Steve Johnson Sets Anchor in Tiverton with the Red Dory

The clams were destined for the Red Dory, the seaside restaurant Johnson opened last winter in Tiverton. Just a few miles from the clam flats, the Red Dory’s spot on the Sakonnet River is a far cry from the gritty stretch of Massachusetts Avenue where Johnson sited his last restaurant, the celebrated Rendezvous, in Cambridge’s Central Square.

“I tell people I’ve traded cleaning up cigarette butts for gull poop,” Johnson said wryly.

For Johnson, the move to Tiverton seems a natural convergence of the personal and the professional. Born in rural Ohio to a family of “serious gardeners,” he says the coastal farmlands of southern Massachusetts and northern Rhode Island captivated him 30 years ago. He bought Blue Sky so he could retreat to the water whenever possible.

Meanwhile, up in Boston, he established a reputation as one of the area’s top chefs. After a stint as sous-chef at Hamersley’s Bistro and as chef at the Mercury Bar, in 1996 he became chef and co-owner of The Blue Room, where he was nominated for a James Beard Award for the best chef in the Northeast in 2001. Boston Magazine twice named him the city’s best chef. In 2005 Johnson struck out on his own with Rendezvous, which Boston Magazine dubbed 2006’s “best restaurant debut.” A casual neighborhood place with exciting Eastern Mediterranean food, it drew national press as well as local academics and suburban foodies.

Johnson was one of the first Boston chefs to seek out produce from local farmers, and he cofounded the local chapter of the activist organization the Chefs Collaborative, which advocates for sustainable fishing and farming practices, among other issues. But selling to city restaurants became increasingly tough for farmers, he says, and by the time he left Cambridge, “only a half dozen farmers were providing the city restaurants. We were all serving the same vegetables. Everyone bought their seafood from one source. It was getting harder and harder to be unique up there.”

Twelve years ago Johnson approached the owner of Mykonos, a Greek restaurant in Tiverton, about buying the spot that is now the Red Dory. The owner wasn’t interested in selling, but over time that changed. Last winter Johnson gave the Red Dory a soft opening so he could work out the kinks and get to know his new neighbors before the summer’s hoards arrived, he says.

Chief among the neighbors he has been getting to know are the farmers and fishermen who live and work in the area, one that remains stubbornly, even reverently, agricultural. The dozens of small family farms in Tiverton, Little Compton and Westport were one of the big draws for Johnson, and he now buys from several—among them Ferolbink in Tiverton, as well as Skinny Dip, Young Family Farm, Walker’s and Wishing Stone in Little Compton. He buys clams just up the river at Bridgeport Seafood.

“The proximity to vegetables and seafood is really inspiring,” Johnson says.