Massachusetts may still be wondering why it gets no love from Buc-ee’s, but the state already has restaurants considerably stranger than a beaver-themed travel center.
Customers can eat inside a giant takeout box, drink cocktails in a historic mansion and attend a colonial feast cooked over an open hearth.
Kowloon Restaurant in Saugus
Kowloon is an enormous Polynesian fantasy palace sitting beside Route 1.
The family-owned restaurant contains multiple themed dining rooms, tiki statues, fountains, tropical decorations and enough neon to make the building impossible to miss at night. The sprawling complex has historically accommodated approximately 1,200 guests.
Its menu is almost as expansive as the building, combining Chinese, Japanese, Thai and Polynesian food with colorful tropical cocktails.
Kowloon also operates an outdoor tiki venue with live entertainment during warmer months.
Plans call for eventually redeveloping the property and preserving a smaller version of the restaurant. For now, the original remains open, giving customers another opportunity to experience one of America’s last gigantic roadside Polynesian restaurants.
The Clam Box in Ipswich
The Clam Box does not merely sell fried clams. The entire restaurant is shaped like the box used to carry them.
Dick Greenleaf constructed the roadside landmark in 1935. Its tall, trapezoidal building and raised roof flaps recreate the appearance of an enormous cardboard takeout container.
The design worked. Drivers could identify the restaurant before reading its sign, and the unusual structure became nearly as famous as the food.
Customers line up for whole-belly clams, scallops, shrimp, haddock and onion rings. The restaurant closes for a portion of the winter, so checking its seasonal schedule is important.
Massachusetts has plenty of seafood restaurants. Only one allows customers to eat fried clams inside a giant clam box.
Salem Cross Inn in West Brookfield
Salem Cross Inn gives guests the opportunity to eat dinner as though modern cooking equipment never arrived.
The restaurant occupies a restored 18th-century farmhouse on a 600-acre property. Its regular menu emphasizes traditional New England food and ingredients grown in the inn’s gardens.
The strangest experience, however, is its ticketed Fireplace Feast.
On selected dates, employees prepare prime rib on a rotating roasting jack beside an open hearth. Guests can watch the cooking, make traditional chowder and sometimes take a horse-drawn wagon or sleigh ride before dinner.
The evening concludes with additional courses served inside the historic inn.
Reservations are required, but few Massachusetts meals offer a more elaborate opportunity to pretend the past 250 years never happened.
The Baldwin Bar in Woburn
The Baldwin Bar hides an acclaimed cocktail destination inside a historic yellow mansion that also serves Sichuan food.
Guests enter the Baldwin Mansion and find dark wood, intimate rooms and cocktails built with unusual ingredients, dramatic glassware and elaborate presentations.
The food comes from Sichuan Garden, so a visit can involve cumin-crisped fish, spicy noodles and dumplings alongside drinks that appear to have emerged from a laboratory.
The combination should not necessarily work. An inventive modern cocktail bar, historic mansion and suburban Chinese restaurant sound like three separate businesses.
At the Baldwin Bar, they occupy the same building—and that unlikely arrangement has become the attraction.
Gibbet Hill Grill in Groton
Gibbet Hill Grill operates inside a restored barn on a working 100-acre farm.
The restaurant grows produce and raises livestock on the property, allowing the kitchen to build parts of its menu around ingredients harvested just outside.
That alone would make it unusual, but the hill above the restaurant contains the ruins of an unfinished castle.
General William Bancroft began constructing the castle-like mansion during the early 1900s. He ran out of money before finishing it, leaving stone ruins that can be reached through trails on the property.
Visitors can therefore eat a farm-to-table steak inside a century-old barn and then walk uphill to explore an abandoned Massachusetts castle.
That is a considerable amount of weirdness for one dinner reservation.
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