Food Adventurer Treks to Port Jeff

Dave Seel considers himself a “food adventurer,” traveling to neighborhoods that capture his interest and trying out local restaurants as a way to explore their character and culture. He recently hand-picked eight Port Jefferson establishments to feature in his blog called, The Art (and Science) of Food Adventuring.

Seel, who lives in Stony Brook and works in Setauket (at his day job he is the Director of Business Systems at Setauket Tennis and Fitness), said that he started his food adventuring when he lived in San Francisco. While there he and his wife decided to "explore neighborhoods around their meals."

“We would strike out on new food adventures almost every weekend or evening we had together,” he said. “As our adventuring expanded, we traveled throughout Sonoma, Napa, and Mendocino, experiencing the food and wine culture throughout those valleys.”

He said that he fell in love with the whole culture and started documenting his travels on Yelp, a popular social network for restaurant reviews. Seel was an English major in college and taught high school English for five years so when the small reviews weren’t enough to satiate his literary appetite he launched his own blog. He also .

The couple moved back to Long Island two years ago and Seel said he was excited “to find a similar local food and wine culture on the North Fork.”

“It's really becoming a dynamic locally focused food and drink culture, with craft breweries and farm to table restaurants popping up across the region,” he said. “Port Jeff is a great example of this recent trend and one of the reasons I chose to highlight it on my blog.”

In the post titled “A North Shore Ferry Town Goes Foodie: Eating around Port Jefferson, NY,” he said that since he starting visiting the village when he was young it’s changed a lot but he said he’s “come to appreciate it even more.”

He says he tries to review the restaurants he visits in a way that is “accessible to folks who might be traveling there or have a similar passion for food adventuring.”

Seel sees the North Shore of Long Island as a place poised to become “a really cool, progressive culture that draws culinary tourism to the region.”

“It's an exciting place to be and I love adventuring to find more spots that are unique to the region,” he said.

You can read his entire post on food adventuring in Port Jefferson here.