Category: Profiles

Eater has published an in depth look at the Preble Street food program and the many challenges it’s navigated during the pandemic.

But on March 25 last year, for the first time in its history, Preble Street closed its dining room. Suddenly, the delicate web of social services that Portland’s unhoused community relied on to meet basic needs, a system largely concentrated in Preble’s Bayside neighborhood, began to unravel. This unravelling, which led to a forced dispersal of the city’s homeless population, brought into stark relief the conflicting imperatives of public health, public safety, and emergency services brought on by the pandemic. It became clear that if Preble Street was going to keep feeding people, the model — and maybe even the organization’s entire mission — would need to be rethought.

The article was written by Christian Letourneau with photography by Greta Rybus as part of a collaboration between Eater and the Food & Environment Reporting Network.

For more information on the Preble Street visit www.preblestreet.org.

The Portland Phoenix has published an article about Blackstones, a gay bar in Longfellow Square.

The coronavirus pandemic has left many local bar owners without a path forward, and reality set in for Blackstones manager Carl Currie last month.

Currie had just come out of a staff meeting with bar owner Matt Pekins where they decided they would have to ask the community for money to stay afloat until spring.

He said the decision was a difficult one that he and Pekins tried to avoid, and that it made him uncomfortable. But less than two weeks after he created a GoFundMe page asking neighbors to help save Portland’s last gay bar, they had raised enough in pledges to survive the winter.

Mainebiz has published a Q&A with Maine Foodie Tours that explores how they’re adapting to operating their business during the pandemic.

The Maine Sunday Telegram has published a profile of Little Lad’s.

In 1995, Little Lad’s opened for business as a cafe and bakery on Route 1 in Woolwich, and it was there that its famous popcorn was developed as an alternative to corn chips. The company began making its Herbal Corn and many other food products by hand in Corinth in 1999, after relocating from its home in Woolwich. Over the years, Little Lad’s evolved — among other changes, the cafes are gone now — but its roots remain in that first Woolwich restaurant and its food.

Flood’s received a shout out this week in the New York Times Style Magazine.

Like Palace, Flood’s offers creative comfort food like juicy burgers and pancetta toast with apple butter, as well as a laid-back environment personified by several unofficial and irreverent mascots from the minds of the Atlanta-based design and consulting group Office of Brothers, Inc., such as a beanie-wearing, cigarette-smoking fish. “I’m not in the business of challenging people with my space or my food,” Mitchell told me. Rather, Flood’s is about feeling like you’re a regular.

The American Rum Report has profiled Three of Strong, a distillery located in Bayside.

In other words, Three of Strong had focus, experience, and novelty on its side from day one. So I was optimistic and interested in what they were making.