The Sinful Kitchen(facebook, website) is now open. Chef David Mallari plans to serve brunch 5 days a week, Wednesday through Sunday. It’s located at 906 Brighton Ave in the building formerly occupied by La Familia.
Restaurant Inspection & Food Safety
The Maine Sunday Telegram has published an update on the city’s restaurant inspection program,
The paper revealed that many restaurants hadn’t been inspected for years and that, when the city hired its first health inspector in 2011, 19 out of the first 23 restaurants inspected failed – a failure rate of 82.6 percent. Since then, the failure rate has steadily improved. It was 45.5 percent in 2012 (40 out of 88 restaurants), 10.5 percent in 2013 (33 of 314) and just 6.4 percent in 2014 (31 of 482).
and an article on the crack-down on Portland chef’s use of cooking methods such as sous vide.
In recent months, hundreds of pounds of meat have been embargoed by health officials and are waiting in cold storage until restaurants can prove the food is safe. Several restaurants have been ordered to stop vacuum-sealing their meats, cooking sous vide dishes and offering some types of house-cured meats until they develop special hazard plans and in some cases get formal variances from the Maine Food Code.
Review of the Miss Portland Diner
The Maine Sunday Telegram has reviewed the Miss Portland Diner.
The Miss Portland Diner serves all you’d expect at a classic hash house, from scrambled eggs and pancakes to sandwiches and burgers. Ask for a booth in the restored 1949 lunch wagon, and try a traditional Reuben. Stacked with sliced corned beef, sauerkraut, melted Swiss and Thousand Island dressing, it’s a paean to all things deli. Burgers here are good, but sides are even better: ultra-bright and crispy coleslaw, thick-cut potato chips and sweet potato fries with a welcome snap. Definitely try dessert from one of the countertop cake stands. A single slice of homemade whoopie pie cake (a riff on Maine’s official state treat) is weighty and rich, with frosting enough for four.
Review of DiMillo’s
The Golden Dish has reviewed DiMillo’s.
The entrée menu is hardly ground-breaking, and all one can hope for is for it to be wholesome and tasty. Of the two local haddock dishes, I chose the more complicated one instead of the simpler broiled haddock with bread crumbs. I figured, try the more complex version. So out came a giant piece of haddock stuffed with butternut squash and cornbread covered in a maple-cream sauce. It was so sweet it could have doubled as dessert. The baked potato was served without butter, and the little tub of sour cream with chopped scallions helped to moisten the dry flesh. With it were the predictable spears of broccoli, slightly overdone.
Best Brews: 21 Breweries, 101 Beers, Beer Madness
Boston magazine has published their list of the 21 best breweries in New England. It includes Banded Horn(17), Marshall Wharf(16), Oxbow(6), Maine Beer Company(5) and Allagash(2).
Men’s Journal has posted their list of the 101 best beers in America which includes Bissell Brothers Substance and Allagash Interlude. Portland’s own Greg Norton, owner of the Bier Cellar helped assemble the list.
Finally, Maine Today has kicked off their Maine Beer Madness bracket survey.
Under Construction: LemonCycle
The Forecaster has posted a report on LemonCycle.
While most 15-year-olds get summer jobs at grocery stores or pizza places, Nat Jordan has decided to do something a little more entrepreneurial.
The Cape Elizabeth High School sophomore is starting his own business, LemonCycle, and plans to launch it this summer in Portland.
Jordan is putting a twist on the classic lemonade stand: he plans to use a tricycle with a cart built on the front to ride around and sell homemade lemonade.
Portland Phoenix Readership Poll
The nominees have been announced and voting has begun in the Portland Phoenix 2015 Best of Portland Readership Poll.
Portland Food Map is a nominee this year in two categories:
- Best Food Blog/Column category (along with Portland Food Coma, From Away, Eater Maine and The Daily Dish)
- Best Blog category (along with Spinster Jane, Fighting the Tides, Hilly Town, and Knack Factory).
Now is the time to review the full list of categories/nominees and to vote for your favorites.
Review of East Ender
Map & Menu have reviewed the new East Ender.
It turns out that all of our worrying was for naught because now that we’ve tried Karl Deuben & Bill Leavy’s reincarnation of the East Ender on our favorite block of Middle Street (read: one of the most delicious blocks in all of Portland), we realized that it’s not the truck that made the meal, but the chefs behind the grill.
Review of Sur Lie
The Portland Phoenix restaurant critic Brian Duff has reviewed Sur Lie.
Sur Lie calls their very first category “to settle” and their dessert category “closure” (the latter features a pair of fantastic fresh donuts, with a tart blueberry filling). But the power of a well-designed list is to trigger what anthropologists call the seeking instinct — rooted in our brain’s most robust neurocircuitry — which never settles nor reaches closure. It’s what drives us through the Internet, click by click, and the rest of life, too. Sur lie’s best innovation might be making small plate dining seem affordable and accessible, but still intriguing and ambitious. It will leave you seeking another chance to visit.
This week’s edition also includes a visit to Lolita with Petite Jacqueline’s chef Fred Eliot.
A.C.: Now that you’re back on marrow, what makes this version special?
It’s super rich, but not an enormous portion. After a long day at work I like to have something that’s not too big because I want to go to bed. But I do like something rich like this or ramen noodles. What’s really cool here is they do it over the fire, so it adds this smokey flavor to it. It’s nothing intense but it’s woody. It’s messy, interactive. It gets everywhere. You need a lot of bread.
Tony’s Donuts Expanding
The Press Herald reports that Tony’s Donuts has closed their South Portland location and is planning to expand their Portland store.
Fournier plans to expand the original family business at Congress and Bolton streets by renovating a former auto maintenance garage on the property into a coffee shop, he said.
“By the time I get done with renovations, you won’t recognize it,” Fournier said.