Category: General News

The Lost Kitchen has released details of their 2019 reservation process. It follows the same pattern as last year, so dust off your stack of 3×5 cards, find an envelope and a stamp and get your letter ready to mail on April 1st.

The Press Herald is seeking nominees for this year’s Source Sustainability Awards. Past year’s winners have included butchers, grocers, aqua-cultivators. If you know of a person or organization (or are one yourself) that are “contributing to the state’s environmental well-being” then take a moment to nominate them for consideration.

A pair of Portland restaurants have gotten some national press:

• Neil Ross from Little Giant was one of the featured chefs for an article in Esquire about using cocktails as inspiration for specialty burgers.
• Chef/owner David Levi was featured in a Marketwatch article about “hyperlocal” restaurants.

Yankee magazine has published an article comparing the Portland and Boston food scenes, and declaring a winner.

Clearly, it’s time to sweep away some assumptions and compare Boston and Portland side by side, category by category, setting aside the buzz and that Vacationland glow. What is really the best food town in New England? And what does that title even mean?

The Food & Dining section in today’s paper reports on the growing number of restaurants producing and bottling their own hot sauces.

Now, interest in hot sauce is soaring in Maine kitchens and chefs are playing around with peppers, making their own sauces to serve and sell – traditional vinegar-based hot sauces as well as fermented ones. And it’s not just a Portland craze; restaurants from Tao Yuan in Brunswick to Anju Noodle Bar in Kittery are impressing hot sauce-loving diners with their in-house creations. Local entrepreneurs who are part of the hot sauce subculture are developing new lines of sauces for the marketplace, and at least three Maine farms are growing peppers destined for bottles of hot sauce.

The Food & Dining section in today’s Maine Sunday Telegram includes articles on rampant theft from restaurants,

At DiMillo’s on the Water in Portland, customers steal steak knives, souffle cups, and nautical decorations from buffets. A chef who owns several Maine restaurants says pictures have been removed from their frames. And someone once stole a large ficus tree – like Volk’s painting, a gift from a parent – at one of his openings.

and on the improved availability of vegan breakfast sandwiches.

A few years ago I couldn’t buy a vegan breakfast sandwich in Portland for love or money, and now at least five places sell them. The sandwiches reflect a wider boom in vegan breakfast taking place across the city. From sandwiches to tofu scrambles to pancakes and doughnuts, it’s become easy to eat vegan in the Forest City for the first meal of the day.

Owner Kevin Sandes has decided to put Eighty 8 Donuts up for sale.

Greetings friend,

I’m writing to you today regarding my future with Eighty 8 Donuts. Something personal and relevant you may not know about me, this July will mark my 10th year as a kidney transplant patient – or my 10th second birthday as I like to call it. To be blunt, facing death as I have and receiving a second chance at life has taught me (more than anything else) the significance of ‘now’ and my misconceptions of ‘later.’ Unfortunately kidney transplants are not cures. They do not last forever and the chances of receiving just one are pretty slim. So…time being what it is…. this chapter of my life has been outstanding and as much as I want to hang on to it, I know that the time has come for me to let go.

It’s important to me to say that although I will no longer be making the donuts ‘that make ya go nuts’ I will in fact remain grateful that our lives happened to come together, if only as brief as it may have been. Moving forward, the plan is to find a passionate new owner for Eighty 8 Donuts. From there, I will continue to explore some other passions of my own while I seek out future medical care possibilities abroad. Until then, please pass my contact info along to any interested parties and please always, always eat well.

Kevin

The Food & Dining section in today’s Maine Sunday Telegram includes an article about the fees restaurants have to discourage reservation no-shows and the reasons for them,

Restaurateurs say that when you skip out on your reservation, it can have a big ripple effect on supplies, staffing and finances, especially for smaller restaurants. Knowing how many diners to expect helps the chef determine how much food to buy, and what size staff to have on the floor that night.

“It hurts everybody here,” said Niko Regas, chef at Emilitsa, a 48-seat Greek restaurant on Congress Street in Portland. “It doesn’t just hurt the business. It hurts my employees as well.”

Servers may go without tips, Regas said, and the back-of-house staff might be sent home an hour early.

and an article about program some restaurants have put in place to encourage Winter business.

Winter has always been a tough season for Maine restaurants in seasonal communities along the coast. Once tourists go home, making enough money to get through until spring can be a challenge. Towns like Yarmouth, where snowbirds fly south for the winter, can also suffer. This year has been especially difficult, since winter started early with snow on Halloween. Keeping diners in the seats requires creativity – cue the special events, exclusive dinner offers, and happy hour specials that run only during snowstorms.