If, like me, you are avoiding or watching your carbs, you will think you have dropped into heaven. Not only are you tolerated here, but you are welcomed by name and encouraged to stick to your diet, with the Dr. Atkins celery and olive plate just for starters. We decided to start with an order of Rhode Island red hot wings. These are Newport’s answer to Buffalo wings, and a very fine answer it was indeed. We were served crispy, well-cooked wings with a piquant but not overly hot sauce.

If you crave the burn, you can go for the hotter version, the Habanero pepper wings.

The menu is huge; it is overwhelming for a first-time visitor. They try to do a lot of different things, maybe too many. Some of the items we ordered were more successful than others. Cindy ordered the gourmet burger, and it was undercooked. The burger was large, juicy, and delicious, so the rarity was forgiven. My patty melt, on the other hand, was supposed to be medium-well, and the total life had been cooked out of it. On the upside, the grilled onions and cheese on delicious rye bread made up for the hockey-puck patty.

What we did like was that you could choose to have a side or Caesar salad instead of fries at no extra cost.

We decided to order supper to go so that we wouldn’t have to come out late in the evening. Both of us ordered salads. Cindy had the hot buffalo chicken salad, and I ordered a Caesar salad with a scoop of crab salad. My salad was wonderful; I enjoyed every sweet, crabby, luscious bite, but Cindy was much less impressed with her salad.

We arrived at 3:30pm on a Saturday in March and had a 45-minute wait to get a table. This is a very popular place, even in the off-season. Is it worth the wait? It could be -certainly the decor is very entertaining, and the staff is friendly and very hardworking. One visit isn’t enough to judge the food sufficiently to say if the burgers were an aberration or if it is a consistent problem. I certainly plan to give it another try.

www.brickalley.com