Before the Beer License, Brewster Asked About the Onion Rings

The question that wasn't on the agenda

The liquor hearing was going the way liquor hearings go.

One Monday evening in March 2025, Izabelle and Robert Crisanti sat before the Brewster Select Board with a list of ordinary business. Kate's Fried Seafood & Ice Cream, the takeout stand near Paines Creek, would reopen as The Cape House. They wanted a seasonal license for beer and wine. Across the road, the town-owned lot at Betty's Curve had been quietly absorbing overflow cars for years, and the town would need to make that official. It was paperwork, parking and hours. (Cape Cod Chronicle, March 12, 2025)

Then the chair, Dave Whitney, asked what everybody in town actually wanted to know.

"And the onion rings?"

"Yes, we are keeping the onion rings," Izabelle answered, laughing, according to the Chronicle's Mackenzie Blue. The license passed unanimously.

It got a laugh. But it wasn't really a joke. Before The Cape House had sold a single basket under its new name, somebody had read one line of its unwritten rulebook into the public record.

A summer spent learning the window

Kathy and John Ohman ran Kate's for 39 seasons. They announced plans to sell after the 2023 season, their 38th. Then they came back for one more summer. (2023 sale report)

That extra summer is the part of the story most people missed. According to Robert Crisanti, he and Izabelle spent it working beside the Ohmans, knowing they intended to buy the place and wanting to learn it from the people who'd spent nearly four decades figuring it out. (Contemporary interview) They weren't taking a tour. They were working a season: the windows, the fryer, the rush when the beach empties at five.

It also meant they met the customers before they owned anything. Izabelle told the Chronicle that people kept telling them how many summers they'd been coming, and how much they hoped would stay the same. The plan that came out of it was modest on purpose. They would keep the core menu and build specials around it rather than erase anything.

Every regular has a private list of what can't change. At Kate's, one line on a lot of those lists was probably the Captain's Club, which by one 2024 account put lightly fried cod and bacon on the same sandwich. (2024 sandwich account) In Brewster, at least one item on the list was said out loud, in a town meeting room, by the man holding the gavel.

The painting that made bartenders duck

Up Route 6, at the corner of Commercial and Standish streets, the list takes up an entire wall.

Members of the Edwards family had been doing business on that corner since the 1940s. In 1959, Donald V. Edwards opened Chef's Restaurant there, and a year later he renamed it the Governor Bradford. Before the doors opened, he commissioned James Wingate Parr to paint a mural across the dining room: 26 feet of sparse shoreline, with shells, feathers and driftwood. (Provincetown Independent, 2022; Provincetown Independent, 2025)

In 2022, Donald R. Edwards showed an Independent reporter a low opening between the kitchen and the bar, the kind of passage where you learn to lower your head without thinking about it. Why had nobody ever raised it?

"I didn't want to cut the painting," he said.

So for decades, the people working there bent down instead of asking the art to move.

That April, Edwards sold the Bradford and four neighboring properties to Lexvest Group for a reported $6.95 million for the whole block. The next operators renovated. Chef and co-owner Collin Kolisko brought in an izakaya-inspired menu, and the old bar came out. The mural stayed. So did the drag karaoke, which by then had become its own institution. (Provincetown Independent, 2022; Provincetown Independent, December 2025)

A good menu in the wrong room

This was not a story about bad cooking.

The Bradford holds roughly 150 people inside and 70 outside. Its dining room has to share the building with a bar, a stage and the kind of late-night noise you can't just turn down for dinner. Jamie Lewis, one of the outgoing leaseholders, told the Independent the group wanted something smaller, more focused on food and hospitality, where Kolisko's menu could take center stage.

Joe Johnston, who would run operations for the next tenant, described it from the customer's side. People in the restaurant business praised the izakaya concept, he told Boston Magazine. But someone stepping in off Commercial Street, into a room that looks and feels like a pub, doesn't necessarily expect it.

"The building dictates what works," Johnston said. (Boston Magazine, June 2, 2026)

In Brewster, a question at a hearing set the rule. In Provincetown, the room itself set it, and it took a few years for everyone to hear it.

This time, it's in the lease

When Lexvest went looking for the Bradford's next operator, it didn't offer a blank slate.

It chose Coastal Hospitality Group, a Cape-based operator, for a 15-year lease beginning in 2026. Johnston had spent 21 years as general manager at Fanizzi's, a few blocks away. When people started muttering "chain," he pushed back: a group of locally run Cape restaurants, he argued, isn't the same thing. (Provincetown Independent)

Lexvest president Matt Blackham told the Independent that anyone who proposed wholesale changes to the Bradford's brand, entertainment, name or basic interior character wasn't considered. And the owner, the incoming tenant and the departing operators all confirmed one detail: "The Governor Bradford" is written into the lease.

The next kitchen could rewrite the menu. It could not rename the room.

"We are big on saying that we are custodians, we are not owners," Johnston told Boston Magazine on the afternoon of the reopening.

Same sign, new felt

At the reopening party in mid-May, Boston Magazine found a room that had changed a great deal and was still easy to recognize. There were new floors and a new bar. The windows were bigger, the outside had been painted white, and the bathrooms were finally better. The old black-and-white stage sign was still on the wall, and the pool table had fresh blue felt. The Red Sox were on one television and RuPaul's Drag Race on the one beside it. Most of the staff had stayed on.

The reopening menu leaned on grandmothers and the harbor. It included a shepherd's pie and Beef Wellington hybrid under puff pastry, Portuguese kale soup, and a seven-cheese mac and cheese finished with spicy pork sausage and crumbled bolo lêvedo, the slightly sweet Azorean roll. The drag karaoke survived this handover too. The Bradford's posted schedule lists it Wednesday through Sunday, from 9:30 p.m. until late.

What the regulars keep

Nobody hands over the part people come back for in a single transaction. It moves more slowly than that. It shows up as a summer of shifts beside the old owners, a painting nobody would cut, and a question asked out loud before the first beer was poured.

The owners change. The cooks change. The felt on the pool table changes. The questions waiting for whoever comes next barely change at all.

Provincetown put its answer in a lease. Brewster just asked, out loud, in front of everybody.

The Cape House | 284 Paines Creek Road, Brewster
Posted hours: Sun–Thu 11 a.m.–9 p.m.; Fri–Sat 11 a.m.–10 p.m. (check the page as the season winds down)
508-896-9517 · thecapehouse284.com

Governor Bradford | 312 Commercial St., Provincetown
Open daily 11:30 a.m.–12:30 a.m.; drag karaoke Wed–Sun, 9:30 p.m. to late
508-413-9105 · thegovernorbradford.com