Just so you know, I don't spend all of my dining time diving into big steaks and pork belly — all that big carnivore stuff. A few weekends ago I attended a workshop about raw food (sometimes called the raw food "movement") over at SoBo Book &...

Americans have cheese fries and gravy, the fries too often covered with noxious bright orange cheese sauce, the gravy from a can or package, the fries a soggy mess. But the French Canadians — they've got poutine (poo-TEEN, although I've also...

In preparation for the opening of "Sex and the City: The Movie" on Friday I've been watching the last few seasons of the show with my cool On Demand feature on the cable TV.

I know it's still only May, but all too soon my daughter will be out of school, sitting around telling me how bored she is. But I've got plans for her: She's going to go on some good mother/daughter bonding trips — four days at a big music...

I love Indian food. It's aromatic and exotic, intriguingly complex. It can be hot enough to bring tears to your eyes and sweat on the brow or sweet, mild and creamy enough to soothe just like your favorite comfort cuisine.

Last year I persuaded Teen Daughter Avalon to go with me to Arrows Restaurant for Mother's Day.

Many of us are eagerly awaiting our economic stimulus check from the IRS next month. We're supposed to put the money back into the economy to help out retailers and such, but many will just use the money to pay for gas which we all know has gotten...

It was a proud moment when my almost 15-year-old daughter called me from her bedroom one floor up from my home office/reality TV watching den and asked where she and her friends should go for sushi on their walk to downtown Portsmouth.

I've noticed a pattern in my choice of restaurants lately. After a couple of months or so of hanging out in little neighborhood cafés and sometimes writing about them, I realized that I'm looking for some comfort in my current personal world with...

Gleaming clear H2O straight from frigid Icelandic aquifers, mineral-laden fizzy water from volcanic Italy and that chilly stuff that burbles out of long-lost springs have been all the rage since, well, ancient times, but for us the 1980s, when...

Many of our Seacoast chefs are getting their pigs and ducks and rabbits and such whole from local farms, and true to the best of the best of great food ethics, they're not just giving us the tenderloin or other run-in-the-mill cuts. We're getting...