Traditional Italian

| Posted in Profiles

The Maine Sunday Telegram has published an article about the Portland area’s traditional red-sauce Italian restaurants.

Instead of starkly decorated dining rooms with lines and lighting reminiscent of an industrial site, these old-school restaurants keep flowers, candles and linens on the tables. The soothing tones of Frank Sinatra and other old-time crooners add to the atmosphere instead of drowning out conversations. In these places, the long-gone Village Cafe – a popular Italian-American family restaurant in the Old Port that was driven out by urban renewal and is still mourned by Portlanders on social media – is remembered with reverence, and the Olive Garden is dismissed as irrelevant.

Reviews: Piccolo, LB Kitchen

| Posted in Reviews

The Maine Sunday Telegram has reviewed the Piccolo, and

The new Piccolo still holds a maximum of 20 diners at a time, but it feels (and is) brighter, more colorful and best of all: more accessible. With the addition of half-portions of pasta to the menu, it is easy to imagine stopping in for a weekday meal of phenomenal Funghi (a stealth salad with a runny egg that creates its own carbonara-like dressing), a plate of pork-sugo-dressed strascinati pasta, and a half-dessert, half-digestif fior di latte gelato slowly melting into a fruity, herbal shot of Pasubio amaro. No special occasion required.

The Bollard has reviewed the LB Kitchen.

It’s definitely possible to make healthier choices than we made — the menu includes several whole-grain bowls, vegetable-heavy sandwiches and the like — but to me, LB Kitchen shines brightest when they put a healthyish spin on traditional breakfast fare. The prices aren’t the lowest in town, but the quality of both the ingredients and their preparation made the cost seem totally reasonable. I can declare without shame that I’ll be back soon.

Speed Rack

| Posted in Events, People

Five bartenders from Portland are competing in the Northeast regional Speed Rack competition:

  • Liz Smith from Lio
  • LyAnna Sanabria from Chaval
  • Sylvi Roy from Hunt & Alpine
  • Kristen Mixter from Hunt & Alpine
  • Charlotte Stanton from Little Giant
Speed Rack is a charity female bartending competition that raises money for breast cancer research. The winner in the Northeast will go on to keep in the national competition in NYC this May.
Tickets for the Northest regional competition taking place March 11 are available online.

Rabelais Books

| Posted in Profiles

Life & Thyme has published a profile of Rabelais Books and its owner Don Lindgren.

For Don Lindgren of Rabelais, an antiquarian bookshop in Biddeford, Maine, these culinary texts serve a purpose even more expansive than the preservation of recipes. Widely considered a leading buyer and seller of antiquarian cookbooks and culinary ephemera, his work consists not just in seeking out rare material, but in helping others understand the role those books played in the lives of both their individual owners and society at large.

Relocations: North Bayou & Ripka

| Posted in Under Construction

A pair of food businesses originally founded elsewhere in New England have relocated to the Portland area:

  • North Bayou Cold Brew has moved from Burlington, Vermont and is now setting up at a location in the Pepperell Mill Campus in Biddeford. North Bayou’s bottled cold brew is for sale at the Little Woodfords coffee shop.
  • Ripka has relocated to Portland from Providence, Rhode Island. Owner Rebecca Volynsky hopes to eventually open her own hybrid Eastern European & Jewish eatery and gallery. In the meantime she’s hosting pop-ups with participating bakeries and restaurants including an upcoming pierogi pop-up at Rose Foods on March 31st.