Clam Box

If you find yourself in the Boston area with a craving for fried seafood that cannot be suppressed, you might want to head an hour north to the Clam Box of Ipswich.

No, it's not a strip club, but you can get fried clam strips there.


Note the resemblance of the building to an actual cardboard carton, and the way the patrons queue up for their heap of breaded rubbery treats. Their appeal escaped me, too, at first, but at some point something changed.

This is also the place where I first learned about lobster rolls. For the uninitiated, this dish consists of a lobster-mayo salad, lovingly placed on a hotdog bun, perhaps garnished with a leaf of iceberg lettuce. Though they are consumed on picnic tables, usually among throngs of screeching children, their asking price starts at about 12 bucks apiece.

It's a lot of lobster, though.