Rhode Island James Beard Award Winner Sly Fox Den Too Forced to Close
Indigenous chef Sherry Pocknett shut down the Charlestown restaurant unexpectedly over the weekend with plans to reopen in Connecticut.
James Beard Award-winning chef Sherry Pocknett of Sly Fox Den Too, now closed. Photo by Wolf Matthewson.
This past Friday night, an alarming post went up after an already tumultuous week in the Rhode Island food scene. Indigenous chef Sherry Pocknett, owner of Sly Fox Den Too in Charlestown — a 2023 James Beard Best Chef: Northeast Award winner — announced she was forced to shut down her restaurant unexpectedly due to a heating issue with the landlord.
“Unfortunately, after years of being here at the Charlestown location, we will have to close the doors due to horrible landlord issues. Ever since we signed the lease, there’s always been an issue. The biggest one is our heat issue, which has never been fixed, and for the first time, I have withheld rent and they now filed papers for us to get out,” the post stated.
It continued: “Unfortunately, this Sunday will be our last day. If you have any gift cards and don’t make it in to use them, we will honor them at our upcoming powwow’s this summer, for any catering jobs you would like to use us for, and of course, once we open our building we own in Preston, Connecticut, as soon as possible. This is just an unfortunate event, but maybe it is just the push we need to get our own building up and running.”
Sly Fox Den Too in Charlestown is closed. Photo by Jamie Coelho.
Chef Pocknett was the first chef in Rhode Island to win a James Beard Award since Al Forno’s late George Germon and Johanne Killeen took home the Best Chef: Northeast title in 1993. Pocknett’s restaurant, which she ran with her daughters, Cheyenne and Jade Pocknett-Galvin, focused on foraged, hunted and fished ingredients that made up her Native American fusion menu that paid tribute to the Mashpee Wampanoag people. This was also the first time that an Indigenous woman had won a prestigious James Beard Award, which are often called “the Oscars of the food world.”
Pocknett attended the awards at the Lyric Opera in Chicago in 2023 with her daughter Jade, wearing her traditional regalia after completing radiation treatment for breast cancer. “It feels amazing that finally we are getting the recognition that I think people want to know about. They are curious and people want to try the food,” she had said.
Now, the public will have to wait to enjoy her cuisine again until the family is able to raise enough funds to open the restaurant they had planned to launch in Preston, Connecticut, under the same name. They will continue serving at area powwows and accept catering orders. Sly Fox Den Too was named after Sherry Pocknett’s father, chief Sly Fox Vernon Pocknett, who taught her all about foraging, hunting, fishing and harvesting shellfish. “My dad was a fisherman and a truck driver. He was always working, fishing, hunting, always foraging for something,” Pocknett said in a previous interview. “They taught us the bounty of the season. They wanted to make sure we could take care of ourselves if we had to.”
Some of the ingredients on the menu included venison, rabbit, quahogs, local fish, foraged herbs and vegetables and more. Specialties included chef Sherry’s corn cakes made from both yellow and white flint cornmeal (also known as johnny cakes) that nestled everything from eggs to stew; quahog chowder, which is a Mashpee Wampanoag recipe made with quahog clams, potatoes, onions and ground black peppercorn in a broth; Indian fry bread was served with nearly everything, and there were specials like turtle soup with fiddleheads, skate wing, smoked salmon, housemade sausage and more. Poached eggs came with a choice of home fries or nausamp, which are yellow corn grits. “Three Sisters” rice is another of chef Sherry’s specialties made with corn, squash, beans and wild rice.
Pocknett had always planned to open the Preston location first. She had already purchased the 3.5 acres in hopes of opening the Sly Fox Den Museum and Oyster Farm, complete with sustainable vegetable, fruit and herb gardens as well as on-site aquaculture. But the location needed a lot of work at the time (she raised more than $9,868 to jumpstart it). In 2019, she decided to buy the smaller turnkey spot in Charlestown, the former Gentleman Farmer restaurant. She and her family opened that location first, in order to invest in the original spot; hence the word “too” in the restaurant name.
“That’s how we ended up here in this restaurant, because we were trying to create revenue to get that other one open,” Pocknett had said. Now Rhode Islanders will have to travel to Connecticut to experience the James Beard Award winner’s menu.
Poached eggs with venison sausage on corn cakes at Sly Fox Den Too. Photo by Jamie Coelho.
