It’s a warm early summer afternoon, and I’m sitting at a simple wooden booth at Northern Spy, a restaurant smack in the middle of the Paul Revere Heritage Site. This is the historic town of Canton, part of the Greater Boston area, some 20 miles south of downtown. It’s a rustic but cozy eatery with warm brick walls that contrast with a sleek industrial ceiling. I’ve coincidentally arrived during the town’s annual Heritage Festival, and people in historical costume are milling about carrying prop muskets and ducking into the restaurant to grab a quick beer at the bar.
Northern Spy is currently the site of a dinner and talk series called Massachusetts 250: Culinary Chronicles of New England, which pairs historians with food experts to explore and re-create regional colonial-era cuisine. Every month, a 45-minute historical talk is followed by a three-course menu built around the evening’s topic. The first event in February 2026 covered the importance of corn and regional grain, while May was focused on the precolonial foodways of the Wampanoag. Every week on regular dinner nights, the restaurant also offers a rotating selection of special menu items based on recipes from the 18th and 19th centuries, like Joe Frogger cookies and clam cakes.
As America is poised to celebrate its 250th birthday on July 4—and since Massachusetts played a particularly pivotal role in the American Revolution—Northern Spy’s dinner and talk series is one of the many events taking place around the state this summer.
Founded in 2020, Northern Spy is in the country’s first rolling copper mill, which was built by Paul Revere in 1801. To create the menu, food historian and chef March Sheehan consulted copperplate engravings that Revere, a skilled silversmith and metalworker, made for the British cookbook The Frugal Housewife, the first cookbook published in the United States, in 1772. Sheehan also researched postrevolution recipes and hotel menus from the Revere House, one of the city’s first grand hotels that opened in west Boston in 1847.
The restaurant is in the Paul Revere Heritage Site and uses recipes that Revere helped engrave for a cookbook.
Courtesy of Northern Spy
“There are a lot of menus that still exist from that hotel, so I looked at them to get a sense of style, ingredients, and seasonality, and then compared them to a lot of my notes from recipes in the late 18th century,” explains Sheehan as I bite into one of his colonial-inspired hors d’oeuvres. It’s flaky smoked Maine brook trout garnished with New England snap peas, assembled onto a piece of bread called Plimoth eight-row flint corn bread. The recipe was created using cornmeal developed by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Plimoth Patuxet Museum; they revived an ancient multicolor corn grown by the Wampanoag and eaten by the Pilgrims in the 1600s.
Also on the menu are plates like traditional thirded bread, created by European colonists in the 17th century; brown bread smeared with bluefish pâté, a highly common fish species in southern New England; and house-made smoked sausage, an essential component of the colonial diet. While ingredients are inspired by colonial-era recipes, they’re threaded with contemporary elements, like tuna tartare and black truffle–Madeira vinaigrette, to appeal to modern tastes. All the dishes are cooked in a roaring wood-fired hearth kitchen.
These culinary trips to the past will culminate in a banquet-style Revolutionary Feast on September 16. Plans are currently underway to develop and host dinners in the fall.
“I hope that people come away from it thinking New England food is vibrant and exciting and interesting,” says Sheehan.
Other ways to experience Boston’s colonial history
Celebrate further by visiting the Patriots of Color exhibition at the American Ancestors’ Family Heritage Experience on Newbury Street in Boston, which highlights the overlooked roles of Black, Indigenous, and multiracial people who contributed to the American Revolution.
Over in Boston’s Theater District, check out Rebel’s Guild, a restaurant in the Revere Hotel that focuses on Revolutionary War–themed dining, including modern twists on historical New England staples, like colonial chowder.
At the Museum of African American History in the Beacon Hill neighborhood, the Black Voices of the Revolution exhibition seeks to honor the perspectives of free and enslaved Black men and women in New England during the Revolutionary period.
The state will celebrate the country’s 250th birthday until the end of the year.
