Month: November 2012

This Week’s Events: Portland Beer Week, Cooking Classes, Movie Night, Pie Tasting

| Posted in Events

Portland Beer Week — more than 50 events are taking place now through Sunday. See the Portland Beer Week calendar for  all the details.

Wednesday — the Maine Cooperative Extension is teaching a food safety class for people helping to cook meals for crowds, and the Monument Square Farmers Market is taking place.

Thursday — Grace will be donating $5 per person that has dinner to the Red Cross for victims of Sandy, they’ll be gathering coats and blankets which Sharon Kitchens from Delicious Musings will be driving down to NY/NJ next week. The Great Lost Bear is showcasing beer from D.L. Geary’s, a Thanksgiving wine tasting is taking place at Aurora Provisions, and Bartlett Winery, Sweetgrass Distillery, Bar Lola and El Camino will be at Seawall for an event featuring Drinking in Maine by Russell French and Michael Saunders.

Friday — there will be a wine tasting at Rosemont Market on Brighton.

Saturday — Rosemont is holding a pie tasting at their Brighton store and a natural wine tasting at their Munjoy Hill store, Sea Change Cooking is teaching a cooking class, and the Deering Oaks Farmers Market is taking place.

Sunday — Pocket Brunch (sold out) is taking place, Babbette’s Feast is the featured film at Petite Jacqueline’s movie night.

Great American Bake Sale — Share Our Strength’s Great American Bake Sale is taking place during the month of November. Proceeds are being donated to the Good Shepherd Food Bank and other organizations that fight hunger in Maine.

Emilitsa — Emiltsa has begun serving lunch on Thursdays and Fridays with a menu of soups, salads, sandwiches and traditional greek comfort food.

For more information on these and other upcoming food happenings in the area, visit the event calendar.

If you are holding a food event this week that’s not listed above, publicize it by adding it as a comment to this post.

Maine Brewers Festival

| Posted in Beer

Both the Maine Sunday Telegram and the Bangor Daily News have published reports on the Maine Brewers Festival.

Healy and 4,999 other beer enthusiasts — tickets were limited to 5,000 — downed samples from about 15 Maine craft breweries at the Portland Expo. The 19th annual festival drew a mixture of beer connoisseurs, hobby brewers and people looking for a fun time with friends.

Attendees received tickets to sample up to a dozen 4-ounce glasses, choosing from 100 varieties of beer.

 

Eventide in the Wall Street Journal

| Posted in Reviews

Eventide was called out as one of the nation’s Outstanding Oyster Bars by the Wall Street Journal.

Since opening this summer, this bright, inviting spot has quickly established itself as the pearl of Portland’s Old Port. Grab a seat at the bar hewn from cement and Maine granite, nosh on house-made pickles and a cup of chowder, and browse the selection of oysters arrayed on crushed ice: 18 enticing varieties, nine from Maine and nine “from away.” Don’t neglect the top-notch cocktails, like the surprising and simple celery gimlet.

Boston Globe: The Holy Donut & 2 Dark Beers

| Posted in Beer, Profiles

The Boston Globe has published a profile of The Holy Donut,

This is a typical Saturday morning for the 5-month-old shop in Portland’s Deering Oaks neighborhood, even though Kellis and her staff, several of whom are family members (she co-owns the business with her father, Allen), have continuously ramped up production since they opened. Nowadays, they turn out roughly 1,200 doughnuts a day in at least a dozen different flavors: plain wide rings dredged with cinnamon-sugar or dripping with maple, lemon, vanilla, or “mojito” lime glaze; sweet potato doughnuts laced with ginger; best-selling dark-chocolate doughnuts flecked with coarse sea salt.

and has highlighted a pair of dark beers from Maine Beer Co. and Peaks,

Thick pine and citrus flavors hit your tongue first, but they’re balanced by a smoky backbone. There’s sweet caramel in here, too, but the hops never go away. They remind you of their presence from start to finish. This is a truly exceptional beer.

Reviews of Paciarino and Eventide

| Posted in Reviews

Diningsense has published a review of Paciarino,

This was another pleasing meal at Paciarino and with the Groupon, the bill was incredibly low. The dessert notwithstanding, there was nothing different about this meal vis a vis past ones—and this is exactly what I look for in a restaurant at this price point. The execution on the ravioli is consistently excellent, the prices are very reasonable, and the restaurant operates almost like a machine…

and The Blueberry Files has published a review of Eventide.

The food is deconstructed, small bites giving way to full flavor when taken together. It makes you think, this is what they’re talking about, those glossy magazines that gush over hip new places in cities that you’ve never visited, places you can’t afford.

TV x Restaurant List

| Posted in General News

I Love Portland Maine has reviewed recent TV shows about the Maine food scene and compiled this handy list of which restaurants where visited by each show.

In the past couple of years alone, we’ve had four shows filmed right in the Old Port, and that’s just for our (apparently world class) restaurant scene, where Food is being elevated to the level of Art. It doesn’t even count all the movies that needed a quaint, reclusive backdrop for their sets. Actually, with all the camera crews that must’ve been milling around I can’t believe I haven’t stumbled into one of them by now…

ILPM has also posted an interview with chef Chuck Hughes whose TV show, Chuck’s Eat the Street aired an episode about Portland earlier this week.

ILPM: Why did you pick Commercial Street in particular?
Chuck: Because it’s a mix of the working waterfront, locals, and tourists… it’s a showcase of fresh food– simple and authentic.

The Portland episode of Chuck’s Eat the Street will be rebroadcast on The Cooking Channel this Sunday at 4 pm.

The Food Coma Show Premiere

| Posted in Events

Bourbon. Portland. Beer. Politics. has published an interview with Joe Ricchio about his new venture The Food Coma Show,

What can people expect from the episode?
The episode is the pilot of The Food Coma Show. It focuses on a meal at Bresca and it looks great. It’s about 24 minutes long and the guests are Olympic skier Julie Parisien, Spose, Joel Beauchamp, [Ricchio’s roommate] Jon Dietz and myself and basically you watch me have dinner. That may be good, or you may hate me afterward. It is kind of an experiment under the Food Coma umbrella. You might hate it and think “This is the most self-indulgent piece of s**t I have ever seen,” but you never know.

and so has the Press Herald,

What makes a good “Food Coma” guest?
Someone who has stories, appreciates food and loves to get drunk. Someone who you’d like to have dinner with in real life. For the first episode, we’ve got Spose, whom I’ve hung out with a few times. Julie I met just once and I heard she was a fan of the old show. Entertainment, athletics, the wine biz the unifying factor is food and drink. That’s where everyone comes together.

and so has the Portsmouth Herald.

“I always felt that when we go to these places we couldn’t carry the experience to the audience. We couldn’t really show what the place was about . Now it’s all one restaurant experience. For the pilot, the chef Krista Desjarlais (Bresca) introduces the menu and we just eat. I really want people to think, ‘I want to go eat there.'”

The premiere episode of The Food Coma Show is being shown this Sunday at SPACE Gallery. Tickets are now on sale.

First Review of Flores

| Posted in Reviews

The Portland Phoenix has published a review of Flores.

The Flores version of chicharron (basically fried pork rinds) includes lots of juicy meat along with the crunchy skin. Their meatiness turns a salad of chicharron with yucca, cabbage, and tomato into something like a meal. The big pieces of yucca (cassava root, sort of resembling potato in texture) are boiled instead of fried. Salvadorans like to fry the tortilla in their tacos. But if you want to really appreciate the house-made tortillas at Flores it’s better to get your tacos soft. Fresh tortillas are too hard to find in Maine, and Flores offers a nice thick, hand-slapped version made from corn. Warm, sweet, and a touch greasy, they are pretty terrific.

Poket Brunch & Review of Figa

| Posted in Reviews, Events

The November issue of Portland Magazine includes a review of Figa,

The charcuterie ($18) is irresistible, house-made. The foot-and-a-half-long wondrous wooden platter displays a dreamy assortment of meats (duck pastrami, pork-and-pistachio terrine, beef bresaola, apricot-cased pork lomo, pork terrine), pickled fennel and red onion, cornichons, and a delectable house-made mustard. We go after each tempting, savory substance with gusto.

a feature article about Pocket Brunch,

In between snacking on tasty pre-meal bites, which includes hand-pressed cider, fresh doughnuts, beet-red velvet muffins topped with goat cheese frosting and walnuts, and fire-smoked bacon, diners pick bouquets from the farm’s flower fields. On the lawn, teams of guests face off at kubb, a Swedish game in which players attempt to knock down wooden blocks by tossing thick dowels across the field.

and named Portland restaurant health inspector Michele Sturgeon to their list of the 10 Most Intriguing Mainers.

Reviews of Sangillo’s and Full Belly Deli

| Posted in Reviews

The Press Herald has published reviews of Sangillo’s,

Those sipping cocktails all agreed they were poured with a generous hand. And we also agreed, you can’t beat the price at Sangillo’s — you can get a can of PBR and a Cape Cod cocktail for $6.

and of Full Belly Deli.

And speaking of Grand Central Station, the Full Belly Deli is one of the few places in Maine where you can get the best of traditional Jewish deli fare a la New York City haunts like Katz’s Delicatessen or the Carnegie Deli.