Weekly Top 6 for Traveling Foodies

1. Check out Epicurious' article on America's Top 50 Restaurants which includes one of my favorites, Babbo here in NYC.

2. Plan for October: There is the Boston Vegetarian Festival on Oct 21, Alba's (Italy) White Truffle Festival, the Exmoor Food Festival October 7-15, and many others listed at cookingvillage.com and smartertravel.com.

3. If you're a business travel, check out Taking a client out to dinner? Here are some tips on "wining"

4. Joel Robuchon Debuts New Restaurant in New York at the Four Seasons Hotel

5. SF Gate reports on Enjoying Almonds at their Peak and on an interesting new restaurant, Barracuda mixes Japanese, Peruvian.

6. Pick up some new cookbooks including Zingerman's Guide to Good  Eating from the deli and restaurant in Ann Arbor and  Moosewood Restaurant  Simple Suppers from the famous vegetarian restaurant in Ithaca, NY.

Seafood at Cape Cod Missing the Boat?

I just got back from my annual trip to the beach and for the second year in a row, we went to Cape Cod and rented a small house in Orleans. As you can imagine, many of the Cape's restaurants specialize in seafood especially lobster, clams, and scallops. There's no shortage of family restaurants that let you pick your own lobsters and fish shacks that specialize in fried clams, scallops, onion rings etc. Higher end restaurants will also feature raw oysters and other seafood specialties.

The fried fish and the onion rings at Cooke's Seafood  are light and crispy and I'd highly recommend this restaurant to get your fill of fried seafood. The Hearth 'n Kettle offers reasonably priced entrees in a family friendly atmosphere and I enjoyed the  Seafood Medley.  Land  Ho! is a good place to grab a drink, but I was a bit disappointed with its basic menu of fried/broiled seafood.

But I couldn't help feeling, are beach restaturants missing the boat?

When I'm at the beach, I'm not going to eat fried seafood more than once and many folks aren't going to shell out the $'s for a 'top rated' restaurant. So where is the middle ground here? Why aren't the shacks and pub style restaurants offering grilled seafood options?  How come I can't order a New England lobster boiled as an entree? Where's the ceviche?

Hopefully I'll find some more creative options next year!