Nobody Here Cooks a Thing

The menu you can download before you go is entirely liquid.

Two pages. Spritzes, frozen drinks, a full column of vodka, a wine list. Go looking for the food and you don't get a menu at all — you get a paragraph. A rotating lineup of trucks. Burgers and hot dogs some days, barbecue or tacos others, bakery and coffee on weekend mornings, ice cream and slushies when the afternoon runs long.

That isn't a website somebody forgot to finish. That's the building.

When the Board of Health looked the operation over in May, the plan in front of it had no permanent kitchen anywhere on the site. Two mobile food trucks. Fifteen standard portable restrooms and three ADA units. Restroom servicing and trash pickup daily to start, with the door left open to dropping back to every other day if the volume turned out to be manageable.

All of that for a place the special permit allows to hold as many as 325 people, subject to the Building Commissioner's final word on occupancy.

Then in June the Select Board took up Oath Pizza. The trailer was authorized to be on site up to six hours on weekdays and Sundays, running through November 30 — a long way past the last afternoon anyone expects to spend sitting on a lawn in Dennis Port. A separate vote set the serving hours: nine o'clock Monday through Saturday, eight on Sunday.

Which is to say a beer garden designed around food trucks opened its first season with one trailer on the books.

Here is the part nobody has written down.

If the truck situation that day doesn't suit you, the Red Nun down the street will take your mobile order and deliver it directly to The Backyard. Wednesday through Sunday, 11:30 to eight.

Stay with that a second. It's August on Main Street in Dennis Port. Two businesses are working the same block for the same party of six. One has a kitchen and no lawn. The other has a lawn and no kitchen. Rather than pretend the other one isn't there, somebody picked up the phone.

The drink list is where you can hear the family.

There's a mudslide, described on the menu as famous, fourteen dollars, Oreo cookies in it. Then there's a second one — The Irish Goodbye, same fourteen, same Oreos, with crème de menthe stirred in. A mudslide wearing a grasshopper's coat.

Two of the drinks arrive in packaging. Juice Box Hero, twelve dollars, comes in a juice pouch. The Beach Bag, also twelve, is described on the menu itself as an adult Capri Sun. The Painkiller gets nutmeg shaved over the top, and a rum float is two dollars more if you've decided it's that kind of afternoon. Somebody named a bourbon-and-iced-tea The Porch Swing. Somebody named a raspberry-and-blueberry vodka drink The Triple Bogey, which tells you there's mini golf out past the picnic tables.

Bog Water is twelve — Nantucket cranberry vodka, ginger beer, soda. A Cape-and-Islands name on a very plain drink.

And then the beer, which is where a year-rounder starts doing arithmetic. Three Ciscos, which is Nantucket. Coors, Miller, Michelob, Bud, Corona. Four canned cocktail brands. Exactly one beer on the current list brewed on Cape Cod proper: Devil's Purse Kölsch, eight dollars, out of South Dennis. No Cape Cod Beer. No Barnstable Brewing. No Cape winery on the wine side.

The Foleys have been running J.J. Foley's Cafe in Boston's South End since 1909, when Mike Foley Sr.'s great-grandfather opened it after emigrating from Ireland. In 1919, the Globe reports, more than a thousand Boston police officers voted in that room to unionize. The dispute ended in the police strike, and Governor Calvin Coolidge called in the National Guard.

Fifth generation now. Foley Sr. is fifty. His son and co-owner, Mike Jr., is twenty-four. The family has summered in Dennis for decades, which is the whole reason this exists — Foley Jr. told the Globe that plenty of good Cape restaurants have limited seating and long waits, and that makes them impractical when you're moving as a family of eleven.

The owners counted nineteen strollers between the picnic tables one Sunday. The Globe reported more than 250 people out there at three o'clock on a Tuesday, watching Spain play France on a fourteen-foot screen.

Three o'clock. On a Tuesday. In a town where most rooms are empty at that hour.

Two hundred fifty is not the ceiling. Three twenty-five is.

At the July 20 operational review, residents told the Planning Board that bass was carrying into the surrounding neighborhood. Speakers raised valet and parking, and amplified programming starting earlier in the day than they expected. One resident described a tent coming loose and reaching the library property.

Foley told the board that police measurements had run between 58 and 68 decibels, and said the operators had brought in an acoustical engineer. He discussed additional sound controls — an acoustic shell around the stage, sound-dampening curtains.

The permit requires perimeter fencing and plantings inside the vegetated buffer. When that work gets done became part of the conversation.

That's the trade this town made, and it made it in public, in a room, in February and again in July. A place where a family of eleven can eat outside without anybody apologizing, four hundred feet from people who bought their houses for the quiet.

It doesn't cook a thing. It just decides whose kitchen you're eating out of.

The Backyard by Foley's | 645 Main Street, Dennis Port Enter from South Street, across from the Oyster House. Posted hours: Mon–Sat 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m. | Sun 11:30 a.m.–8 p.m. Hours vary with weather and programming. Reservations for groups of 20 or more; walk-ins welcome. backyardbyfoleys.com