Restaurants, Ice Cream Parlors, and Bars

Along the Eel Pond Channel on the north side of Water Street is a building partly built out over the water. This small building has been both restaurant and bar. In the early 1900s it was known as The Ideal and housed a restaurant and a bakery. Some Portuguese immigrants of the time, boarding and working in Woods Hole with no permanent address, used it as a place to receive mail. The building became the Rendezvous Bar in 1939 after the end of Prohibition. It was always a rougher bar with sailors and fishermen as its patrons as contrasted with the Cap’n Kidd next door.

The building housing the Cap’n Kidd had been a well-loved ice cream parlor and restaurant. The land on which this was built had been owned by Isaiah Spindel. There was an existing building on the site which was sold to Harry Daniels in 1916-1917 (although he did not own the land). He made his own ice cream for many years, until 1929 or 1930. At that time he began selling lunches, soup, chowder, confectionaries and tobacco and bought his ice cream. A newer section of the building, constructed in 1916-1917 was used for the sale of wine and beer. Mr. Daniels died in 1939. The building became the Cap’n Kidd. It was sold to the Augusta family in 1946.

On Depot Square where the trains arrived and the ferries departed, a restaurant was built in the 1890s or perhaps around 1902, after Railroad Avenue was built and the ice houses torn down, called Eaton’s Lunch. In 1922 it was bought by the James family and called James’ Grill. It became the Leeside tavern in the 1950s and has remained under that name until recently when it became the Quicks Hole Tavern.

The busy intersection near the end of the railroad tracks and steamship docks. A wagon holding logs is in front of Eaton’s Lunch, later James Grill, the Leeside and now Quicks Hole Tavern. The wonderful horse water trough is now located at the Falmouth Water Department driveway entrance off Route 28 as you come into Falmouth. Florence Howes Gordon Collection.

Eaton’s Lunch on the corner at the end of the railroad tracks, water trough in center of the intersection and Woods Hole Garage beyond Eaton’s.

Daniel’s ice cream parlor and store, c. 1917.