It’s not necessarily somewhere you want to hang out in winter. But you couldn’t pick a more pleasant seaside town in summer than Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with its gorgeous Colonial and Federal style houses and colorful brick buildings lining the harbor. Half the fun of visiting is eating fresh seafood at a restaurant along the Piscataqua River (if you can splurge, try the Wellington Room). Then there’s the added bonus of being able to look across the water and see Maine. Sure, it’s just the town of Kittery you’re staring at and not Winslow Homer’s cliffs, but still. Maine! Wandering the shoreline of two states in this particular cove, you feel like you’re getting two snapshots of historic coastal New England for the price of one.

If you do make the few minutes’ drive across the Memorial Bridge to Kittery, you’ll realize that, unfortunately, most people are making a beeline for the town’s gigantic outlet malls. We say skip those and head straight for the historic sites, like the small museum at Fort McClary, the Lady Pepperell House and other historic buildings in Kittery Point.

For museums on the Portsmouth side, check out cool paintings and photos of New England seaside life at the Strawbery Banke Museum or period furniture at the Moffatt-Ladd House & Garden. If you’re still hungry at the end of the day, you must stop by Bob’s Clam Hut, the quintessential New England seafood shack where you can get whole clams, clam fritters, clam burgers and clam cakes. Perhaps not the healthiest pick, but Bob’s, which showed up recently on The Food Network, is a member of the Green Alliance, a Portsmouth-based environmental group. Bring your own silverware to Bob’s and they’ll donate $2 to green causes.

Image: InAweofGod’sCreation

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Something just feels right about eating fresh fish in a pirate costume. For weeks, my friends and I had been planning a pirate-themed party, and last weekend we pulled it together: Eye patches, hats, sashes, plastic swords. Oh yes, and ten fully-grown adults calling each other Cap’n and saying things like “Shiver me timbers!” We rented our good ship, a pontoon boat, on Douglas Lake in East Tennessee, and set sail, returning to our friend’s lakeside cabin for amazing meals – including fried catfish, of course.

Hokey? Absolutely. But the next stop on our pirate-themed tour of the South will be anything but. Turns out one of the greenest restaurants in Charleston, South Carolina – which this weekend hosts the extraordinary arts festival Spoleto – is The Buccaneer, a seafood joint with a pirate museum attached.

The Buccaneer, in a warehouse on a cobblestoned street in the city’s wharf district, was in fact the first certified green restaurant in the state of South Carolina. For grub and grog, The Buccaneer serves locally-caught shrimp and crab, vegetables grown on its own Wadmalaw Island farm, and beer made by Charleston’s Palmetto Brewing Company. The small museum includes decidedly un-cheesy pirate artifacts, like cannons, tankards, engravings and coins that the owners collected from around the world. Still, when you run a pirate-themed restaurant, you must tolerate at least a bit of pirate silliness, right? My friends and I will bring an eye patch or two but leave our plastic swords at home.

Image: Courtesy of Tripadvisor

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Happiness, it turns out, is a slice of grilled pound cake. Put pound cake on a grill and it comes off looking like a dainty steak and smelling just like a toasted marshmallow. Top it with ice cream made from organic local strawberries and you have a nice neat pile of eco-friendly foodie bliss. In fact, such bliss comes in all shapes and sizes at Knife & Fork, an out-of-the-way upscale farm-to-table eatery in tiny Spruce Pine, North Carolina. Chef Nathan Allen, who studied at Johnson & Wales and received his cooking comeuppance in L.A., opened the restaurant last July with his wife, Wendy Gardner. While residents of nearby Asheville, N.C., have a dozen or so fine farm-to-table restaurants to choose from, this one is well worth the hour’s drive across the mountains.

A friend and I were heading north from Asheville through the Blue Ridge Mountains, winding our way up to Boone, a college town named for Daniel Boone. Even when you live in the mountains like I do, Boone feels lofty. At 3,300 feet, it’s simply higher than all the towns around it. In fact, it’s higher than any town east of the Mississippi. From many points on the campus of Appalachian State University, you can survey the Blue Ridge high country and its layer upon layer of smoky blue slopes.

If you’re lucky enough to land in this scenic corner of North Carolina, take U.S. Route 221 through the Pisgah National Forest and stop off at roadside farm stands. In spring and summer, they sell local veggies and flowers, plus quirky southern items like boiled peanuts, sourwood honey and wild, onion-like ramps. A smattering of ramps stole the show in my Knife & Fork entrée, a flatbread dish with bacon and two sunny-side-up eggs, laid that morning by the chef’s own chickens.

In rural Appalachia, gourmet eateries are few and far between. (And environmentally-minded restaurateurs are even farther between.) But digging into my plate at a diamond-in-the-rough green restaurant like Knife & Fork, I found the food to be as good or better than any I’d had at white-tablecloth restaurants in big coastal cities. And the scenery on the drive to get there, was hard to beat.

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Turns out it isn’t easy being green in Savannah – the spooky Southern city known for its historic squares and trees dripping with Spanish moss. According to the Green Restaurant Association, a Boston-based nonprofit, there’s only one green-certified restaurant in Savannah and it’s a takeout joint – not surprising in Paula Deen country. Deen, the queen of the deep-fried Twinkie, has lived in Savannah since the “˜80s. The Food Network star and her family still run The Lady & Sons restaurant in downtown Savannah, which serves up down-home Southern dishes like peach barbecue grouper with cheddar cheese grit cakes.

If you’re looking for eco-friendly though, Thrive, a newish green-certified “carry-out café” on Whitemarsh Island, does seem like it’s worth a stop on your way to the beach. As you head toward the coast from downtown, pack a gourmet picnic basket with jambalaya (made with wild Georgia shrimp) and stuffed seasonal vegetables nicoise. Locals also keep coming back for the signature chicken salad, made with organic chicken, grapes, almonds and cranberries.

Thrive gets many of its vegetables from the Forsyth Farmers’ Market in Forsyth Park, a 30-acre gem in the middle of Savannah’s historic district. Famous for its fountain and moss-covered live oaks, the park’s farmers’ market is a good place to find fresh herbs, veggies and local baked goods on Saturdays all summer.

Image: rachelspeak

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In New York City you expect good restaurants, but not necessarily green ones. I was lucky enough to be traipsing around the Big Apple recently with several old and dear friends. One of them happens to live near Gusto Organics, the 6th Avenue Manhattan eatery that claims to be the first and only completely organic NYC restaurant. And when they say completely, they mean it. Everything in the restaurant is organic, from the mushrooms on the bruschetta, to the candles on the tables and the cotton in the servers’ uniforms. The restaurant’s founder, Argentinian Alberto Gonzalez, has racked up green kudos galore for his all-organic concept, making appearances on CBS and CNN. When I strolled by, the breezy outdoor seating area was lined with boxes of organic herbs and I saw that Gusto had just launched a line of high-end organic baby food.

But while their dedication to organic is admirable, more than a few people who had eaten at the restaurant found Gusto’s entrees to be pricey and lacking punch. Risotto for $19? Only if it’s top notch. Several online reviewers noted that the grilled veggies in the pizzas and pastas were healthy but bland. “If you don’t mind paying $9 for a salad with only three ingredients, then I recommend this place,” one reviewer wrote.

Since picking the right restaurant is critical to having a fantastic weekend in New York, my friends and I skipped Gusto in all its green glory. We ended up at a Brooklyn joint, Flatbush Farm, that I thought was the perfect blend of earthy eco-friendly and New York City sophisticated. It’s on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, which is pretty far from any actual farms. (Their “garden” is now open, but by garden they mean a large-ish concrete back patio with soft twinkling lights.) Yes, a good deal of their veggies and meats are organic and raised on farms in Vermont and upstate New York. And yes, they advocate local, seasonal eating and are official pals with Slow Food USA. But plenty on the menu is not certified organic and that’s all right with me. The plain fact is, their food was really good. And walking in, even with a name like Flatbush Farm, the restaurant doesn’t hit you over the head with its farm-to-table philosophy. The atmosphere is swank but not too formal, earth-friendly without being righteous. There are plenty of fancy menu items, like oysters and filet mignon, but also un-snooty ones, like a ploughman’s platter and beer and broccoli soup. Yes, my heaping plate of free-range roast chicken and kale was $22, but it was heaping. And delicious. The lesson in all this seemed to be that, in New York City (and everywhere, really) when you go organic, it still has to be good.

Image: saschaaa

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Yes, it’s true. It’s possible to love both Hank Williams and fancy food made with organic vegetables. When I lived in New York City, I never met so many people who shell out as much cash for dinner at Nobu as they do for Dwight Yoakam concert tickets. Or who stand around in urban honky-tonks wearing designer jeans. There’s no shame in it. But it sometimes results in dissonant combinations – like, in my case, owning both a fuel-efficient Honda and a gas-guzzling ’79 Ford truck (just for kicks).

Lately I’ve been wheeling around in the Honda – Nitty Gritty Dirt Band blasting, of course – making stops in my favorite country music meccas. Late spring is a perfect time to visit Austin, right when the South by Southwest festival crowd has cleared out. But really, any time is a good time to visit the Texas capital, one of the greenest cities in the country and one of the best places to find both mind-blowing Mexican food and brilliant country and alt-country music acts. One of the buzziest shows in Nashville this spring will be Dierks Bentley, playing the Ryman Auditorium in May with Del McCoury’s band members and scruffy alt-country hottie Hayes Carll. Ryman (as a side note, if you haven’t seen the full-scale replica of the Parthenon in Nashville’s Centennial Park, it’s something to check off your life list.) And coming up in St. Louis in June is TwangFest, one of that city’s coolest country-flavored musical happenings.

Even if twang’s not your thang, chances are you’ll end up in one of these burgs soon. And when you do, you must stop off at these excellent, eco-friendly eateries.

Austin: La Condesa

You’d never think crabmeat would belong in guacamole. And you’d never believe crabmeat guacamole would taste better with a tart green apple mixed in. But somehow it does, and it all comes together in one heaping, mouth-watering bowl at La Condesa, a hot, cosmopolitan new Austin Mexican joint. La Condesa gets a two star certification from the Green Restaurant Association, and a stamp on the menu reads: “We use local, organic and humanely harvested ingredients. Because it tastes better.” That means vegetables from Austin area farms and meats from sustainable producers like Niman Ranch.

Last year La Condesa won the Austin CVB’s Cocktail Throwdown with the Enlightened Austin Martini, made with organic watermelon juice, agave nectar and Tito’s Vodka. Have one on your way to a Carrie Underwood concert (she plays the Frank Erwin Center on May 12), or go see the Band of Heathens, who play the legendary downtown blues club Antone’s on May 21.

Nashville: 1808 Grille

In Nashville, you can hit the honky-tonks. And you must stroll around the Country Music Hall of Fame, where you can see Hank Williams’ boots and learn all about Brenda Lee, who sang “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree“. But you might forget that you’re in country music-land altogether if you stay at the Hutton Hotel downtown. It’s a 50 million dollar eco-friendly boutique hotel that opened last spring with green features like a water-saving laundry system, bamboo floors and energy-efficient lights that shut off when you leave the room.

The hotel’s 1808 Grille is worth a stop, even if you don’t stay at the Hutton. The menu is New American in every sense, with trendy dishes like rutabaga lamb pot pie and several global touches, like a vegan soba noodle Pad Thai. Still, it’s hard to beat a solid burger and garlic-parsley fries, or the cod and potato “tater tots.”

St. Louis: Pi and the Atomic Cowboy

Truth be told, St. Louis is not your greenest city. Or your twangiest. In fact, because I grew up just south of there, I know it to be more of a baseball-playin’, beer drinkin’ Mississippi River town where Purina dog food and the evil ag biotech company Monsanto are headquartered. (Though everyone was excited a few years back when several Whole Foods markets moved in.) But you can certainly find some fun things to do there in the summer. Like Twangfest, which runs June 9 – 12. In past years, Twangfest has totally rocked, with sizzling alt-country and folky singer-songwriter acts like Alejandro Escovedo, The Gourds, The Avett Brothers and Slaid Cleaves.

And believe it or not, you can find some green eateries not far from the festival in the Delmar Loop. First, there’s Pi, a trendy chainlet of eco-friendly pizzerias. They’re known for their cornmeal-crust, deep-dish pizzas with fresh veggie toppings and some unusual additions like Amish chicken. Then there’s the Atomic Cowboy, which serves Tex-Mex and burgers and has and outdoor patio and fire pit. It’s about 10 minutes from the festival but well worth the drive, and they serve food until late. They compost all their food scraps and have recently started serving up organic wines and cocktails. You can’t go wrong with a Cowboy Cosmo.

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