Category: General News

Terrence Henry is a journalist who is making a food tour of US, Canada and beyond and reporting on the experience at TheAtlantic.com. He’ll be spending 24 hours in Portland and is asking for advice on where he should eat. Five Fifty-Five, Evangeline, Duckfat, Fore Street, Hugo’s and Bresca are all on his short list but he’s open to other ideas. The poll results are favoring Fore Street over Five Fifty-Five by a 2-1 margin at the moment. (via Port City Sally)

Had I planned this all out better, we would probably be spending a few days in Portland instead of just 24 hours. But this being a trip on a budget, we have to get to New York by Thursday to enjoy four nights of free accommodation (thanks, Mom!), so we’re left with too little time to sample what’s on offer in the promising city of Portland, Maine (this may necessitate a return trip in the future).

OpenTable, an online restaurant reservation service, has never had that many Portland area restaurants to choose from on their site. That’s now starting to change. Bar Lola, Bull Feeney’s, Cinque Terre, David’s, Five Fifty-Five, Fore Street, Street & Co, The Frog and Turtle and Vignola are now all listed on the site. I hope they continue the expansion. It’s a very useful service, especially when looking for last minute reservations or trying to get a table for a larger group.
Restaurants are charged a fee for every reservation made through the site but the fee is less if you link to the OpenTable reservation page from the restaurant’s own website. So if you want to cut your favorite place a break go to their site first and click on their reservation link. Fore Street, Street & Co and Bull Feeney’s are the only ones that don’t have a reservations link on their own site.

Erik and Krista Desjarlais, owners of Evangeline and Bresca, have posted information on their blogs (here and here) about their new venture, 12 Seats.

12 Seats is a collaboration between Krista and I. 12 Seats is just what the title says. 12 seats, 12 courses, 12 times in one year. The last Sunday of each month, Krista and I will transform bresca in to an amalgamation of our culinary and hospitality passions. 12 Seats will take over the bresca dining room and kitchen, and she and I will transform ourselves into one chef with the mind of two cooks.

Columnist Margo Mallar has written about B&M Beans history and her tour of the facility here in Portland in her weekly food column in this weekend’s Portland Daily Sun.

From the sluice where navy pea beans are first winnowed to the conveyor belt where labeled cans are wrapped for warehousing, we walked the canning process from start to finish. Salt pork before and after soaking, molasses tanks, spice totes, train cars that bring in 200,000 pounds of beans at a time from Canada and the Dakotas: Don explained each step of the eight-hour process, referring to workers by name, many of whom had been there for decades.

Also in the weekend edition is an article from Editor Curtis Robinson on how he’s “Staying hip to the city’s ongoing water debate” between Take Back the Tap and FLOW.

Type A has a report on 12 Seats, a new monthly cooking collaboration between Krista and Erik Desjarlais. It will be a highly customized event for 12 people and will be held at Bresca’s Middle Street location.

The goal is to create a highly personalized experience. For example there will be dialogue with every guest about dietary restrictions. The dinner will be $120pp, excluding wine.

Erik and Krista plan to secure a phone number over the weekend and will start taking reservations shortly. The first meal will be served on Sunday, October 25th. I’ll update this post when the phone number is available.

About Town is citing “fairly reliable sources” in a report that Trader Joe’s is coming to Portland. A commenter on the blog wrote that the checkout staff at a Trader Joe’s in Saugus said, ” they expected to open a Portland store in the next year to 18 months”.

The new issue of Port City Life is now available at newstands. It includes a special Maine Eats section filled with restaurant recommendations, cool kitchen gadgets and 10 must eat foods in Maine and more. The food articles also spill over in the rest of this issue including a feature article on young organic farmers in Maine entitled Living the Good Life 2.0.
This is the last issue of Port City Life. The magazine was bought earlier this year by the publishers of Maine Home + Design. They’ll be renaming and relaunching the magazine but hopefully the flood of good food coverage will continue.

The now defunct Portland Public Market and its successful spin off the Public Market House make an appearance in this article from GOOD about a national rebirth in public markets.

Across the United States, the public market concept may be undergoing something of a renaissance—coinciding with an increase in farmers’ markets, direct-to-consumer food sales, and smart growth initiatives in downtowns.