Northshore Magazine (Digital) January/February 2024

With a new year on the horizon, I am hopeful that 2024 will be a little kinder than 2023. I had a great loss this past year when my sister Patty succumbed to a very rare cancer. With losing Patty, I realize I need to be a bit kinder to myself. Get more rest, go for walks, and share my thoughts and feelings when the grief becomes too much to bear. The greatest lesson of all is that health is everything. We all need to take better care of ourselves when life becomes stressful. I won the wellness lottery this issue as I got to write about 5-star spas in Boston and beyond. Visiting the Mandarin Oriental, Encore Boston Harbor, and The Four Seasons One Dalton spas was healing, therapeutic, and…

JARED CHARNEY Jared Charney is a portrait/photojournalist working with local and national publications exploring the lives of people in New England. Jared can also be spotted playing tennis, sipping coffee at the many independent coffee shops on the North Shore, and trying to keep up with his teeangers, wife, and very small dog named Lulu. More of his work can be viewed at jaredcharney.com GLENN SCOTT Glenn Scott has been creating images at his GSP studio in Beverly’s downtown Arts District for more than 25 years. His favorite projects feature simple subjects complemented by inventive surroundings. See Glenn’s portfolio at glennscottphotography.com DANIELE SIMONELLI Daniele Simonelli is a freelance Illustrator based in the eternal City of Rome, from where he has fought against the use of clipart for ten years (and counting) and has created work…

Consider carefully the components on any restaurant dish, and you might notice far more than initially meets the eye—in terms of technique, plating, and care. Certainly, that is the case with the Coffee & Cacao-Crusted Venison Loin at Brown Square Bistro in Ipswich. The farm-raised venison is tender and flavorful, standing on the plate in thick slices, held in place with a woodfire-roasted chestnut purée. But, honestly, that is just the beginning of this earthy dish. For between the slices of venison stands a rectangle of sweet potato pavé. Look closely: Each piece is composed of impossibly thin slices pressed together. To create this side requires a lot of patience. The sweet potato is sliced and layered into a baking pan, each tier brushed with brown butter, then the whole thing…

Salem’s historical background and year-round fondness for skeletons, spirits, and haunts offer up a freebie concept for any brewery mulling over the town as a possible location: Lean into the spookiness when designing the space and developing a tap list. Lafayette Street’s Couch Dog Brewing, which opened doors last June, pays tribute to The Witch City’s character with Portergeist, one of two dark beers on the menu. But the brewery actually draws more personality from the Korean-American heritage of one of its cofounders. Adam Shoemaker and his partner, Alli, got their start home brewing, as many brewery owners do, experimenting with flavors and ingredients uncommon in modern craft beer, but staples in Korean kitchens. “I think it’s a lot like cooking in some ways,” Shoemaker says about their approach to brewing.…

On a recent and chilly afternoon, I stopped in at the newly opened DeVille Cafe & Market in Beverly, a sweeping, curated space that was, until just a few months ago, home to Frank McClelland’s critically acclaimed restaurant FRANK. I had come on a mission: to sample hot chocolate (other items, like Fly by Jing’s chili sauces, which have a cult following online, caught my eye, as did a refrigerator case full of artisan products: Red Jacket Orchards juices; cheeses from Cypress Grove, in California; Maestri slow-cured charcuterie). DeVille’s culinary curation is headed by Annika Firestone—her cookbooks were on display as I browsed—a chef known for her work at the Tatte Bakeries across Boston. At the counter, I ordered a hot chocolate (and a prosciutto and mozzarella sandwich on a croissant, for…

Beverly is known for its beaching and boating, but this seaside town offers lots of winter fun, too. For instance, most North Shore locals know that Beverly’s 16-acre Lynch Park is the city’s “crown jewel,” thanks to its lovely rose garden, two beautiful beaches, performance venue, ice cream stand, and splash pad that attract visitors from across the region all spring, summer, and fall. But what you might not know is that Lynch Park has an awesome wintertime secret. “Lynch Park has the best sledding hill around,” says Bruce Doig, parks, recreation, and community services director for the city of Beverly. In fact, there’s such a great sledding hill for kids (and adults) that the city doesn’t plow the back one-third of the Lynch Park parking lot to accommodate the sledding area. Even better?…