Portland, Maine: A Restaurant Rich City

Portland, Maine: A Restaurant Rich City

If you want to eat well, you might want to visit Portland, Maine. Named “Restaurant City of the Year 2018” by Bon Appétitt, this former ship building city has emerged as a foodie mecca.

If you do go, I suggest, NO, I highly recommend that you sign up and take the Maine Food for Thought Tour and do it the first day of your visit. You’ll be glad you did.

Why?

1. You’ll get an overview of the foodie scene in this city, and 2, you’ll learn a lot about the food production and issues in Maine.

I’ve done food tours in several cities, but this one provided the most content as well as a delicious sampling of some of the best bites the city has to offer. I’ll include links at the end of this post to the other food tours and if you click on the name of the restaurants in the blog below you can learn more about these eateries. I think taking Food Tours is a great way to learn about a city and eat well.

The Maine Food for Thought tour is owned by a darling young couple (Bryce and Sarah Hach) who decided to give up corporate/government lives to establish this business.

The philosophy or mission as stated on their web site is: To reveal the distinctive stories of Maine’s unique food system, and the social, environmental, and economic connections.

I think they do a great job of that.

The choices for the tour included a mix of ethnic approaches and an emphasis on locally sourced food. Why local sources? Less chemicals, smaller carbon foot print and good economics. Taste and quality are key. The tour included a small sampling of the 416 restaurants in the area.

We started at Union, attached to the Press Hotel, where my husband and I stayed. We learned that the Union has four bee hives on the top of the building and a small green house.

The chef was “Maine Chef of the Year” last year. Our clam chowder was inspired by the chef’s time in Thailand. Wow. It was good. Lighter than normal chowder with a delicate flavoring. Coconut milk, lemon grass and ginger had something to do with it.

After that we were off to Evo Kitchen—a Mediterranean and Middle Eastern restaurant, closed at lunch time making our sampling in the small eatery possible. There we enjoyed an urban meets rural potato dish. Who knew? Maine’s main crop is the potato. I always thought it was wild blueberries.

Solo Italiano served us the best pesto I’ve ever had on a delicious handkerchief pasta. I was sorry we didn’t know about this restaurant. I would have loved a whole meal there. Actually I could have made a whole meal of the pesto. It has won awards. Delicious.

After that, we had a mini lobster roll at Luke’s Lobster. How could we go to Maine and not have the traditional dish? It was great. We enjoyed seeing fisherman unload the lobster on our walk there. Lobster fishing is highly regulated in Maine which is a good thing Bryce told us about the current concerns about the ocean’s temperature rising and the impact on the lobster industry.

We concluded our tour with a delicious skate at a Japanese restaurant called Mami and yummy dessert at Piccolo. The chocolate and strawberry concoction looked so good I downed it before remembering to take a photo. Sorry.

In addition to a full tummy, I came away with the knowledge that Portland, Maine has a terrific food culture and that there are many restaurants that fuse ethnic backgrounds with traditional Maine foods.