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Our Best of the Beach Eats - Delaware beaches

Summertime means beach time.

If you are headed to the beach soon here are some of our favorite beach eats in the Delaware Beach area:

Arena's Cafe - Rehoboth Beach (plus other locations)

Arenas Cafe is more than your ordinary cafe. It's the ideal breakfast, lunch, and dinner paradise for individuals and families.

We always have to eat here at least one time while we are at the beach. The tasty food, the fun decorations, and the consistency of the restaurant makes it truly a fantastic place!

Below are some photos of a Sunday breakfast where they offer an all-you-can eat option complete with omelet station or order from the regular breakfast menu. Lunch and dinner are just as good. 

Mickey's Crab House - Bethany Beach

In our opinion an awesome crab house. They also offer other foods (seafood, fried chicken etc.) if you don't want crabs. The restaurant doesn't have a website but here's the address: Jefferson Bridge Rd & Rte 1, Bethany Beach, DE 19930 and phone # (302) 539-5384

For more information click here to read our Mickey's Crab House blog post. 

 The Bake Shoppe - Rehoboth Beach 

We've been to some amazing bake shops in New York & New Jersey and this ranks up there with the best of them.   A huge variety of pastries, cookies, tarts, cakes, pies, donuts, croissants, egg sandwiches and so much more. 

Summer House - Rehoboth Beach

This is another of our "must" go spots at the beach.  We always make sure we visit Summer House when we are at the beach. 

With its sports bar theme complete with several large screen televisions, it feels homey and has a great diverse menu.  Our favorites are ribs and fried calamari. 

Fried calamari -
 one of the best we've tasted. 

 Summer House has fantastic BBQ ribs that are served with shoe string french fries. They are actually so good we try to go on BBQ Rib night when they are all-you-can-eat.

Salad with cranberries, nuts and sweet dressing

 They also have sandwiches, salads (our mom goes crazy for the Summer House salad), steaks, seafood, pasta, hamburgers.....and some cool root beer.

Fins Fish House and Raw Bar - Rehoboth Beach 

This place is pretty famous at the beach. They are known to have the best seafood in Rehoboth. We can say we agree.  We've eaten both lunch and dinner here. 

The lunch menu has a ton of seafood sandwich options....

Fish tacos

Thomas and his grandpa

Swordfish sandwich

Salmon burger

Dinner has more options....

Fish and chips

House salad with cranberries and almonds

Grilled scallops salad with goat cheese, nuts and arugala (our mom loved this!)

Crab cakes 

Swordfish with their famous mac and cheese

Baked flounder stuffed with crab meat with mac & cheese - our  Grandpa LOVED it)

Leave room for desserts. You don't want to miss trying one of their many cakes. 

You can't leave the beach without having ice cream.  Our favorite is Kilwin's Ice Cream, Fudge and Chocolate  because the ice cream is delicious and there is so much more to choose from including fudge and chocolates.

  

HoCo Rising blog fundraiser for the homeless

Usually this blog is about eating food.  Well, this post today will focus on people who don’t always have enough food - the homeless. 

Late Wednesday night, we learned about the HoCo Rising blog’s fundraising effort to raise $2,500 to help house four Howard County homeless men.  

The subject of homelessness was fresh on our minds since we just returned from a vacation to California where we saw so many homeless people.  They were old, young, tired, some with pets, some without shoes – being poor didn’t discriminate.  And the one thing they all had in common was being hungry. 

We went to bed thinking of how we could help.  

On Thursday morning we read that HoCo Rising fundraiser had met its goal of raising $2,500.  That means that four homeless men will no longer be living on the streets or in the woods. Even though they met their goal, HoCo Rising said he would still accept donations because there are so many more homeless people to help.

We devised a plan. Bake cookies. Sell them at a cookie and water bottle stand.  Our parents agreed to match whatever amount we raised. 

First we called the Giant in Dorsey Search to ask if we could sell our cookies in front of the store. The manager was very nice but said only organizations were allowed to sell things. But he said if we wrote him a letter, he would try to get us a gift card so we could buy our cookie ingredients.  We plan to  write the letter and donate the gift card to the homeless.

Then we called the Miller Branch Library and spoke to the manger, Susan Stonesifer. She said yes! 

Thursday night, we used our chore money to buy the ingredients and water bottles at Giant, baked 4 dozen chocolate chip cookies and made our signs and banner. 

This morning, we set up our cookie/water stand outside the Miller Branch Library main entrance at 10:00 am when it opened. 

In the three hours we were there, we met the nicest and most generous people. One man dropped a $20 bill into our donation container. We saw neighbors and classmates who contributed like the Baker, Sanidas, Jolles, Demme and Parekh families, Charles’s former basketball coach Mr. Conca, Thomas’s teacher Mrs. Pierantozzi. Plus our Grandma stopped by to donate. And tons of really nice people who we never met before. 

Lots of people asked what we were doing.  So, we told them we were helping a fundraiser started by HoCo Rising blog. We had copies of the HoCo Rising blog post about this fundraiser to hand out.  Some already knew about the fundraiser while others were glad to find out about it.  

In the end, we raised $97. We added $3 more dollars to make it $100.  In total, we donated $200 ($100 from the cookie stand and $100 matching contribution from our parents) to support HoCo Rising’s fundraiser. 

We hope this post will show others how easy it is to raise money for people in need.  Everyone should be able to have food and shelter.  

Thanks HoCo Rising for starting this fundraiser.  You are doing great work. We’d be happy to participate in it again.

If you would like to donate to the fundraiser click here. 

FIG restaurant - Santa Monica,California

The Fig restaurant motto is "ingredients first." Located in the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica, the bistro certainly lives up to its motto. Since our hotel package came with breakfast, we ate their every morning. 

Fig restaurant head chef Ray Garcia coming back from the Santa Monica Farmer's Market with food for that day's menu. 

According to their website, their "menu is built around what is grown in season" which they buy from local farmers. We know this is true because we ran into Fig's head chef Ray Garcia at the Santa Monica Farmer's Market. Ray is one cool chef who was very eager to tell us about his restaurant.

Over the course of several days, we tried a few breakfast entrées (see below). It was cool that Fig made some of it's own products such as butter and syrup.

Scrambled eggs (the best we've ever tasted!), sausage, herbed potatoes and roasted tomato 

Fig makes some of it very own maple syrup and butter.

We loved these potatoes so much we asked the waiter how they were made He said they were baked with fresh oregano and garlic, and the onions are sautéed.

Toasted bread came served wrapped in a napkin. 

Lemon ricotta pancakes with blueberry, almond butter, and syrup. My mom said it was the best pancake she had ever eaten.

Fig's homemade granola with fresh yogurt and strawberries.  

                                                                  

                                                         Charles eating the American Breakfest.

Fresh squeezed orange, grapefruit and cranberry juices served in these cool bottles. 

Grilled asparagus as a side dish

There was nothing we ate that didn't have the most fresh and pure taste.  Also, it was presented in fun and simple ways like the toasted bread served in a napkin.

We also ate dinner at Fig once during their “Fig at Five” special where everything on the menu including drinks is half priced if you order it before 6 o’clock. We don’t have dinner pictures to show you because we ate with friends and just enjoyed our meals.  But we can say that the food was just as good at dinner....and our parents loved the half priced value.

The restaurant got it's name from the historic fig tree that stands at the entrance to the hotel. Can you see how big the tree is compared to us standing at the tree base?

Overall, FIG restaurant was an adventure in itself. The restaurant space was very open, airy and comfortable especially the seating area overlooking the pool with ceiling to floor windows. And the food....was absolutely fantastic!!!!!!  We looked forward to getting up and going to the restaurant every morning.