Tag: Food Review

Destination: Rehoboth Beach, DE – Fin’s Ale House

Fin’s Ale House comes complete with outdoor dining and spacious seating inside. Ask around for a good restaurant in Lewes, Delaware, and the name Fin’s Ale House & Raw Bar is almost sure to come up. When it does, run, don’t walk. It doesn’t matter …

Fin's Ale House in Lewes, DE
Fin’s Ale House comes complete with outdoor dining and spacious seating inside.

Ask around for a good restaurant in Lewes, Delaware, and the name Fin’s Ale House & Raw Bar is almost sure to come up.


When it does, run, don’t walk. It doesn’t matter if you want to sit and the bar and shuck oysters, or if you want to sit on the dining side. Just go and enjoy being a bit pampered while you enjoy fresh seafood.

In our experience, the service was great, especially for a place where shorts and ball caps are not questioned. It’s tourist-town-casual-dine, but up a notch.

We spent time asking a few of our usual questions of the server. What is your favorite? What is most popular? Anything we should avoid?

Fin's Ale House Seafood BakeThe Seafood Bake is the perfect sampler if you want to taste it all.


He quietly warned us that the chefs often have a heavy hand with the white wine on the Seafood Bake, making it watery, not better. We dared it anyway, and it must have been a good night—the flavor combination was delicious. Shrimp, scallops, flounder, crab cake, and a light sauce with Florentine butter, which is a mix of cultured butter, olive oil, and lemon, often with other seasonings or a bit of brandy thrown in.

Fin's Ale House Crab CakesThe Crab Cakes were full of fresh crab, not filler.


He made sure we knew that the Jumbo Lump Crab Cakes weren’t your ordinary fried circles. No, they are pure crab, broiled and delicious. Hint: Ask for them to be delivered piping hot, as there appeared to be a tendency to let them sit just a little too long.

Fin's Ale House pastaThe Seafood Pasta from Fin’s Ale House.


We also took his recommendation and ordered the FINS’ Shellfish Pasta. It proved that you can take some of the same seafood and make it taste totally different. This dish had the shrimp, scallops, and lump crab meat, but was mixed with a delectable lobster cream sauce and served over penne pasta.

Specials when our party of three was there included a lobster roll made with “FINS’ famous lobster salad,” and a Spicy Grouper Scampi, using one of the daily fish selections. As good as it sounded—pan seared fillet, linguini, sun dried tomatoes, asparagus, garlic white wine, butter, capers, and crushed pepper—we stuck with the regular menu. We could also have gotten Pecan Encrusted Mahi or Horseradish Encrusted Halibut. All for another time.

Fin's Ale House Fin’s Ale House has a choose your own fish dish.


Fins is also known for its Build Your Own Fresh Fish aboard. The instructions are simple:

1. Select a fish from the daily rotating selection
2. Select a preparation (e.g. broiled, grilled, blackened, or even stuffed with crab imperial)
3. Select a sauce—citrus hollandaise, lobster sauce, lemon shallot cream, Creole sauce, and more


Just like that you can have the seafood dish of your dreams.


Oh, and if your tastes spin to the more exotic, they offered a Spanish Seafood Paella that sounded amazing. It was made with all the standards, including scallops, mussels, shrimp, clams, fish, lump crab meat, calamari, Andouille sausage, and saffron rice. This alone proves both the versatility of the restaurant and its commitment to fresh seafood.

We did feel the need for a crusty bread basket to sop up our sauces, but didn’t see it on the menu and one wasn’t automatically offered. Next time we’ll ask.

Because there will be a next time.


Photos by Paul K. Logsdon

DiGiorno’s all-onion March Madness ‘Cry Pie’ pizza is better than it has any right being

DiGiorno’s special college basketball pizza reeks, but onions and alfredo sauce should be best friends.

NCAA basketball tournament season is a time for gimmicky experimentation for all the #brands out there. Two weeks ago we were treated to the danky grossness of the Coors-sicle, a frozen beer-adjacent … confection? that smelled like weed and tasted like a can of Arizona iced tea had been taught to vomit.

This, somehow, led DiGiorno to reach out to Caroline Darney and I in hopes of reviewing the company’s new, March Madness-specific pizza. The Cry Pie is a thin crust square topped with alfredo sauce, a light amount of cheese and then what I can only estimate is half a pound of onions.

Red onions. Caramelized onions. Scallions.

Seriously, this thing smelled the minute I brought it out of the freezer. Frozen things shouldn’t smell and yet, here we are.

Just checking on it by cracking the oven door unleashed a torrent of onion smell that will linger on in my kitchen even after I flood it with Febreze. My dogs, two animals I have seen eat (and then vomit) rocks, investigated the source and ran to higher ground. Friends, this pizza reeks.

But the taste? Well, the taste is pretty damn good.

The acidic tang of the onions — ALL THE ONIONS — plays great with the creamy base of the alfredo sauce. The crust, which is always a concern with frozen pizzas but especially with a thin crust and the liquid-heavy content of vegetables on top, came out perfectly crisp. The raised edges kept the cheese from spilling to the bottom of my oven and had a real Pillsbury Crescent Rolls vibe to it.

While a little garlic would have been a nice touch (and destroyed my breath for possibly weeks afterward) this is a pretty solid, if basic, pizza. Some hot sauce upped the acidic tang a little and really worked out well. You can’t tell from the video above (thanks to my extremely professional editing) but I gruffled down three slices in the six-ish minutes we were filming.

It’s good! I gave the Cry Pie an eight out of 10, which means something since I live in Wisconsin where our frozen pizza grocery selection is so vast it goes viral every now and then. Caroline was more reserved at a six of 10, which is still way better than that Coors nonsense from the start of the tournament. Both of us only slightly regretted the Superfund burps that quickly accompanied digestion.

Anyway, I don’t know if DiGiorno’s gonna dive into all-onion pizzas from here on out. I’m just saying I’ll give it a try if they do.