Venice was the right place at the right time. Not the city — which we were dining our way through at this time last year — but rather the Westerly restaurant. Driving through a cold and rainy South County, we were beckoned by a place that beckons like it was a campfire in the winter woods.

The semiformal atmosphere strikes an inviting balance between comfort and indulgence. The waitstaff wear ties and black aprons; a stuccoed partition next to our table was topped with plants; paintings were mostly picturesque scenes of Venice.

Despite the name, the restaurant doesn’t offer Venetian specialties — there isn’t even prosecco among the bubblies on the lengthy list of 80 or so wines, 17 by the glass. Menu offerings are as all over the map of Italy, just as the wine list is all over the globe. Under "Pesce e Crostaceo," you can have tuna or swordfish prepared Sicilian style, the former with a kalamata olive, pine nut, and golden raisin caponata; the latter with a salmoriglio sauce, featuring

Lions, and tigers, and bears — oh no!

Just kidding. We are talking deepest, darkest Exeter, but you’re safe from wildlife at the Middle of Nowhere Diner, unless you snag yourself on an antler while sideling through the parking lot some brisk dawn in hunting season. Have no fear, dear Cranston or Warwick natives who consider a drive to Westerly as exotic, and unlikely, as a slow boat to Marseille.

This restaurant is one of those unassuming places that line blue highways up and down America. Outside, it’s a nondescript gray box with a red tiled roof. Inside, it has the requisite row of stools along a counter, per diner designation, plus several booths and two-person tables. The decor is straight out of grandma’s kitchen, with a strip of grapes-and-fruit wallpaper along the ceiling and a cuteness quotient summed up by a framed photo of a kid wearing fairy wings and sitting on a mushroom. The ashes of a Problem Customer rest in a corked jar on a top shelf, warning potential complainers.

Jack’s is a family restaurant in both senses. In addition to being inexpensive and amiably informal enough for families — candy canes and wreaths on the plastic tablecloths after Thanksgiving, for example — Jack’s is a family-run enterprise.

Jack Gomes started in the restaurant business in Bristol when he came from Portugal with his family in 1963. Nine years later, he was ready to open his own place next door in Warren, with him and his two sons cooking, and daughter Maria as hostess. Son Joseph is now head chef and general manager, with his brother, Victor, as his lieutenant in the kitchen, working religiously from their dad’s recipes. If you liked the marinated smelts here when the place opened in 1972, the popular appetizer still tastes the same today.

When I visited, the big dining area was decorated like a family rec room, with Christmas stockings, Nutcracker dolls and other tchotchkes festooning the red walls, with strings of lights twinkling above them. The bentwood chair

The buzz about DeWolf Tavern reached us even before it was recently recognized by Esquire magazine as one of America’s 20 best new restaurants. The tall waterfront warehouses in Bristol have been under renovation over the past few years, and it’s terrific to see how the manager/ chef team (and personal partnership) of Melicia Phillips and Sai Viswanath have maintained the historic atmosphere of this 1818 stone building. Both bring strong credentials to this venture, Phillips with her background in management, cooking, and publishing, and Viswanath with degrees in culinary arts from the Culinary Institute of America and a school in Madras, India.

The downstairs has a colonial tavern feel, with rich wood all around, in walls, ceiling and floor, booths on one side, banquette and chairs on the other side of the long, narrow space. Round natural-wood pillars holding up the beams are a reminder of the spot’s warehouse beginnings, purportedly in the triangle trade whose New England base was in Newport.

The people who opened Blaze Eastside in September are quite clever. They’re clever and confident enough to give the place a name that’s also a memory aid when people start talking about that "hot new restaurant" up Hope Street. Enough people have been doing so within our hearing for us to give it a try.

Yes, it’s admirable that you don’t follow the crowd, but you might consider making an exception in this case. Blaze was already busy at 5:30 on the Friday night when we stepped in. The bar was busy on the left, and past the partition on the right, a dozen-plus small tables were mostly occupied. We took in the muted décor, the sand-colored textured walls complemented by dark-stained mahogany. Colorful abstract paintings were a hip accent. The atmosphere is informal, with brown butcher paper on the tables — cloth napkins, though — and sandwiches for the lunch crowd are listed on chalkboards above cold cases at the back.

This place used to be Miller’s Deli, and more recently, DeFusco

Our post-Thanksgiving appetites have often led us to Italian-American cooking, and this year was no exception. We headed for pizza, specifically Carmella’s Middletown location, one of the newer pizzerias in the Newport area, and judging by our visit, one of the most popular. Older couples dined out on meatball grinders while families with several kids opted for one of the New York-style pizzas.

The pizzas are delivered to the copper-topped tables on pedestal trays, so that the aromas of the baked crust, the garlicky tomato sauce, and the melted cheese are even closer to your nose, which processes these amazing smells and guides your hand toward the first wedge. A phone call before our visit, to inquire about the special attributes of Carmella’s pizza, produced the following amusing response from a young worker: "Well, it’s round, and we cut it into eight pieces."

And so they do. They offer a whole-wheat crust as dark as gingerbread that could convert any anti-whole-grain eater,

It may be possible to step into Costantino’s Venda Ravioli and not work up an appetite, but it’s highly unlikely. The place is an emporium of culinary toys and Italian gourmet foods, both packaged and fresh. Ready-to-go dishes are colorful and varied (not only stuffed half-artichokes, but also stuffed artichoke hearts), and they compete for visual titillation: steaks marinate, chicken slices commingle with portobellos, and dainty racks of lamb are coated in peppercorns that glisten like sequins.

But if you get all worked up, you don’t have to wait until suppertime and dash across the plaza to eat at Costantino’s Ristorante & Caffe. Lunch is served at Venda. Meet a friend there who’s already having a bite to eat, and all dieting bets are off. I turned left at the door and strolled a lap around the long rectangular display before finding him at a table. If the more than 150 cheeses hadn’t worked up my appetite, the countless varieties of dried sopressata, trussed bracciola, and other red meat w

The vibrant bittersweet vines twined around the ceiling lamp in the foyer are the first clue. The warm, rich avocado and pomegranate colors of the walls are another. New Rivers is not your ordinary eating place. It never has been. In a space that accommodates just more than two-dozen diners (with some overflow in the bar area), chef/owner Bruce Tillinghast has always intended to make his guests feel welcome but also intrigued by the visual details of the restaurant and the culinary details of the food.

Banquette seats pick up the green theme; tables are covered with white linens and white butcher paper. Small vases of fresh flowers and globe lamps with candles augment the intimacy. A note on the menu asks diners to turn off cell phones, and though the volume on nearby conversations cannot be lowered, it only adds to the gemŸtlichkeit — as if everyone there were sharing the evening.

New Rivers’ upscale prices are well justified, but they do offer alternatives: "small meals and p

If kimchi, that spicy-hot fermented cabbage, has been your only introduction to Korean food, read on. The Sun & Moon Korean Restaurant will convince you that the country’s cuisine ranges far wider than hot to hotter. Remember when you learned that about Thai cooking, and the joys that followed? Like that.

The place is halfway into its fourth year, tucked away in East Providence, but word has certainly gotten around by now. Hearing yet another recommendation from friends, we finally decided to check it out. After just discovering the place on their own, Stuart and Cathy had already been to the Sun & Moon twice that week, but they didn’t have to be talked into indulging again.

How could a restaurant with dishes called Dukguk and Dolshot Bibimbob not at least be fun?

The space is small, however, so to keep the lines down, please, let’s not all act on the following recommendations at the same time. Tables for two line the wall at the left, ending with a single four-seater

Friends have been recommending Café Zelda for years, and somehow we’d never gotten there. When we wandered in for lunch last summer, we were struck by the old-fashioned nature of the bar and the dining areas, one a few steps up from the other. The feel is old Newport, with dark wood wainscoting, subtly striped wallpaper above that, and identically framed illustrations of sailboats at regular intervals on the walls. The chairs pick up the dark wood, though their dark green seats match the ceiling and banquette cushions.

There’s something about the small two-level dining room, now elegant with white linens, that is reminiscent of its days, from the ’40s through the early ’80s, as a neighborhood tavern: the wood wrapping around many tables like a booth, the subdued light from fluted glass wall lamps. The upper level, where we sat, maintains the nautical feel that came to this space when Murray Davis, the founder of Cruising World, bought the restaurant in the 1970s and named it after F