The Nantucket Restaurants Cookbook: Menus and Recipes from the Faraway Isle
The Nantucket Restaurants Cookbookis exactly that, a collection of menus from a whole host of restaurants on Nantucket Island. And for such a small island, Nantucket has a lot to offer the hungry gourmet. Samara Farber Mormar, a former chef, is a Nantucket resident and loves everything about the island. Her coauthor, Melissa Clark, is a cookbook writer and columnist forThe New York Times. Together they interviewed the chefs and owners of 18 Nantucket restaurants and wrote a chapter on each which includes a little history, a little personality, some local color, and a showstopping menu.Black-Eyed Susan's doesn't advertise, take reservations, or publish a phone number, but there's always a line out the door. With beautiful, summery dishes such as their Tuna Tartare with Cucumbers and Sriracha Aioli and Lemon Tart with Spring Strawberry Sorbet, it's no wonder. You'd expect The Boarding House to serve simple food, but you'd be wrong. Angela and Seth Raynor met as culinary students, and while he was cooking French on Nantucket at the Chanticleer, she was cooking in France. Today, their love for all things French flavors their "new American" cuisine in dishes such as the refreshing Cold Tomato Infusion with Lobster. The Club Car is revered for its food and service far beyond the island's shores. Their Grilled Veal Medallions with Fresh Horseradish Cream and Poached Oysters is more than worth the time it takes to prepare. While you can't enjoy the setting of The Galley on Cliffside Beach--"smack dab on the  beach"--without going there, Goat-Cheese-Stuffed Squash Blossoms with Grilled Onion and Organic Tomato Vinaigrette and Rosewater Angel Food Cake with Blackberries and Lemon Verbena Syrup help to explain the entrancing serenity of the island described by every one of these chefs. Only a handful of the chefs are Nantucket natives; most of them migrated to the island, or happened upon it. But once there, they fell in love with it and stayed. The result is a plethora of fine dining establishments, and although many are only open during the summer season, much of their business is repeat.So if you always imagined Nantucket cuisine as fried clams on the beach, think again. "Sophisticated food and warm hospitality" is the order of the day. Come and meet the generous food community from Nantucket, and follow their lead--maybe all that island serenity comes just as much from painted plates of Banana Bread French Toast with Bananas Foster and Crème Fraîche as it does from the windswept dunes and the sapphire sea.--Leora Y. Bloom