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Butterscotch pudding

Photograph: Jeff Gurwin

Long before words like locavore were on the tip of every tongue, Home made sustainability a credo of its cooking. Although the original owners have sold their interest in the restaurant to focus on their Long Island winery, the new chef, Ross Gill (Dos Caminos), continues their progressive vision at the (dare we say, homey?) townhouse dining room. The resulting affordable, honest menu and mostly local wine list (bottles rarely top $50) give new meaning to the term comfort food. A warming corn chowder, for instance, studded with tiny, plump cockles and flecks of bacon, rolled all the flavors of a New England summer into one. Three diminutive yet crispy peekytoe crab cakes, each dabbed with chipotle mayonnaise, may have been slightly less iconic, but no less delicious. This isn’t to say that the food is flawless. The majority of dishes we tried needed more salt, and a corriander-seed–crusted pork chop had been cooked well past the requested medium temperature (the plate was rescued by a pile of rainbow-colored baby carrots and lightly fried onion rings). An entrée that suffered none of those imperfections was a juicy Newport steak—a potentially tough cut—served with a simple yet moist savory bread pudding and sautéed spinach. Desserts included an addictive, not-too-sweet butterscotch pudding and a respectable apple-cranberry pie—near-essential items considering the name of the restaurant, an essential type of place, especially now.