A restaurant called Riverton Station (facebook) opened this past Friday. As the name would suggest Riverton Station is located at 1569 Forest Ave in the Riverton neighborhood of Portland.
The menu includes sandwiches, salads, pizza, burgers, wings and more. Riverton Station will be open 7 days a week starting on Wednesday.
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Full Turn (website, instagram) is opening today. The new restaurant is located in the former Baharat space in East Bayside. The launch of Full Turn is being led by Chloe Kessell and Melissa Pappas in collaboration with the owners of Baharat. Josh Lemay will be running the bar program. Kessell, Pappas and Lemay were the former GM, kitchen manager and bartender at Baharat.
Full Turn will be serving seasonal menus that change-up frequently with restaurant concepts that shift with each ‘turn’ of the menu. For this initial version of Full Turn the concept is of a neighborhood pub. When you go be sure to check out the spicy version of the fried chicken sandwich.
Full Turn will initially be open 4 – 9 pm, Thursday through Saturday.
After an extensive renovation, Miyake (website, facebook, instagram) is set to reopen Thursday, December 1st. The new Miyake will seat 28 with a 10-seat beverage bar up front (shown above), an 8-seat sushi counter and table banquet seating.
Chef/owner Masa Miyake has prepared a menu that includes a variety of nigiri, sashimi and house-created rolls as well as sashimi and nigiri omakase options. The rice dish section of the menu includes a made to order kamameshi with king salmon and ikura fish roe. There are also a number of shareable plates which Miyake has adapted from traditional Japanese dishes such as a lobster chawanmushi. You can see a few photos of the dishes on the Miyake instagram account. The beverage program will includes sake, wine, house-designed cocktails, and a pair of draft beers.
Miyake will be open Tuesday through Saturday, 5 – 9 pm. The front bar will be held for walk-in customers and the remaining seats will be available for reservations. During their first week Miyake will be for walk-ins only—the Tock reservation calendar starts on December 6th and will go live on November 29th. Miyake is located at 468 Fore Street.
Chef Masa Miyake opened his first Portland restaurant Food Factory Miyake at 129 Spring Street in 2007. Pai Men Miyake followed suit in the fall of 2010, and Miyake on Fore Street opened its doors on July 13, 2011. Masa Miyake was a James Beard Awards Best Chef: Northeast nominee in 2015, and a semifinalist nominee in 2014.
Cong Tu Bot is set to reopen this Friday for indoor dining and with a new concept as a quán nhậu. The concept of a quán nhậu approximately aligns with the idea of a Vietnamese pub or tavern and more directly translates to a shop/diner for drinking and feasting.
The menu (see below) features many new dishes with a few classic carry overs—CTB dessert fans will be happy to know that the chè and the flan made the cut. Some new options include a Rare Denver Steak Salad w/shrimp paste & pineapple sauce, grapefruit, shiso, watercress, birds eye chili, Chicken Liver Pâté w/ fried mantou, whipped condensed milk, chinese mustard, pink peppercorn, and a Caramel Braised Monkfish w/ caramel-cured egg, cilantro, black pepper, and steamed rice.
Also new on the menu is an expanded beverage program designed by Matthew Im, Ashley Ogando, and Hannah Hermes. The bar menu is centered around wine with both by the glass options and bottle list as well as cocktails, beer and no ABV drinks. Cong Tu Bot will also be a BYOB restaurant (see corkage details below).
Co-owner Vien Dobui shared that the popular noodle dishes from their previous dinner service like the phở and bún will eventually make a return.
Cong Tu Bot will be open Friday through Monday, 5 – 9 pm and for the first time is taking reservations.
The new Thai restaurant Dok Mali (website, instagram) is scheduled to open Tuesday for lunch and dinner 11:30 – 8:30. Dok Mali is located in the former Lois’ Market space at 47 India Street which chef/owner Nonglack Thanephonesy has completely renovated into a 32-seat restaurant.
The menu includes the option of a flight of all seven types of dumplings, grilled okra, corn fritters, six different types of noodle soup, and main courses like Crying Tiger (marinated ribeye, served with sticky rice, veggie skewers and roasted tomato dip) and La La Pork (braised pork belly, bok choi + egg served with ginger rice).
In addition to Dok Mali, Thanephonesy is also the owner of Capital Thai Kitchen and Bar in Exeter, NH. She grew up in Portland and is excited to bring to life a new Thai restaurant in her home town.
Dok Mali will be open Tuesday through Sunday for lunch and dinner opening at 11:30 am.
A new distribution company called Fruit Bat Distribution (instagram) has launched. Fruit Bat will exclusively focus on the distribution of hard cider. Owners Jessie Robb and Josh Lemay have a strong passion for cider as well as deep ties in the restaurant industry. Their goal is to create a bridge that helps the growing cider industry thrive.
The first two producers that Fruit Bat are representing in Maine are Sundstrom Cider and Metal House Cider, both located in the Hudson Valley. Lemay and Robb expect to be expanding their portfolio as they build demand for quality ciders and build relationships with restaurants.
Fruit Bat is collaborating with local restaurants on some cider-centric meals. Here are the first two on the schedule:
The Twin Swirls (instagram) ice cream shop is slated to open this Saturday. They’ll be serving a limited menu on Saturday but will eventually have on offer hard serve and soft serve cones and dishes, milkshakes, sundaes and coffee.
The name Twin Swirls is inspired by owner Sarah Palmer’s twin six year old girls, Alex and Sage.
The shop is located at 865 Brighton Ave in the Nason’s Corner neighborhood, and their regular hours will be Thursday through Sunday, noon to 8 pm.
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Zu Bakery (website, instagram) owner Barak Olins is aiming to launch his new West End location in early November.
In the coming two weeks he’ll be holding a series of pop-ups from his bakery at 81 Clark Street on Wednesdays and Fridays, 3 – 5 pm. Stop by to try some of the the breads and baked goods he’ll be featuring in his shop.
When Zu Bakery is fully open Olins and his team will be serving pastries and coffee at the start of the day and with baguettes and other breads going on sale as they come out of the oven and offering two types of pizza alla Romana at the end of the day.
Olins plans to make most of his bakery products with Maine grown grains he mills in-house. In addition to morning pastries and breads, Zu Bakery will also sell biscotti, granola, seasonal pastries and a small selection of bottled wine.
Olins originally launched Zu Bakery in 2000. Previously he was a co-founder/chef of the highly regarded Cafe Uffa, which was located in Longfellow Square and opened in 1995.
Joe Fournier has relaunched the former Dirty Dove cocktail bar with a new name and concept as the Saint Joe Restobar (instagram).
The restaurant will be serving “pan-continental fare” prepared by “Executive Cheftender” Ezra Dunn. Locally Dunn has worked at Evo and Black Cow. Before moving to Portland from the Hudson Valley he led the kitchen at The Stagecoach Inn.
The Saint Joe Restobar—named after Joe Strummer from The Clash—is located at 229 Congress Street. It is open noon to 9 pm, Monday through Saturday.
Separately, Fournier and Matt Moran are opening A & C Soda Shop in South Portland as a successor to Fournier’s popular business A & C Grocery which closed on Washington Ave last year.
The Bangor Daily News has a report on a new robot food delivery service at the University of Southern Maine.
The bots receive orders via the app and an internal phone SIM card, then proceed to a campus food kiosk — which includes the Hungry Huskies food truck — where a Sodexo employee loads them up with vittles. The machines then trundle on to their destination using GPS mapping software to guide them. Stopping outside their destination building, folks who’ve ordered food then use the app to open the Kiwibot and retrieve their lunch.