On a bluff above the upper Eastern Shore’s Betterton Beach, smoke and tantalizing smells wafted from the chimney of the newly opened restaurant, Sassafras. Inside, I and four other diners were about to try our eighth dinner course, a highbrow-lowbrow affair entitled “Catfish & Caviar” on our menu cards. (It was one of twelve courses we would be served by the end of the evening).
We watched as Chef Paul Edward plated, for each of us, a large raviolo stuffed with a blend of Chesapeake Bay blue catfish and traditionally fermented Pennsylvania ricotta cheese, made with egg yolks from Edward’s own backyard chickens. Atop each raviolo he spooned caviar from Mississippi River hackleback sturgeon, billed as the last wild American caviar. Brown butter and lemon herbs completed the indulgent dish.
As Edward wowed us with one beautiful course after another, one of my fellow diners couldn’t help herself. “But this is Kent County!” she blurted out.
The diner, a Kent County resident who was curious to try the new restaurant in town, was clearly surprised to find such a high-end experience in the nearly forgotten town of Betterton. Her reaction is understandable: Sassafras is unlike anything Betterton’s 350 residents have seen before. Rural Kent County—Maryland’s smallest by population—is not exactly known for its twelve-course dinners.
That’s why the restaurant’s opening in April got my attention. The concept of an “Intimate Modern Chesapeake Dining Experience” in 12 courses is something I’d expect to find in a high-end eatery along the D.C. waterfront, or perhaps at a luxury inn in upscale Easton or St. Michaels.
Sassafras is more of a dining experience than a restaurant meal. The chef and his righthand man, Scott Kollig, serve a maximum of eight guests per night in an intimate, supper club-style affair. The courses are plated right in front of the diners, with Edward narrating the details of the ingredients and techniques used in the dish.
This experience is not found in D.C. or St. Michaels, however. It is at the tiptop of Maryland’s Eastern Shore in Betterton, where the nearest convenience store is two towns away. A quiet residential community that attracts empty nesters to its breezy bluffs and wide, sandy beach, Betterton is well off the beaten path. And it doesn’t exactly have a thriving restaurant scene. For the last six years, there was only one other restaurant option in town: a pizza place called Marzella’s By the Bay.
It hasn’t always been so quiet, though. During the Chesapeake Bay’s steamboat era, Betterton was a major resort town, boasting a dozen hotels. Visitors could depart Baltimore in the morning, steam directly across the Bay, and arrive at Tolchester and Betterton beaches before lunchtime. Beginning in the early 1900s, they strolled the Betterton boardwalk to take part in “Boating, Bathing, Bowling, Dancing!”, as the venue advertised. When vacationers wanted a break from the sun, a movie theater played “modern moving pictures”. The men could book fishing excursions to the Susquehanna Flats in Havre de Grace, dressed in jackets and boater hats as they traveled in skiffs.
Located at the confluence of five rivers on the upper Bay (the Sassafras, Bohemia, Elk, Susquehanna, and North East), Betterton Beach features mostly freshwater, keeping sea nettles away and making it an excellent swimming beach—both then and now.
Before my reservation at Sassafras, I stopped by the Betterton Heritage Museum to meet with former mayor Carolyn Sorge, who runs the museum and chairs the Betterton Community Development Corporation. Her vast historical knowledge, paired with the painstaking preservation work of Washington College students’ Digital Scholarship in Museum Partnerships (DSMP) project, paints a picture of a bygone vibrant vacation destination.
For mid-century Baltimore City dwellers suffering through hot, sticky summers without air conditioning, Betterton’s Bay breezes couldn’t be beat. By the 1950s, the Wilson Line’s Bay Belle steamboat sometimes carried 1,200 people across the Bay. In a 1958 advertisement displayed at the Heritage Museum, the Bay Belle‘s Tolchester and Betterton destinations were billed as “Vacationland”, promising bathing, amusement rides, and large, shaded picnic groves. Visitors could leave Broadway in Baltimore’s Fells Point at 9:45 a.m. and be home again by 7:20 p.m. In 1961, a round-trip ticket on the steamboat cost $3.
The Betterton waterfront was also a commerce hub, with a lumberyard, fishing trade, and a railway to carry Eastern Shore farmers’ prized peaches and tomatoes right to the steamboat, bound for western shore customers.
In a story that is familiar in many lost resort towns, the construction of the Bay Bridge changed everything. Sorge explained that after World War II, there were more cars and highways, allowing people to travel further and more quickly. “People started going to Ocean City, Maryland, and they forgot Betterton,” she told me as we toured the museum, a converted Catholic Church built during the town’s heyday.
The town’s decline happened quickly. Sorge recalled working at hotels in the 1960s to earn money for schoolbooks, but by the time her sister looked for a job in 1970 no hotels were hiring. Through the ’70s and ’80s, Betterton’s visitors dwindled and its waterfront attractions sat idle. Nearly all of the resort buildings and the boardwalk were ultimately torn down, making today’s beachfront almost unrecognizable from its steamboat days.
Still, the beach, panoramic Bay views, and scenic overlooks remain. When you drive into town and Still Pond Road becomes Main Street, the beach unfolds in front of you. It is now the 5.2-acre Betterton Beach Recreational Area, maintained by Kent County Parks and Rec. It may not have “modern moving pictures” or a dance hall, but it does have a volleyball court, fishing jetty, bathhouse, and boat ramp, along with a picnic pavilion built on a bluff above the beach. It also has peace and quiet. On the evening I visited, a man was flying a kite along the wide-open beach, a couple sat on a park bench in the shade, and a preschooler dug happily in the sand with his beach shovel.
Modern-day Betterton residents, about 60% of whom live there part-time, are drawn from places like southeast Pennsylvania. Upon visiting, they fall in love with the “non-commercial beach town”, explained Sorge. “They are astounded to find that kids can ride their bikes all over town. It’s still safe and walkable,” she said.
So how did this non-commercial beach town with only one place to eat become the home of a prix-fixe, fine-dining restaurant? Chef Edward moved from ventures in Baltimore (like the popular Bluebird Cocktail Room) and Frederick County, Maryland, to make a fresh start on the Eastern Shore. He lives with his wife, Caroline Benkert, and their two preschool-aged daughters, in Worton, a small community down the road from Betterton. At their small homestead, the family raises chickens and grows as much fresh produce as they can.
The Sassafras restaurant space had sat vacant for six years, since its last occupant, the casual hangout Barbara’s on the Bay, closed for good. Edward knew the spot; he brought his kids to play at Betterton Beach frequently. Benkert nudged her husband to take the opportunity for a new restaurant project.
The vision for Sassafras came from Edward’s desire to “tell the story of Kent County” and the greater Chesapeake region. He does so through the many local ingredients used in his dishes, and with the restaurant space itself. Edward bought the building, which had been home to numerous restaurants over the years, and overhauled the interior. “He did a beautiful job on the building,” Sorge remarked. “He really put sweat equity into it. I applaud him for taking that risk.”
At Sassafras, you don’t just stroll into the restaurant. The wood doors, beautifully carved with images of tall ships, bear a sign instructing guests to ring the bell. Inside, there is no clattering of dishes or servers bustling from table to table. There is just one chef’s counter, situated where a bar would be, awaiting that evening’s handful of diners.
On the night I visited, there were just five of us. The lighting was cozy, and so was the wood-fired oven. The decor felt vaguely antique and comforting, much of the furniture and dishes being sourced from the famed Dixon’s Auction at Crumpton. My dinner courses were served on floral china or in cut-glass bowls, with weighty carved knives for the meat.
Behind the counter, Chef Edward tended the massive wood-fired oven and plated each course himself, bringing each impeccably sourced local ingredient to the counter from the back kitchen. The menu card merely hinted at the twelve courses, with coy names like “Raw”, “Bones”, “Ocean”, and “Invasive”. As he revealed each course, he explained the thought that went into each ingredient, no matter how small. “We have 12 courses and I’m gonna talk about every single one!” Edward declared.
We started off with a “Grains” course that was the farthest thing from a plain bread basket. Edward served sourdough focaccia bread (Pennsylvania organic sunflower oil and hard red wheat from the Susquehanna rivershed, plus an herb blend from a Baltimore County farm). There was cornbread (pictured above, in the lower left corner) made from Charles County organic corn and buttermilk from a Caroline County creamery. The attention to detail continued right down to the Cape Henlopen sea salt garnishing the top of the honey butter (with honey from an award-winning Frederick producer).
Kollig served the wine, cocktail, or mocktail pairings, each one thoughtfully chosen and accompanied by a story about its characteristics and source. (Diners can add their choice of full, partial, or nonalcoholic pairings to their meal.) A pedigreed restauranter himself, Kollig gave the entire experience a high-end touch.
Each dinner course was a nod to a different aspect of the Bay’s bounty, from land to sea. We tasted Bay rockfish, Virginia clams, a chicken bone broth made with bluefish and scallops, softshell crab, Eastern Bay oysters, and Maryland lobster from the Baltimore canyon offshore, along with local cheeses and famed Virginia peanuts. While the food was exquisite, I pointed out that none of it seemed too edgy or impractical. “This is not an urban restaurant,” Edward agreed. “If you want edgy, you can go to D.C. We’re not trying to do things that push people out of their element… Fermentation and aging things, are not new [concepts]. Most of the things we’re doing, you could do 100 years ago.”
One dinner guest, an enthusiastic foodie named Drew who has a waterfront weekend home in Chestertown, likened the dining experience to the three-Michelin-star restaurant the Inn at Little Washington. “I think all the ingredients are here to make this a destination,” he told me.
Sassafras manages to be both high-end and approachable, with Edward and Kollig setting a mood that is both welcoming and utterly impressive. When Edward introduced the “Invasive” course, a Chesapeake Bay snakehead marinated in fermented saltwater and served with hollandaise, he realized partway through plating the dish that he’d forgotten to add the crabmeat garnish. Kollig quipped, “You know we’re luxury when we forget to add the crab!”
The memorable meal was topped off with an unexpected dessert: a slice of “vinegar pie” made with house-fermented lemon verbena Kombucha, Pennsylvania maple syrup, and Kent County’s own Lockbriar Farm strawberries.
The one-of-a-kind experience Edward creates at Sassafras comes from his firm belief in the concept, and his uncompromising commitment to keep things small and personal. “If we fill eight seats, that’s enough. I’ve owned restaurants for a long time, but this one’s for me,” he said.
Some diners might balk at the price, set at $158 plus tax and service charge, but the price point is what makes it possible for him to source each ingredient from small farms and providers: “To nickel and dime, I’d have to work with companies I don’t want to work with,” he said.
Don’t expect Edward to scale back the nearly three-hour dining experience, either. When a diner asked if he’d consider offering a six-course version for more casual diners, he said simply, “We can’t tell the story of the Eastern Shore in less than 12 courses.”
Will Sassafras thrive in quiet Betterton, bringing culinary tourists to stay and discover the rest of this special beach town? So far, so good. Edward has already been filling his chef’s table seats with guests from D.C. and Baltimore. Down the road, he’s considering opening the dining room to a maximum of 20 diners.
Reservations are available at restaurantsassafras.com and there are still a few seats at the counter left in June. There are several AirBNBs for rent in Betterton and nearby towns, for those inspired to stay for a beach weekend. You may not arrive by steamboat, but you can still find your very own “Vacationland.”
