Restaurants in Newington

When The Saybrook Fish House Restaurant first opened in 1978, its chefs would scrawl their menu on brown paper bags each day, constantly updating dishes according to the freshest catch available. Today the menu is printed, but the chefs continue to follow in their predecessors' footsteps by serving only freshly caught seafood from New England waters.

Amid the wooden panels and hanging lanterns of the restaurant’s four cozy dining rooms, baskets of fried seafood meet with iced clams and oysters from the raw bar. The staff provides full meals complete with warm bread, salad, and fresh fruit, along with a hot towel and an original poem written by the busboy.

CW's American menu—which features locally sourced seafood and thick-cut steaks—combines the comforting nostalgia of classic Americana with contemporary cooking techniques. Their modern methods include rubbing each cut of meat with a proprietary blend of spices before broiling them at 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit to seal in juices. When possible, the chefs source their seasonally changing ingredients from local businesses to encourage the local economy and give their wheelbarrow driver a break. In addition to the contemporary fare, Friday and Saturday evenings bring merriment and dancing as the restaurant showcases live jazz and prerecorded FDR fireside chats.

India Kitchen—deemed Hartford County's Best Indian Restaurant in 2011 by readers of Connecticut Magazine—piles family-style offerings from North and South India onto its menu, concocting entrees with imported ingredients and an authentic tandoor oven. Patrons can play games of solitaire with 11 types of traditional breads, such as the raisin- and nut-filled khandari kulcha ($3.95). Jumbo shrimp slip into robes of lemon juice, yogurt, and spices before sizzling in the clay oven, only to emerge as tandoori shrimp ($15.95) or, in rare cases, a single giant shrimp with crime-fighting ambitions and mastery over fire. The chicken chutney wala surrounds poultry morsels with tangy pools of curried mango and mint sauce ($12.95), whereas cashew-and-almond sauce varnishes vegetable-and-cheese dumplings in the vegetarian malai kofta ($11.95).

Featuring a catering menu for larger groups, India Kitchen's chefs portion out party-sized servings from a limited menu that includes naan ($32+) and vegetable biryani ($40+). For heartier mealtimes, they also simmer orders of lamb or fish curry ($90) that can either feed 30–40 people or one insatiable garbage disposal.

Owner Randy Price curates a creative menu of New Haven–style "apizza" in more than 30 styles. His team crafts fresh dough daily using unbleached flour, creates sauce from handpicked Italian and Chilean tomatoes, and sprinkles pies with cheese from home-schooled cows. The famous Challenger—a 22-inch pizza stuffed with a mélange of vegetables and meats that weigh in at nearly 10 pounds—presents the hungriest visitors with a challenge to conquer the hot wheel in an hour or less, a feat that has earned a place on the Travel Channel's Man Vs. Food roster of surmounted food battles.

The audience goes wild for Chef Jesus "Suso" Seoane as he deftly dances the handle of a sharp butcher knife between his fingers. As if drawn by magnet, the blade finds a large red pepper and flays it down the center in one fluid stroke. When Jesus isn't flaunting his knife skills on the Telemundo cooking show Cocinando con Suso, he's hard at work perfecting an authentic menu of Spanish and Latin-American dishes at his restaurant, Suso Latino Basket.

The word suso sprawls across his eatery's wall, a painted chef's hat jauntily hanging off the o. Just past the marble-tiled bar, tables populate with steaming specialties such as puerto rican pork pernil, peruvian sautéed pastas, cuban sandwiches, and spanish paella, which overflows with more seafood than Poseidon's bank vault.

Chez Ben Diner serves everything you’d expect from a classic American diner—three-egg omelets, triple-decker club sandwiches, and burgers—with an unexpected twist: a selection of authentic French-Canadian dishes. Founded by Benoit and Solange Quirion, the restaurant recently passed to Windsor natives Joel and Anne Quirion who continue the family tradition of friendly service, all-day breakfast, and uniquely Canadian dishes, such as poutine, a combination of fries, cheese curds, and brown gravy. The emphasis on traditional Canadian eats hasn’t gone unnoticed: the breakfast poutine earned a mention in Serious Eats, and Roadfood.com calls the cretons—a cold pork spread that can be served on toast or used as stucco on a gingerbread house—“addictive.”