This Week's Events

Monday — The Foreside Tavern in Falmouth is celebrating their 5 year anniversary.
Tuesday Bar Lola is collaborating with Allagash on a beer dinner.
Wednesday — there’s a wine tasting at Old Port Wine Merchants, Grace is holding a Flights & Bites wine social event and Maine Kombucha Works is teaching a combined kombucha and sourdough bread class.
Thursday — The Great Lost Bear is hosting the annual Brew Pub Cup challenge, Leavitt and Sons and Browne Trading are holding a wine tasting and it’s the first night of the Ice Bar at Eve’s at the Garden.
Friday — the Ice Bar continue at Eve’s and there will be a performance of the psychogeographic dinner theater Dual Site at the Whitney Art Works.
Saturday — it’s the final night of both the Ice Bar the Dual Site dinner theater. Author Kenneth Helphand will be reading from his book Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens In Wartime and signing books at Whitney Art Works.
Sunday — Masa Miyake and Rob Evans are cooking an 8-course snout-to-tail pork tasting dinner at Hugo’s.
For more information on these and other upcoming food happenings in the area, visit the event calendar.
If you are holding a food event this week that’s not listed above, publicize it by adding it as a comment to this post.

This Week’s Events

Monday — The Foreside Tavern in Falmouth is celebrating their 5 year anniversary.

Tuesday Bar Lola is collaborating with Allagash on a beer dinner.

Wednesday — there’s a wine tasting at Old Port Wine Merchants, Grace is holding a Flights & Bites wine social event and Maine Kombucha Works is teaching a combined kombucha and sourdough bread class.

Thursday — The Great Lost Bear is hosting the annual Brew Pub Cup challenge, Leavitt and Sons and Browne Trading are holding a wine tasting and it’s the first night of the Ice Bar at Eve’s at the Garden.

Friday — the Ice Bar continue at Eve’s and there will be a performance of the psychogeographic dinner theater Dual Site at the Whitney Art Works.

Saturday — it’s the final night of both the Ice Bar the Dual Site dinner theater. Author Kenneth Helphand will be reading from his book Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens In Wartime and signing books at Whitney Art Works.

Sunday — Masa Miyake and Rob Evans are cooking an 8-course snout-to-tail pork tasting dinner at Hugo’s.

For more information on these and other upcoming food happenings in the area, visit the event calendar.

If you are holding a food event this week that’s not listed above, publicize it by adding it as a comment to this post.

Meal Deals

Here are some additional Meal Deals for you:

  • Portland Dine Around Club – members get a discount of $10 to $25 off a second entree at participating restaurants. Annual membership in Portland Dine Around costs $29.95.
  • Old Port Sea Grill– 3 courses for $30 and the option of 3 different wines by the bottle at a 30% discount; they’re also doing a happy hour 4:30-6:30 with appetizers in the $3-$8 range; both offers are available Sunday through Thursday.
  • Vignola Sunday Family Style Dinners –A 3-course family-style meals on the last Sunday of each month for $25 per person; will feature “antipasti, main course, cheese course and dessert with choices of traditional favorites and chef creations”.
  • Vignola Happy Hours– Monday through Friday from 4:30-6 p.m, cocktail specials and complimentary antipasti.

Review of Olive Cafe

Olive Cafe received 3½ stars  from this Taste & Tell review in the Maine Sunday Telegram.

The flavors of Middle Eastern cooking, cool mint, sour sumac (the Mediterranean kind, not Maine’s ubiquitous poison sumac), tahini and an abundance of parsley and tomatoes, are perfect for relieving January monotony. The Olive Cafe in Portland handles these particulars with panache, tossing grilled slices of aromatic beef on top of a thin pizza that ranks at the top of good things I’ve tasted in Portland lately.

2 Rabbit Reviews

Appetite Portland has reviewed a pair of rabbit dishes from Emilitsa and Sonny’s.

Perhaps in deference to Bugs and the memory of Harvey — my friend Faryl’s late pet – I had not ordered rabbit in years and years. Until this past week, that is.

Somehow I found myself noshing on two wildly different preparations of the little mammal at two vastly different restaurants: Emilitsa and Sonny’s.

MOOMilk

According to a blog post on Eat Maine Foods, MOOMilk, a new brand of organic milk sourced from Maine farms, will start appearing on store shelves this weekend.

Produced by 10 Maine family organic dairy farms in Washington, Aroostook, Penobscot and Kennebec Counties, the milk will be trucked by Schoppee Milk Transport of Holden to Smiling Hill Dairy in Westbrook for processing, then distributed by Oakhurst Dairy of Portland and Crown O’ Maine Organic Co-op of Gardiner. That makes it the only organic milk available in Maine that is produced, trucked, processed and distributed exclusively by Maine family businesses.

2010 Best of Portland Readership Poll

The Portland Phoenix has kicked-off their 2010 Best of Portland readership poll. As in past years its a 2 step process:

  • Step 1, nominate candidates you think are an especially good fit in any or all of the dozens of categories
  • Step 2, based on the nominations, the Phoenix will publish a ballot next month summarizing the top nominees from each category for you to vote on.

There are a plethora of food and drink categories (Bagels, Bars, Barbecue, Beer Selection, Brewpubs, Brunch, etc) there’s even one for food blogs. A list of the 2009 winners is available online as a reference.

Help for Haiti

Several Portland restaurants are raising money for the relief efforts in Haiti.