Restaurant Worker Quandary

| Posted in People

An article in this week’s Portland Phoenix explores the difficult choice restaurant workers have to make—balancing personal/family health and financial needs—when considering when to return to work.

“Everyone obviously wants things to be normal and wants things to go back to normal,” said one Portland bartender, Hanna, who left her job in July after feeling uncomfortable with on-premise dining. “If we can make things feel normal for a couple hours then that seems worth it to a lot of people, but I know that my coworkers were pretty uncomfortable with everything.”

Despite new COVID-19 regulations, sanitation precautions, and mandated masks, industry workers said they feel unsafe returning to work, yet feel pressure to continue working at the risk of losing financial security.

Dean’s Sweets on Marketplace

| Posted in People

Dean’s Sweets will be featured this Thursday on the public radio show Marketplace as part of a report on past and current sales, trends, and future effects of the pandemic on small retailers around the country.

According the an announcement from Dean’s Sweets on the show,

Co-owner Kristin Thalheimer Bingham describes the challenges of owning a food-related business at this time, as well as outlining the strategies Dean’s Sweets has employed to build their business during the uncertainty of the pandemic. Bingham also projects how the pandemic may affect the fall and upcoming holiday season.

Dean’s Sweets last appeared Marketplace late last November. This week’s piece will mark the sixth time Marketplace has featured the Portland chocolate maker.

Survival & Making Something Special

| Posted in General News

The Food & Dining section in today’s Maine Sunday Telegram talks with business owners about the current state of the restaurant industry, and explores the need for federal and state programs to help them survive.

In Maine, especially in Greater Portland, small, independent restaurants are a huge part of both the economy and culture, drawing visitors from all over the country who come here to explore the city’s food scene, named the best in the nation in 2018 by Bon Appetit. Many of these restaurants, often owned by the chef, have suffered enormously during the pandemic, and say that efforts to help them so far have not been enough. The state shut down restaurants in mid-March and allowed them to reopen in June, initially only to outdoor dining in Maine’s more populated counties, then two weeks later to indoor dining with requirements for capacity, spacing, mask-wearing and sanitization – measures that cost money to implement and reduced the number of customers that could be served, on top of those unwilling to dine out because of the health risks.

Restaurant critic Andrew Ross tries to identify “what made Drifters Wife and Piccolo so special“.

Both restaurants shut their doors permanently last month – Portland’s first high-profile casualties of the novel coronavirus pandemic. But it’s only now, after weeks of thinking about their absence, that I’ve started to see why the two restaurants were so important, and how their example can become a model for whatever sprouts from the fallow of the city’s locked-down food scene.

Vinland Has Permanently Closed

| Posted in Closings

Chef/owner David Levi has announced that he’s permanently closing Vinland, his locavore restaurant at 593 Congress Street.

Vinland has closed. It is a hard loss for me and for those closest to me, professionally and personally. It is also a beginning. Vinland could not withstand the long quarantine required for the Covid-19 pandemic, the disproportionate impact on the fine dining sector of the food industry, and the overall downturn in the economy, the last of which may reverberate for years. This is plain and simple. It’s a reality that was not lost on me as I cooked and served the last Vinland meals on March 15th, but one which settled in and calcified, slowly, over the ensuing months. I’d hoped for a reopening even as I failed to see the viable path. The path, for us, didn’t exist.

For now Levi looks forward to “spending far more of my time with my wife, my son, and, very soon, my daughter.”

As  for the future,

Have I served my last oat brown bread, my last hakurei turnip soup, my last smoked monkfish, my last parsnip turmeric custard? Has Timm served his last Sunstone cocktail? No. So stay tuned. There will be more Vinland meals. Just not at Vinland, and not six nights a week. If we’ve entered the Brigadoon stage, I promise, we’ll show up a little more often than once a century.

Read the full announcement on Facebook.

The 1,720 sq ft restaurant space in Congress Square is now available for lease for $2,782/month (Modified Gross).

WIne Enthusiast 40 Under 40

| Posted in People

Wine Enthusiast magazine has named Andrew and Briana Volk, owners of the Portland Hunt & Alpine Club, to their 2020 40 Under 40 list.

…In 2013, the duo opened Portland Hunt + Alpine Club in the other Portland. With Andrew overseeing day-to-day operations and Briana focusing on public relations, events, creative direction and marketing, the establishment has earned two James Beard Award nominations for Outstanding Cocktail Program. The Volks also helped to cofound Heart of Hospitality, a program that trains Maine bars and restaurants on sexual assault prevention and bystander intervention, and are working on the opening of Verna’s All Day, a small market and restaurant that will offer a wine program focused on women winemakers…

Roll Call in the West End

| Posted in Under Construction

A new restaurant called Roll Call (instagram) is under development in the West End. Owners Michael and Siobhan Sindoni have leased a space in the Little Giant building (which was briefly a West End outpost of A&C Grocery) for their new venture. The Clark Street space is slated to open for takeout and outdoor dining in late September. The Sindoni’s will be joined in the business by Michael’s brother Nick who will run day-to-day operations.

Starting today (noon to 8pm), Roll Call will be holding a weekly pop-up at the Austin Street Brewing location in East Bayside on Fox Street. The pop-up will be serving an “8-hour House Roast Beef sandwich, Fake N’ Cheese (a vegetarian sandwich made with a soy protein), Cucumber Salad and Buttermilk Panna Cotta with Blueberries and Milk Crumble”.

Both Michael and Siobhán Sindoni are from the Northeast and after a visit to Portland in 2015 made plans to move here.

Prior to moving to Maine, Michael was the executive chef of the Joule Hotel and opened the restaurant CBD Provisions in Dallas. Siobhán was the sommelier/manager at FT33 in Dallas. They also work together for Makeready as culinary director and service/wine director. Their most recent Makeready opening was Frannie & the Fox in Hotel Emeline in Charleston.

Femidish: Fork Food Lab

| Posted in People

The Femidish podcast has a week long series going on interviewing a set of Fork Food Lab entrepreneurs.

Welcome to our Fork Food Lab mini series! Fork Food Lab is a shared commercial kitchen and food business incubator space in Portland, Maine. This series will profile the organization and hear from four (count ’em, 4!) businesses who use the kitchen to create their products – the makers who call Fork Food Lab home and appreciate it’s important role in starting their business. For this first episode of the series, The Femidish ladies were privileged to interview the wonderful staff of women at FFL, who explain to listeners what the Food Lab does, why it’s an important pillar in the food system, and how women and the economy can benefit from this organization.  Stay tuned for the rest of series hearing from a chocolatier, a baker, food truck owners, and a natural snack maker.

ReUp ME Restaurant Relief Fund

| Posted in Openings

A new initiative called the ReUp ME Restaurant Relief Fund is raising money to help restaurants when they reopen. Organizers are hoping to raise $1 million dollars, and will “provide direct and in-kind financial support on a sliding scale from $500 to $15,000 to each restaurant award recipient.”

The ReUp ME Restaurant Relief Fund was created to directly support restaurants who are in the midst of reopening, rehiring, and restocking.  It is anticipated that rebuilding of the Maine hospitality economy is going to take several years. The next 6 months will be critical to saving and helping to sustain Maine’s passionate restaurant owners.  

Mainers have always taken great pride in supporting their communities across all sixteen counties. If we mobilize quickly, this approach will create a profound and unified message of hope and inspire consumers inside and outside the state to donate.

Restaurants can apply to be a grant recipient online.

You can donate to the fund online.

As part of the kick-off for the ReUp Fund, Taste of Maine is launching the Sunday Supper online chef cook-along show. The first episode is scheduled to go live on August 23rd and will feature chefs Ilma Lopez, David Turin, Paolo Laboa, Charlie Zorich, Kirk Linder and Dorene Mills.