Eat Drink Lucky is once again offering a Maine artist tea towel subscription for the coming year. Each month subscribers will receive a tea towel designed by a different Maine artists—see the EDL website for a list of partners.
Subscriptions are available in 3-month increments for the full year. The New York Times has included the Eat Drink Lucky subscription in their 2024 Gift Guide.
The photo above shows an assortment of towels from the 2024 subscription.
The Press Herald has published a report on the free Thanksgiving meal program that Taj restaurant has run for the last four years. This year the owner Sai Guntaka and his family were on track to hand out 1000+ meals.
The restaurant was providing food for all on Thursday, whether customers could pay or not. By early afternoon, owner Sai Guntaka said Taj was on track to give away between 1,000 and 1,200 free meals by the end of the day, in addition to the hundreds of meals they served to paying customers.
The James Beard Foundation posted an open call for recommendations from industry professionals and the general public earlier this fall. The deadline for everyone to send in their submissions is coming up on November 29th.
If there’s an exceptional food or drink business or hospitality professional you want to see win a Beard Award then visit jamesbeardawards.awardsplatform.com to create an account and send in a submission on their behalf.
For reference here’s:
The Maine Center for Entrepreneurs held their biennial Food Producers Showcase today at Thompson’s Point. The event included dozens of Maine companies from oyster farms to bakeries to packaged good producers like Pen and Cob Farm and Ragged Coast Chocolates. The MCE announced the winners of the three Golden Fork Awards:
The latest episode of Maine Calling on Maine Public Radio focuses on Maine’s Food businesses. Panelists and callers include representatives from FocusMaine, the Maine Department of Agriculture, the Maine Center for Entrepreneurs and callers from Tootie’s Tempeh, Maine Harvest, CEI and more.
Practical Pomology: A Field Guide, a new book guide for identifying and describing apples is now available to pre-order on Kickstarter. The 150-page book explains how to differentiate between seedling and grafted trees, how to recognize and name the various features of the apple, and includes anatomical photographs of the thirty-four varieties (Saint Lawrence shown below) that most commonly grow in historic orchards. The books is extensively illustrated with photos an drawings.
Practical Pomology has been written by Sean Turley, a Portland-based apple author, historian, photographer, cidermaker, forager and the creator of The Righteous Russet instagram account. Turley worked extensively with Maine’s preeminent apple expert John Bunker on writing the book, as well as with designers, artists, and photographers to bring the subject to life.
Apples are everywhere; so are books about apples. But despite the extraordinary quantity and quality of tomes about pomes, no text has ever been printed that provides a comprehensive, systematic approach to describing and identifying historic varieties of apples—let alone one that condenses the foundational work by pomologists over the last couple of centuries into a simple-to-follow, practical resource for the expert and novice alike.
Practical Pomology: A Field Guide aims to fill that void. Across its pages, you will be taught how to recognize and differentiate between seedling and grafted trees; describe and classify the anatomical features of the apple; and identify and distinguish among the varieties most commonly found in historic orchards. It is a resource that can be pulled off the shelf when deciphering descriptions of lost varieties in antiquated texts and a portable manual you can toss in your backpack when heading out into the field. Whether you are new to pomology or an old hand at describing and identifying pomes, this book should prove to be an indispensable resource.
You can pre-order your copy of Practical Pomology on Kickstarter now through December 14th. The book is expected to go to print in early January and be shipped to customers in mid-March.
Today’s Maine Sunday Telegram includes a review of Wander at Long Woods, and an article about the evolving Saco food scene.
As in past years, the James Beard Foundation has posted an open call for recommendations from industry professionals and the general public for the awards committee to consider when building the list of semifinalists for 2025.
The entry and recommendation period for the 2025 James Beard Awards…is officially open! We’re looking for chefs, beverage experts, creators, and culinary and food system leaders who could be the next James Beard Award winners…Whether you published a cookbook in the last year, own a restaurant, or advocate for food system change, we encourage you to submit your entries and recommend your talented colleagues.
A notable change from last year is the addition of three new awards categories: Best New Bar, Outstanding Professional in Beverage Service, and Outstanding Professional in Cocktail Service. These are in addition to the existing categories of Outstanding Bar and Outstanding Wine and Other Beverages Program.
The deadline to submit recommendations is Friday, November 29th and if the process follows the pattern from 2023 and 2024 then we can expect to see the semifinalist list come out in late January.
Reference these PDFs for guidelines on the chef and restaurant awards categories, and for insight into the overall awards process. Also check out this list we maintain on Portland Food Map for a list of past award winners, nominees and semifinalists from Maine.
To create an account and submit your recommendations visit: jamesbeardawards.awardsplatform.com
Vien Dobui, chef and co-owner of Công Tử Bột, is one of the restaurateurs interviewed by Eater for an article on “Why Restaurants Are So Expensive Now.” Dobui’s commentary reads in part,
“I’m going to be completely transparent; we filed for bankruptcy in December 2023. We might break even this year. Most of our costs go to labor; our restaurant is actually unionized, so our labor percentage is almost unsustainably high, around 50 percent. And that’s by design. When I am pricing our food, I generally take the highest-cost ingredients, and multiply that by a factor of three and a half to four and a half, and that usually captures my labor costs.
Portland Old Port has released the list of award winners from their Best of 2024 readership survey. Dozens of categories run the gamut from Best Bar (The Great Lost Bear) to Best Veggie Burger (Totally Awesome Vegan Food Truck).
Congratulations to all the winners, and thanks to everyone who voted for Portland Food Map, with your help we won the Best Blog/Website category.