Getaway to Maine
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Getaway to Maine
Where to eat in Portland and beyond, courtesy of our friends at FOUND NY
This week our friends at FOUND NY — a new twice-weekly newsletter for people with good taste in and around New York City — are checking out the Maine dining scene, in Portland and beyond. Check out their reports below and subscribe to FOUND here.
GETAWAYS • The Nines
Magnus on Water (Biddeford), serious cocktails and small plates
Palace Diner (Biddeford), elevated diner with life-changing tuna melt
The Well at Jordan’s Farm (Cape Elizabeth, above), gazebo fine dining in a farm field
Primo (Rockland), OG Midcoast farm-to-table still holds up
Nina June (Rockport), NYC chef Sara Jenkins (Porchetta) returns to her Maine roots
Long Grain (Camden), top-notch Thai, consider takeout if booked up
Brooklin Inn (Brooklin), serious cooking at a four-bedroom boutique inn
Aragosta at Goose Cove (Deer Isle), tasting menu via Tock, or walk-in on the patio
Jordan Pond House (Acadia), hike the pond then tuck into legendary popovers
Excluding lobster & clam shacks, but obviously go to McLoons.
GETAWAYS • Maine Restaurant Report
Twelve is the newest addition to Portland’s overachieving restaurant scene. It opened last summer to much food media acclaim, but we didn’t make it in until this June, when we did back-to-back nights there and at Fore Street, the standard-bearer for Portland fine dining.
Fore Street, which opened in 1996, is the Gramercy Tavern of Portland. I’ve had dozens of meals there over the years, and very little has changed about the dining room, the finest in New England. Much of the cooking happens over wood-fired grills and in a wood-burning oven that frames the open kitchen at the center of the restaurant. To start: oysters, of course, Bangs Island mussels, and if you’re there in tomato season, the tomato tart. For mains, order the seafood special, often served in cast-iron.
The cooking at Twelve is fussier — as befits the pedigrees of its principals, who worked at Eleven Madison Park, Per Se, and Tartine — but mostly wowed us. The menu is a four-course prix fixe for $90 in the dining room and a la carte at the bar, which takes walk-ins. The setting is lovely, too: a converted railroad building along a recently revitalized stretch of the harbor known as Portland Foreside.
Where Fore Street has always shined brightest, though, is service. Last month, as usual, the long-tenured waitstaff offered a deft, light, Danny Meyer-esque touch. Which stood in contrast to our over-attentive Twelve server asking us after every course, didn’t you love it? We did, and we might even more as the restaurant matures and settles into itself. Maine plays the long game. –Lockhart Steele
Twelve (Portland, ME), 115 Thames St., Resy
Fore Street (Portland, ME), 33 Wharf St., OpenTable