Edible Afield: New Haven — A Visit to The Enchanting Elm City
/By Thomas Martin, Edible DC
Courtyard of Branford College at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut.
Just a few hours north of Washington by train, the city of New Haven offers visitors exciting attractions (ranging from art museums to world-class libraries to a planetarium) as well as a dynamic and diverse restaurant scene. As a Yale senior, I’ve spent the last four years exploring and falling in love with New Haven and all this city, my home-away-from-home, holds.
There’s no shortage of places to stay in New Haven. Popular downtown hotels include the swanky Omni New Haven and the New Haven Hotel. If you’re looking for a quieter part of town to spend a night or two, The Study at Yale is ideal. Its rooms are spacious and comfortable, and it’s located in the artsy nexus surrounding the Yale School of Art.
The Study at Yale offers luxurious accommodations and a lobby that may as well be an actual library or private study.
Steps away from your hotel, there is sure to be a stellar place to grab a cup of coffee and a pastry. Swing through the line at Atticus Bookstore Café on Chapel Street and snag an almond croissant (my favorite), or brave the wait for a table and try the Smoked Salmon Tartine on house-made sourdough bread. Jojo’s Coffee & Tea, right next door to The Study, offers excellent green tea lattes, assorted quiches, and more than a dozen bubble tea flavors. Visit Claire’s Corner Copia (est. 1975), just across the street from Yale’s Old Campus, for a wide variety of vegetarian and vegan dishes and desserts—the Lithuanian Coffee Cake is legendary. Other popular cafés in the area are Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea (right next to the Yale School of Architecture), Book Trader Café (java and used books abound) and Koffee?, a quirky den north of campus with live performances and after-dark wine service.
Sterling Memorial Library, Yale’s main library, houses more than 2.5 million volumes.
There’s plenty for visitors to do on-campus at Yale. Our two flagship art museums, the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art, are free and open to the public six days a week. If you’re more of a bookworm than an art enthusiast, head over to Sterling Memorial Library, the center of Yale’s library system, housing 2.5 million books. A short walk north from Sterling is the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, which houses Yale’s rarest and most fragile texts. Visitors can view exhibitions currently on display as well as some key materials (a Gutenberg Bible and a copy of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America, for instance); if you register with the university beforehand, you can even request materials to be pulled from the stacks and view them up close in the Beinecke’s downstairs reading room. And for science lovers, the Peabody Museum of Natural History and the Leitner Family Observatory and Planetarium are certain to delight.
The “KFC” (Korean Fried Chicken) steamed bao buns at Mecha Noodle Bar.
All the sightseeing is sure to stir up an appetite. Luckily, New Haven is a fantastic city for foodies. There are some local classics that everyone should try (like Louis’ Lunch, which claims to have invented the hamburger, and the two icons of New Haven-style pizza, Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana and Sally’s Apizza) but there’s far more to New Haven’s restaurant scene than burgers and pizza. Harvest Wine Bar & Restaurant dishes up farm-to-fork American fare in stylish surroundings. Lalibela Ethiopian Restaurant on Temple Street is the perfect place to go with friends; order several meat and vegetable entrees and pass around the injera so everyone can taste all the options.
The white clam pizza at Frank Pepe’s is one of the institution’s most beloved pies.
If al fresco dining is your style, check out Kasbah Garden Café; enjoy their selection of Morrocan tagines and couscous dinners in their lush outdoor seating area, perfect for when the weather finally warms up. Mecha Noodle Bar is a lively yet cozy place to grab ramen, pho, dumplings, and steamed bao buns. For dessert, stop by Arethusa Farm Dairy or Milkcraft for ice cream, or venture out to Libby’s Italian Pastry Shop in Wooster Square, the Italian section of the city, and stock up on house-made butter cookies, macarons, and biscotti. If you’re short on luggage space, no problem—Libby’s ships right to your door.
A two-scoop waffle cone from Arethusa Farm Dairy—one scoop of strawberry, one scoop of cranberry almond.
Nightlife in New Haven is always buzzing. Barracuda has some of the best happy hour food and drink specials around (try the Yucca Frita, seriously), and BAR is a great no-frills place for music and dancing. For a more chill evening of wine, cocktails, and good eats, Barcelona Wine Bar and Elm City Social are perfect. More of a pub person? Rudy’s Bar & Grill has been serving the city for more than eighty years—and their Belgian fries are to die for.
Before skipping town, be sure to head to Campus Customs or the Yale Bookstore and grab some Bulldog merch. The next time you come back to New Haven, you’ll fit right in!
Thomas Martin is a digital associate at Edible DC and a former summer intern. A senior and English major at Yale University, Thomas hails from southern Maryland and was last year was awarded a Yale CIPE Summer Journalism Fellowship at
INDY Week. He is a staff writer for Yale's The Politic and writes about food, politics, and culture.
