I went in for the pies.
The James Pub & Provisions, which opened in Essex in the spring of 2024, is the second iteration of a popular Needham restaurant by the same name. The Irish pub greets visitors driving down Essex’s Main Street; anyone familiar with the winding road that crosses the Essex River down toward Woodman’s knows the way. Perched at the start of what can be, in summer, a busy intersection, the restaurant is ideally located for those looking for a reprieve from the traffic.
You can come to The James for fried clams, too, market priced, much as they are elsewhere in Essex. But I didn’t. Instead, I came for the pies (and, in the end, for much else that was in chef Richard Baker’s kitchen). Savory pies, that is. In the long tradition of savory foods, The James offers a section devoted to them: shepherd’s pie with braised lamb, carrots, peas, sweet corn, and creamy mashed potatoes; seafood pie with halibut, haddock, shrimp, braised leeks, and, yes, whipped potatoes; short rib and ale pie with Guinness-braised beef, pearl onions, potatoes, Gruyère, fennel pollen, and horseradish cream; and chicken pot pie with shredded chicken, peas, carrots, green beans, and puff pastry.
I’ll get back to the pies, of course. The menu, though, offers more, like a raw bar, with a creamy clam dip, and shrimp cocktail (large, and served with a devilishly spicy, horseradish-forward cocktail sauce, which I did, in fact, order), and local oysters on the half-shell. And a “bites” section, with offerings like fried onion strings. I kicked myself, in retrospect, for skipping the corned beef arancini, served under the “starters” heading (it’s now available only for private events); I opted, instead, for the crackly-crisp salt-and-pepper wings, with a side of blue cheese, devoured quickly, before our pies even hit the table. Wings are also served with the James house sauce, a Peruvian aji verde made with yogurt, cilantro, jalapeño, and aji peppers.
Those pies, though. My husband and I diverged here on preference. As my kids settled into their own preferred choices—a pub burger for my eldest, served with, I will say, superlative fries; chicken tenders for my youngest—I took to the chicken pot pie. It was served with a cap of pate feuilletée, puff pastry, perfectly burnished, not at all gummy, as sometimes happens when the bottom of pastry hits gravy. It can happen if it sits too long, but this hadn’t.
The gravy was a light velouté, or a stock gently thickened with flour, like a béchamel, but better. I make a lot of chicken pot pies myself, and rarely are they this good. The viscosity is never quite right; they seem thick enough when they go into the oven, but then the vegetables give off water, or some other mysterious alchemy takes place, et voilà. Failure. Somehow, everything came together in this version. It tasted like chicken. It tasted a little like a very good soup. It tasted homemade. There was enough pastry to last through the entire serving.
“I’m not ordinarily a shepherd’s pie person,” my husband said between mouthfuls, but I had to fight him just to get a bite. And I mean fight. It was a war of spoons. I managed to edge him out, but just barely. And he was right; the gaminess of the lamb, Maillard reaction achieved, mixed perfectly with the sweet corn, the creamy potatoes, the peas. The dish made sense, and so did his enthusiasm for it. When I went for another spoonful, I realized I had missed my chance.
There are, of course, other delights at The James. I ordered, for instance, a frozen Irish coffee—alcohol-soaked with Irish whiskey and topped with whipped cream—the kind of thing I would never ordinarily get, but inspiration had struck. It was a whimsical drink, and the kind of thing that made sense, given the circumstance. No less whimsical at meal’s end: a seasonal pavlova, bathed in crème Anglaise and lemon curd. But the pies are imprinted in my consciousness. I am already planning another trip, when winter is deep and bleak. I imagine a cold day, a cozy dining room, me with my chicken pot pie, my husband with a shepherd’s pie all to himself, pursuing our passions the way we were designed to, one spoonful at a time.