Eleven years after opening Pop+Dutch, their petite sandwich and sundries shop on Commercial Street in Provincetown, Rebecca Orchant and Sean Gardner expanded into nighttime food and drinks. In June they launched Ladyslipper, a cocktail lounge two minutes up the street, with partner Ben Weihbrecht. Like its sibling, Ladyslipper makes a big impression from its small space with delicious and creative drinks; tasty, fun snacks and desserts; and an overall happy vibe.
Orchant and Gardner met in New Mexico, where she grew up and where his family moved when he was 12. He lived in Bridgewater when he was younger, and his family spent summers in Chatham but, “as soon as I was driving age, I’d venture out to the Outer Cape,” he explains. He first brought Orchant to Provincetown around 2007, and she fell in love with its beauty, lifestyle and queer culture. Before moving to the seaside town in 2014, the two spent several years in Brooklyn working in food-related jobs. Gardner was manager of Court Street Grocers, a beloved purveyor of regional specialty foods – most made in the U.S. – and housemade sandwiches. Orchant wrote about food for HuffPost Taste. “We decided we wanted to be the ones to make [the food] and we wanted to live at the beach,” she says. “We knew if we were going to do something on Cape Cod, it was going to be in Provincetown. This is the only place for me.”
The couple opened Pop+Dutch in the former Provincetown General Store space. Initially, they continued to sell groceries along with the sandwiches and prepared foods that were their focus because they thought the neighborhood needed it. Over time, they phased out groceries in favor of beach essentials, picnic supplies and vintage ware, the latter the result of their collecting habit. Everything from the vintage-inflected decor (repeated at Ladyslipper) to the sandwich names, to signs throughout says, “We don’t take ourselves too seriously and neither should you.”
Orchant and Gardner make most of the food, but now some staff pitch in with prep under the owners’ supervision. They poach and hand-slice turkey for the customer-favorite Agent Dale Cooper sandwich and make the pickled shallot garnish in-house. They also poach the chicken for the Gator McKlusky Green Goddess chicken salad sandwich. Of course they make the Green Goddess dressing too. Orchant’s buttermilk biscuits, available with pimento cheese, house-made jam or sorghum, are legendary. Every Summer, All Summer is the best-selling summer tomato sandwich special: thick slices of local heirlooms with Duke’s mayo, Maldon salt and black pepper on potato bread. “We run it until the heirlooms start to taste mealy,” Gardner says.
In addition to salads, vegetarian and vegan options are headlined by the Danny DeVito (roasted mushrooms, mandoline-sliced zucchini, provolone, hoagie relish, artichoke hearts and arugula) and Sophia Loren (Caprese ingredients with spicy mayo on focaccia, both made in-house) sandwiches – “Italian vegetarians named for Italian vegetarians,” Gardner explains. All sandwiches can be made on gluten-free bread, and the peanut butter cookies are gluten-free.
Until just before July 4, Pop+Dutch offered what Gardner describes as “a remarkably good” breakfast sandwich. They stopped breakfast service when they opened Ladyslipper. Sandwiched between Provincetown Bookshop and The Canteen, the only hint of the red wooden building’s previous incarnation as a convenience store is the neon LOTTERY sign behind the bar. Unlike Pop+Dutch, which is seasonal, Ladyslipper is open year-round.
“We’ve both always wanted to own a bar,” says Orchant. “It has been a long-standing dream of ours. It came about with our friend Ben, who was a bartender at the beer garden [Nor’East Beer Garden]. We were chatting about the building that became available, and he said he’d always wanted to open his own bar and he was ready. He is an absolute cocktail wizard.”
The partners received the keys in April, and did the buildout themselves, except the plumbing. The cozy, 34-seat space serves Weihbrecht’s creative cocktails, beer and wine, with Orchant and Gardner’s snacks and desserts by Kelly Fields, a James Beard Award-winning pastry chef and friend of the owners. Fields and Weihbrecht have been having fun playing off of each other’s creations. For example, Weihbrecht answered Fields’ corn pannacotta with blueberry compote and Tajin caramel corn with a corn milk punch with blueberry whip. They can be paired or enjoyed separately. Other drink favorites include the Come One Comal, with mezcal, nixta (corn liqueur), chili mango, pineapple and lime, and Little Red, with vodka, strawberry, rhubarb and lemon, garnished with beet powder dusted through a stencil in the shape of fish scales.
In the spirit of Pop+Dutch, Gardner says the snacks are, “The kind of stuff you want to eat at a bar, but playful.” Chips and dip features homemade French onion dip and Middleswarth bar-b-q chips, cooked in beef tallow. Cheese slaw, a Roanoke, Virginia specialty, looks like coleslaw but is a mix of cheddar and Swiss cheese with chopped pickles, jalapeño and banana peppers, spices and a little bit of mayo. Orchant didn’t want to copy exactly Pop+Dutch’s popular pimento cheese but says the slaw is “pimento cheese adjacent.” Bordering on high-end, she notes, are a tinned fish plate and a vegan pâté. With a cashew base, the pâté incorporates roasted artichokes and zucchini, white miso and “a lot of pickle juice. I was a little worried it was going to be too weird for folks, and I cannot keep it in stock.” Orchant says she plans to change the menu seasonally. Fall and winter will probably mean soups and hot snacks.
Having one seasonal and one year-round business makes perfect sense to the couple. “The model at Pop+Dutch is we’re a beach sandwich shop; we don’t have seats,” says Gardner. Ladyslipper is fun and fills a void. “We all live here year-round, and Provincetown is losing gathering spaces hand over fist,” Orchant notes. “It’s nice to have someplace where you can meet your friends for something delicious.”
Ladyslipper
227 Commercial Street, Provincetown
@ladyslipperptown
Pop+Dutch
147 Commercial Street, Provincetown
popanddutch.com
