One of my colleagues and I were talking last night. We both like food. I cook a lot - so I watch a lot of cooking videos and TV shows (the ones where they teach you how to cook, not the ones where they compete). He eats out a lot. So, it's rare that I go to a restaurant before he does. But, that did happen last weekend, and I did have a good recommendation for him.
This conversation was overheard by another colleague. She's newer to the department, and had never heard of most of the restaurants we were talking about. So, she said, "Why don't you blog about this?"
Well, this is an advising blog - so I think it's mostly about advising students about academic matters. But you all have to eat.
There are a bunch of really super-expensive restaurants. Gracies, Al Forno, Bacaro, Hemingway's, Persimmon, Bayberry Garden, and Oberlin are all really good places. Gracies is probably my favorite. Hemingway's is a quintessential Providence restaurant for seafood. Bayberry Garden's is newer and is my wife's favorite. There's also a number of excellent Italian restaurants on Federal Hill - Pane e Vino is my favorite. Providence actually has one of the best restaurant scenes in the country (it's mostly because there are a lot of graduates from Johnson and Wales' culinary school who stick around an open a restaurant here). We are very luck this way.
But this isn't really want I want to talk about. Instead, I want to talk about an experience I had when I was a sophomore in college. Swarthmore was an isolated campus - there was a train station on campus, which could take you to central Philadelphia, but the actual town of Swarthmore was really small. You really needed a car to go anywhere or do anything off campus. I didn't have one.
But I remember in the Spring of my sophomore year, there was a movie I really wanted to see that came out in early May. For the life of me, I don't remember what movie it was. But I remember that there was a guy who lived on my hall - a senior - who also wanted to see the movie. And he had a car. So we drove to the mall, saw the movie, and then he took me to this diner that had the best milkshakes I had ever tasted. He graduated soon afterwards, and I never saw him again. But I remembered that diner. I burnt the directions into my memory.
I stayed at Swarthmore that summer. I bought an old, used car, which got me around and I remembered that diner. I wound up going for milkshakes once or twice a week. I was also lucky that as a junior I won a lottery for a parking space and was able to keep my car on campus during the year. So, the milkshakes didn't stop. The place also had really good onion rings, and that was my go-to late-night snack for two+ years.
Last summer (2024), my daughter sang the national anthem at a Phillies game (a story for another day), so we drove down to Philadelphia. The next day, we toured Swarthmore and went to this diner for dinner. Milkshakes, onion rings, and a burger. I hadn't been there in over 20 years, and it was exactly the same, and taking my daughter there and watching her love it was priceless to me.
I tell you all of this because there really isn't a place like this in Providence (if you really like ice cream, I recommend Eskimo King - 300+ flavors of soft serve - but it's in Seekonk across the bridge). No. The place I want to tell you about is Gregg's. It's about 2 miles from campus (on North Main St). It's the restaurant I tell students to go to more than any other. And really, you're not going for the food (the food is mediocre). You're going for the desserts. The desserts will change your life.
For...reasons... I can't link to this restaurant here, so I'll leave it to you to look this up on your own. All I can say is that once you get their cakes/pies/eclairs whatever, there's no turning back.
You've been warned.