The Port of Call

Empanadas folded into the house language

The fold comes first, dough pulled over filling and sealed by hand. Renee Touponce, Executive Chef of The Port of Call in Mystic, brought that gesture from a Torrington kitchen into service on Water Street. Her first lessons in dough and filling came beside her mother, making empanadas before the work had a professional title. At New England Culinary Institute in Essex, Vermont, she gave that home practice a formal frame, then built range through the less visible stations that keep restaurants honest: server, prep cook, dishwasher, the daily discipline of clean hands and readiness.

Mystic became the working ground. Touponce joined 85th Day Food Community from 2017, then worked through Grass & Bone and Stone Acres Farm before taking leadership at Oyster Club in 2021 and The Port of Call in 2022. Here she is Chef/Owner and Executive Chef, carrying more than a menu. The role reaches from the bench to the room, from the small plate leaving the pass to the identity of a restaurant built around port-city appetite. Her James Beard recognition belongs to the same arc, but the clearer measure is the empanada: family technique, culinary school, local sourcing and service pressure held in one folded food.

A port-city menu turning toward Paris

The Port of Call opened in 2022 as a neighborhood bistro and cocktail-forward restaurant next to Oyster Club, under the 85th Day Food Community. The menu works in small plates and à la carte rhythm rather than a single regional lane. Beef empanadas sit beside a smoked hot dog, smoked banh mi, dumpling soup and Hawaiian pork musubi, a list that makes sense only if the port is treated as method rather than decoration. Movement is the organizing idea: preserved, smoked, folded, brothy, handheld, built for the bar as much as the table.

That direction is now narrowing for a 2026 refresh called Next Port: Paris, with the kitchen and bar turning toward a brasserie-era register. The useful detail is not theme but translation. Pomme frites, olives and cheese, ham and bread, bread dumplings in brodo with sourdough, pecorino, nutmeg, fresh herbs and chicken broth, and fried mozzarella with local cheese all show how the place handles comfort without flattening it. Beverage Director Jade Ayala leads the bar program, which has been named by Esquire among the 24 Best Bars in America in 2022 and reached the James Beard Awards semifinalist list for Outstanding Wine & Other Beverages Program in 2026. The cellar figures are not published, but the program’s place in the restaurant is plain: the glass is part of the craft, not a companion to it.

The room above the Dive Bar

The room carries a nautical idea without asking the food to dress up for it. The Port of Call occupies two levels at 15 Water Street: the upper restaurant and bar, and below it the Dive Bar, described by the house as the belly of the beast of a deep-sea exploration vessel. That lower room gives the place its pressure and shadow. Upstairs, the pass has to answer a livelier brief, with cocktails, wine, small plates and conversation moving at once.

There is New England seafaring in the materials and Parisian inflection in the current turn, but the feeling is less costume than station work. A plate of beef empanadas can arrive with a drink built from the bar’s own discipline; a bowl of dumpling soup can hold the table in place while the room keeps moving. Touponce’s food does not separate memory from technique. It lets the fold, the broth and the bar carry Water Street.