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Worcester Kicks Off 2018 With Seven New Restaurants

An artist rendition of the AC Hotel at City Square in downtown Worcester, MA.

Worcester’s food scene continued to grow in 2017 with the addition of a dozen new restaurants including the Railer’s Tavern and Kummerspeck, and Central Massachusetts doesn’t show signs of slowing down. As Worcester continues to expand its commercial spaces, grow by population and its demand to satisfy the needs of every foodie in the city, it solidifies itself as the culinary capital of New England. In 2018, Worcester has already revealed seven new restaurants and Mass Foodies has already seen some incredible plans for more. But, for now, here are some places that you should prepare your appetites for.

Maddi’s Cookery and TapHouse:

Opening in April of 2018, Maddi’s Cookery and TapHouse will add to the Canal District fever as a “truly neighborhood pub” according to the owner, Chef Adam Hicks. Maddi’s will serve a range of pub-style dishes, including salads, sandwiches, hamburgers and fish and chips. With an affordable wine list and a craft beer selection, Maddi’s may be the new “after-work hang out” this Spring.

110 Grill

If Worcester’s food scene lacks anything, it is a restaurant with an allergy sensitive menu but that will change with the addition of 110 Grill – attached to the new AC Marriott – this March. With featured appetizers, salads, sandwiches, hamburgers, entrees, and desserts, 110 Grill will bring a regular dining menu and an accompanying gluten-free menu to downtown Worcester. Creating five seating areas: a dining room, a lounge, a U-shaped bar, a private dining room for up to 50 guests, and an outdoor patio with couches and a fire pit, the restaurant will cover over 6,000 square feet of downtown space.

Protein House

Nurturing and supporting a healthy lifestyle, Protein House will offer a fast-casual environment with superior, healthy foods including protein pancakes, breakfast sandwiches, lean bowls, high protein burgers, PH wraps and acai bowls alongside cold press juices, protein shakes and wellness shots.  Opening at City Square, Protein House will cater to fitness and wellness foodies of Worcester with a diverse menu including a gluten-free option.

New England Craft Restaurant Concepts

New England Craft Restaurant Concepts is “a lively restaurant group inspired by innovative craft food and by extraordinary experience.” 2017 was just the beginning of the New England Craft Restaurant Concepts in Worcester with the addition of Brew on the Grid and Techni Mediterranean Grill in downtown. In 2018, they plan to expand their Worcester collection with four new places: STIX Noodle Bar – 72 Franklin Street – will serve up classic and creative ramen bowls in a contemporary space with hand-made curry and teppanyaki dishes; Revolution Pie + Pint – 50 Franklin Street – will cook up pizzas in an 850 degree oven in under two minutes and offer a large selection of entrees, sandwiches, salads and sharable apps; Craft Table and Bar – 50 Franklin Street – will feature craft beer, wines and innovative dishes with dishes including lamb lollipops and spice-crusted rib eye; Brew Beer Garden – 64 and 66 Franklin Street – will be the city’s new outdoor space to splurge on craft beers, homemade sausages, and “Wicked” pretzels.

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Worcester’s Abe Froman: Make Your Own Wurst Joke

Sausages from Kummerspeck on Water Street in Worcester, MA

Sausage is the king of meats.  While any grill-jockey can fry a steak, it takes a salumist to make sausage.  This is not just the act of cooking, but actually physically making sausage; assembling the delicate dance of fat and flavor.  From the familiar to the foreign, literally, every country on earth produces a form of sausage.  Sausage is a way to preserve, a way to extend limited resources, and a way to work with what you’ve got.  You’ve got blood, make blood sausage.  You got face-meat?  Make face-meat sausage.

Kummerspeck on Water Street in Worcester, MA
Kummerspeck on Water Street in Worcester, MA

Massachusetts, oddly enough, has a fairly impressive sausage presence.  The true awe-inspiring Blue Seal Kielbasa is made in Chicopee, the plucky Kayem hot dog is made in Chelsea, and the indomitable Karl’s Sausage Kitchen in Peabody.  And Worcester itself has a rich and colorful history of sausage making in its own right.  This history of Polish and Italian sausage makers is one of the reasons why Matt Mahoney and Rachel Coit chose to open the new Water Street restaurant Kummerspeck in Worcester.

Aside from being a bang-up restaurant, these kids are running one of the best butcher shops in the city, which is appropriate as they’re in the old Tom’s Deli storefront.  They’re making their own sausage, curing their own bacon, making their own charcuterie, selling duck fat and house-made head-cheese.  I sat down with Matt Mahoney, the Sausage King of Worcester – an Abe Froman level tribute of Ferris Bueller notoriety. We talked sausage and tried some of the best house-made meats in the city.

Kummerspeck on Water Street in Worcester, MA
Kummerspeck on Water Street in Worcester, MA

“The sausage world is huge,” said Mahoney.  “It’s every country, most every culture is sticking meat in tubes.  You can sausage anything: lamb, pork, veal, beef, chicken, and even fish.”

Essentially the theory of sausage is all the bits that were too small to serve, too small to cook, too valuable to throw out, are combined and packaged.  It’s ground up, mixed with spices and stuffed into “casing.”  Yes, that almost always means intestine.  “Delicious, delicious intestine,” said Mahoney.  “It’s a neutral thing, it’s your blank slate.  Your paint is filling and how you preserve it.”

“The filling is the moneymaker.  That’s where you’re putting in flavor, that’s the recipe,” said Mahoney.  “I tend to use an existing recipe and try to dial it into my taste.”  The filling is the difference between a hot dog and a chorizo, between a bratwurst and a baloney. “It used to be the offal, the organ meat, and bits of meat.  It all gets chopped and ground into sausage filling.  Today there’s not much organ meat or cartilage being sold out there.”

Matt produces a plate with four different sausages from the kitchen: a chorizo, a hot Italian, a smoked kielbasa, and a bratwurst.  Three are fresh sausage, the fourth, the kielbasa, is smoked.  Some sausage is preserved, like our kielbasa.  The rest are fresh and need to be refrigerated.

Sausage is preserved in many ways.  Smoked, cured, or drying.  “Essentially water equals life,” said Mahoney.  “So whatever you’re doing, smoking or whatever, you’re essentially trying to pull water out of the sausage.  But you need that fat in there to keep it moist when cooking.”

At the butcher's table in Kummerspeck on Water Street in Worcester, MAMatt and I talked as we worked our way through each of the sausages in front of us.  It was all familiar, but better.  The kielbasa, the hot Italian, and the bratwurst, but you know… the best kielbasa you’ve ever had.  We discussed the amount of fennel in the hot Italian, how the smoking process is necessary for kielbasa to get a good snap from the skin, and the bratwurst was a traditional recipe veal and pork mix and very dense.  The star of the show was undoubtedly the chorizo.  A Cuban style chorizo, it was a fresh sausage and loaded with spice and cilantro.  Matt got a hang-dog look on his face and admitted, “Yeah…that’s an Erin Hockey original.”

Erin Hockey.  Lady Butcher?  Meat Queen?  Sausage Maven?  How do you describe this woman?  In short, when you visit she’ll be the woman behind the butcher block wielding a mallet and a cleaver…and possibly a pig head.  “I can make sausage and parallel park,” she said.  And in my sausage-induced daze, I’m pretty sure I hugged her.  It was very emotional.  The sausages were that good.

It was scrap meat, organ meat, things that would otherwise have been wasted.  It is the most basic expression of necessity, of doing what cooks have done for thousands of years, of simply working with what they had to make something delicious out of bits of meats and entrails that might otherwise go uneaten or discarded.  And though it has refined itself since its humble origins, now is the time to revisit the much maligned and overlooked sausage.  From Coney Island to the sausage-dancing man on the side of Golemo’s on Millbury Street, Worcester is a sausage city and the lowly sausage deserves your attention.  Yes, the sausage world is huge and sometimes intimidating but with this team, you’re in good hands.