By Jamie Coelho with assistance by Lauren Clem and Dana Laverty

Fall River Food Guide

While we’ll never exhaust all the restaurant and dining options in Rhode Island, we thought it was high time we traverse the other big bridge over state lines to explore some foodie finds in Fall River, Massachusetts. 

Fall River is a melting pot of good food. It’s well known for its Portuguese cuisine, but everywhere you turn, there’s another market or restaurant representing a different culture. Not only are there fabulous Portuguese restaurants, bakeries and food markets, there are also dining institutions for Polish pierogies, Coney Island hot dogs, Italian-style grinders, Chinese chow mein, Lebanese spinach pies, English pork pies, gluten-free fare and so much more. The food and culture all relate back to the whaling and textile industries that initially brought so many immigrants to this area. 

New Bedford was once the whaling capital of the world. Whaling ships picked up men from the Azores to work on the ships, and many of them settled in southeastern New England. After the whaling industry declined, the textile industry took off, and Fall River was the perfect place to establish mills due to its “falling river” — the Quequechan River — with its series of eight falls that created ample power for industrialization. Factory and mill work brought European immigrants from other countries to the area. 

More Portuguese people later moved here to escape volcanic activity in the Azores and to avoid getting drafted into the Angolan Civil War, which ended Portuguese colonial rule in Africa. Many took jobs in the booming textile industry and other trades. Today, southeastern New England has the largest population of Portuguese people in the United States, with 46 percent of Fall River’s population claiming Portuguese ancestry. We took a couple of days to explore the dining and food shopping scenes with several trusted tour guides, and here’s what we found.

Click here to access the full guide, with pages of information about the best that Fall River has to offer!