Cuvée at Chatham Inn

Four, seven or thirteen courses

Three lengths define the menu at Cuvée at Chatham Inn on Cape Cod: a four-course prix fixe, a seven-course tasting menu and a thirteen-course chef’s table. The lengths are as much the craft as the dishes, because a kitchen that changes its menu daily has to make every course stand alone and still leave room for the next one. Day boat scallops come off piers about a mile away. Agnolotti carries the Italian influence running under the cooking. A5 Japanese wagyu, black sea bass and Creekstone ribeye hold the middle, and the finish runs to carrot cake or a white chocolate mousse. Local farms and local fishermen set what is available, and the plate puts a global technique over that rather than the other way round. The kitchen team works those producers season by season, which is part of why Cuvée is rated the top restaurant on the Cape and Islands.

Thirty-two wines by the glass

The wine programme is unusually open for a room this small: thirty-two fine wines poured by the glass and more than 150 labels by the bottle, with pairings folded into the longer menus. Cuvée took a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence for 2025. Cocktails sit alongside. At this scale the pass and the glass have to work close together, the kitchen setting the tempo and the wine answering it course by course, which is easier to promise than to hold across thirteen plates.

A French country inn on a New England street

The room reads more like a French country inn than a coastal dining room built for spectacle: tables set with Villeroy & Boch china, Schott Zwiesel crystal and Frette linens, a fire lit, service calibrated for a quiet evening. Cuvée is the restaurant inside Chatham Inn, the only Relais & Châteaux property on Cape Cod and a Forbes Five Star hotel, in a house that has taken guests since the 1800s. The intimacy changes how the food lands, because a tasting menu here cannot disappear into scale. The pass stays close to the room, and a visit to the table from the kitchen has become part of how the restaurant describes itself.

A refresh, and the parts that have to survive it

Cuvée is in a period of refresh. A new and deliberately more approachable dining experience was announced for May, the wine bar is closed while that happens, and the Patio on Main sits in the plan for summer terrace service. Continuity under that kind of pressure takes more discipline than the change itself. A restaurant built on tasting menus has to keep the sequence, the pairings and the compact exchange between kitchen and room intact while the frame around them changes, and the test stays where it always was: the first course, the final pour, and the day boat scallops leaving the pass at Cuvée.