Dovecrest's American Indian Food: Disconcertingly Close to Home

[Note -- this article is from 1991. The restaurant is not there anymore. It has been replaced by a Native American museum and school. I have been told that a few years before my visit, under its original owners, "In its heyday, it was an award winning, well attended, beautifully decorated Native-run establishment."]

At Brown University, the nearest Indian restaurant is just across the street, but the nearest Native American restaurant is thirty minutes away, overlooking the desolate settlement of Arcadia, amid a howling wilderness of red oak, white pine, and abandoned stone fences near where Interstate 95 approaches Rhode Island's western border. You can work up your appetite by climbing nearby Rattlesnake Ledge for a 180° view of miles of uninhabited Rhode Island.

Dovecrest Indian Restaurant is on Summit Road in Arcadia (see directions below), just uphill from a roadside teepee and wigwam. Ask to be seated in the sunporch, with a panoramic view of a pond and a delightful brook, a shocking magenta G.T.O., and the hundred cats who patrol the rustage and wreckage, boggage and shackage that is Arcadia. Free kittens are available in every variety.

What is Native American food? It all depends on the location. Generally, Indians eat the same things anyone else in their area eats, with slightly more emphasis on the natural products of the area (due to economic necessity). In various regions you may encounter versatile uses of corn, wild berries, deer, sheep, wild rice, or seafood. Native cuisine is not an exotic experience, but a reminder that most of what we take for granted as American food or W.A.S.P. food, like the land itself, is borrowed.

Dovecrest mostly serves the same things you might find in any other ordinary restaurant serving middle-aged travelers and occasional locals: steak, ribs, grilled fish, chicken, burgers, and a basic salad bar with some idiosycratic elements, such as the unusually creamy potato salad, which was surprisingly good, and the best crouton I've ever had.The bread is done creatively, though with uncertain success.The scallops and shrimp (both $10.95) were excellent, abundantly yet tastefuly breaded. A narrow selection of alcohol is offered, though an inspirational message on the menu warns that "Our Enemy is liquor." The Narragansett Lager sign hangs from the gutter only for old times' sake.

The menu has a distinctive side, though. Each month or so Dovecrest offers a different selection of game, including black bear, duck, buffalo and venison. At this point I'd like to make a plug for venison. Many suburbanites dislike it because they've once had it prepared by an inexperienced hunter who waited too long drain the blood, or tried to cook it in its own fat. In contrast, these people clearly know what they're doing with game. On our way out we saw a deer being butchered.

I skipped the intriguing "sea birch" and chose the more mundane quahog pie ($8.95), a juicy pot pie of clams and potatoes seasoned with bacon. Johnny cakes, light pan-fried cakes of white corn grits, can be had with each entree. Mine were wonderful, so milky they seemed to be made with fresh silver queen corn. After all that corn I had to forgo the Indian pudding ($2.25), but it is a dessert everyone should try at least once.

Consider Dovecrest as a part of its environment. It doesn't go out of its way to be dirt-cheap, intimate, nostalgic. Most Native Americans, like most other Americans, have better things to worry about than the authenticity of their food and drink, but they still value their distinctive identity. Dovecrest provides a good hot meal and a glimpse of a very different part of the world. Next time you get hungry while driving down I-95 between here and points south and west, or after a day of hiking in the surrounding wilderness, stop in.

***Dovecrest Indian Restaurant, Summit Rd., Arcadia Village, Town of Exeter, R.I. Directions: I-95 exit 5A to RI 102. Right on RI 3, right on RI 165, left on Old Nooseneck Road (the road sign is gone but there's a sign marked "Dovecrest"). In Arcadia, turn right on Summit Rd.

SIDEBAR

If you find yourself on the aforementioned lonesome stretch of I-95, hungry but lacking the time, money, and cultural elasticity to go to Dovecrest, consider Gil's Galley, a counterpart of Providence's White Truck. Parked a hundred yards north of Exit 5-B, it bolsters the usual Rhode Island fast food menu with quahog chowder and clamcakes, which Gil modestly compared to "tennis balls." They were cheap, hot, clammy, doughy, and greasy, in just the right proportions. (Open daily 11-7)