Dispatch has published a profile of East End Cupcakes.
Zoidis moved back to Maine and initially kept her job in New York, taking cupcake orders from a word-of-mouth clientele, and baking on weekends in her home. When it came time for the business to grow, Zoidis stumbled into several situations involving good networking, good timing, and damn good cupcakes.
The Boston Globe has published a profile of The Holy Donut,
This is a typical Saturday morning for the 5-month-old shop in Portland’s Deering Oaks neighborhood, even though Kellis and her staff, several of whom are family members (she co-owns the business with her father, Allen), have continuously ramped up production since they opened. Nowadays, they turn out roughly 1,200 doughnuts a day in at least a dozen different flavors: plain wide rings dredged with cinnamon-sugar or dripping with maple, lemon, vanilla, or “mojito” lime glaze; sweet potato doughnuts laced with ginger; best-selling dark-chocolate doughnuts flecked with coarse sea salt.
and has highlighted a pair of dark beers from Maine Beer Co. and Peaks,
Thick pine and citrus flavors hit your tongue first, but they’re balanced by a smoky backbone. There’s sweet caramel in here, too, but the hops never go away. They remind you of their presence from start to finish. This is a truly exceptional beer.
Bourbon. Portland. Beer. Politics. has published a list of coffee shops and cafes off the Portland peninsula.
With coffee shops and cafes like Arabica, Crema, Speckled Ax, Tandem Coffee Roasters, and Bard, the peninsula has no shortage of great coffee and places to enjoy it at. If you are like me, though, you regularly find yourself traveling around off peninsula in the Greater Portland Area and less than knowledgeable about where to grab a cup of coffee.
The Food & Dining section in today’s Press Herald includes an article about Portland Beer Week. Portland Beer Week is is taking place November 4-11.
The inaugural year of beer week was well received, but in a lot of ways, beer lovers say, it was kind of like Restaurant Week with beer as an add-on. This year Stevens, who owns The Thirsty Pig on Exchange Street, and her fellow beer geeks have structured an impressive line-up that is overflowing with nearly 60 events. And they did it all in barely two months.
Also in today’s paper is a profile of VitaminSea, a company that sells energy bars and other products that are made with seaweed.
Right now, company founders Tom and Kelly Roth have reached capacity with the number of SeaCrunch bars they can make in the licensed commercial kitchen in their Buxton home. They’re currently churning out about 1,000 bars a week of the mixture made from almonds, sesame seeds, dried cranberries, kelp and maple syrup. Yet, sales of the bars keep growing and the company plans to introduce two new flavors in the coming weeks, Blueberry (with dried blueberries and dark chocolate) and S’mores (with milk chocolate and marshmallows).
The Portland Daily Sun has published an article about the new Frosty’s Donuts located in South Portland.
The selection isn’t huge nor is the dining room large. The drink menu is simple and straightforward and has no call for a seasoned barista to steam or spoon elaborately prepared hot beverages. The precision branding clings to the past on all signage and marketing materials, with a feel-good retro font proudly pointing out that Frosty’s Donuts has been providing Maine with famous, hand-cut donuts since 1965. Since then, the path that led to the recent opening of the third Frosty’s Donuts just over the bridge in South Portland is made up of the stuff we Mainer’s love.
Mainebiz has published a report on Cousins Maine Lobster, a West Coast lobster food truck run by Jim Tselikis and Sabin Lomac who hail from Cape Elizabeth. The cousins recently appeared on the ABC venture capital TV show Shark Tank and were successful in getting financed by Barbara Corcoran.
To that end, the duo appeared last week on the ABC reality show “Shark Tank,” where entrepreneurs pitch their business and seek capital from a board of seasoned and well-heeled investors, including the likes of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and real estate magnate Barbara Corcoran.
Tselikis and Lomac’s long-term plans include a food truck in Portland.
With strong roots in Portland, Tselikis says he and Lomac have talked about expanding back to their home turf, but not in the near future.
“It’s a saturated market, which is why we didn’t start here, so it’s not on the 2013 schedule, but you’ve got to be where you came from eventually,” says Tselikis.
MaineBiz has published an article about the focus Miyake placed on great architecture and design when they moved the sushi restaurant from Spring to Fore Street.
Miyake and co-owner Will Garfield met with Thompson and shared their vision for a space that would elevate the restaurant’s already strong reputation without outshining the food.
“Before, you went to a crummy little building in the West End and the food was amazing, but that was the previous story,” says Thompson. “We were a little nervous because this was going to change the story. It was not going to be a magical surprise of great food in a little hole in the wall, it was going to be a restaurant almost as beautiful as the food.”
The Salt food blog from NPR has published an article about Maine Mead Works.
“Mead has the quintessential terroir,” says Alexander, 36, who began developing his mead in 2007 after becoming fascinated with its history as the oldest alcoholic beverage in the world. “You can get good honey anywhere, and it always has this sense of time and place.”
That idea resonates especially well in Maine, which has one of the strongest locavore movements in the U.S. Spend a little time in Portland, and you get the sense that every new food product on the market better be made with native Maine ingredients or no one’s buying.
Kate’s Homemade Butter was featured in a New York Times article that was published earlier this week.
Today, Kate’s produces more than a million pounds of butter a year, all from the same tiny garage. And last year, the company became the first large-scale bottler of a dairy product that has almost disappeared from American tables: real buttermilk, the creamy liquid that remains in the churn after the butter comes together.
Joy the Baker has published a report on her recent eating trip in Maine, which includes this hearty endorsement of the mussels at Fore Street.
The people at Fore Street restaurant make magic (and mussels) come out of this kitchen space. The restaurant feel like you’re sitting in someone’s home… with a bunch of strangers, wine, and amazing food (and you don’t have to help with the dishes). If I had a list of favorite restaurants around the country, Fore Street would top the list. It tastes like home, elevated to its highest level.
Joy’s visit to Maine was part of a collaboration between Sharon Kitchens and the Maine Office of Tourism which brought a trio of influential food bloggers from California, Colorado and Tenessee to Maine for a week.