I was off last week on PTO, and headed to Chincoteague Island, Virginia, with my wife, stepdaughters, and another family of four (a family we know, just in case you were concerned), renting a house there near the tiny “downtown.” The hurricane kept us away from the beach most of the week, but I was impressed by the life on the island, including the sheer number of food options with almost no chains of any sort.
The best food we ate on the island came from Pico Taqueria, which is a take-out stand like the majority of food spots on the island. I tried the fried fish taco, the seared shrimp taco, and the roasted cauliflower taco, the last of which had the most flavor, with a briny pico de gallo with capers, garlicky mayo, and fried shallots. The rice and beans, which contained bacon, were well-seasoned and properly cooked, although I didn’t get any bacon flavor from it.
Our one meal out at a restaurant was at The Pearl, a seafood-focused restaurant on the Assateague Channel, so you get a view of the national park while you eat. The seafood was good to very good, although I was disappointed that the crab cakes didn’t contain any lump crab meat, so they had a higher ratio of breading to crab than they should have given where the restaurant is. The best item we got was the raw Chincoteague oysters, which are salty and briny enough to eat without the included cocktail sauce or anything more than a bit of lemon juice. Don’t bother getting a mixed drink, though.
Cosa Pizza is a wood-fired pizza truck that promises “a modern twist on … the original Neapolitan thin crust.” I liked their pizza quite a bit but it’s well-removed from Neapolitan, as their dough isn’t that airy and they must cook at a lower temperature, getting a lot of browning around the outer crust without the charred spots that are characteristic of Neapolitan.
Island Creamery has a couple of locations on the Delmarva peninsula, one of which is in Salisbury, Maryland, about 10-12 minutes from the Shorebirds’ ballpark. They make their own ice cream and the flavors are strong – I’ve had the Java Jolt, dark coffee ice cream with brownie chunks and chocolate-covered espresso beans, and Marsh Mud, very dark chocolate ice cream. I’d go there over the BYOC (Build Your Own Cookie) stand, where you pick one of seven cookie flavors, then get it served warm with a scoop of Hersheys ice cream and a topping for a little under $8.
I only had coffee out once, at Amarin, a café and bakery right on Maddox just over the bridge from the mainland. They roast their own coffee at a roastery you’ll probably pass driving towards Chincoteague, but everything is medium-dark or darker, which just isn’t my preference. If you’re more into Starbucks-style coffee drinks, it’s a great option – and there’s no chain coffee on the island, other than McDonald’s if you want to count that – but I like lighter roasts.
Church Street Produce is a small produce stand with baked goods, including homemade pies for (I think) $23 for a full-sized one and $8 for a mini pie. We cooked a good bit while in the rental house, and I picked up a few vegetables here – the selection is small but extremely high-quality.
In non-food activities, Old Neptune’s Bookshop is a cute and very well-curated used bookstore, where just about everything is $9 and up but most books are in excellent shape. It’s in part of a house, which is true of a lot of shops and cafes on the island, right on Maddox, not far from Amarin. There’s no parking here but for now there’s an unoccupied food lot across the street where you can park. I bought four books there and could easily have bought three times that.
The main beach is on Assateague Island, in the national park, although there was no swimming permitted in the ocean while we were there because of strong rip currents that were exacerbated by Hurricane Erin. We did get to swim in Tom’s Cove, which you can access from the same parking lot that serves the main beach, where we could walk most of the way out and only be waist-deep. It’s a smaller beach, but it was way better for the kids. You’ll need a park pass to access any of this, along with the walk to the lighthouse, the drivable wildlife loop, and the various hiking and bike trails.
We don’t usually go to the same place twice, but if circumstances brought me back to Chincoteague, I wouldn’t mind. Nothing was more than 15 minutes from the house; most of the food options were less than 7 minutes away. If we were bike people, we probably could have ditched the car for everything but the trip to the beach. I would take this over the Outer Banks, based on our trip there last year, since this was half the distance from our house and the fact that there was so much less driving involved once we got there.