Category: General News

The Maine Monitor has explored the connection between housing costs and staffing challenges for restaurants.

Honey’s Fried Chicken Palace was an expansion of Bedell’s first fried chicken restaurant, Ancho Honey, which opened in Tenants Harbor in 2019. With five years under his belt and two finalist awards for best burger and best fried chicken in the state, Bedell started to expand, with the hope of starting a Maine-based chain.

Instead, just one year after he opened his new counter-service restaurant, Bedell made the decision to shut down Ancho Honey — a choice that was fueled in large part by problems finding staff.

And he’s not alone.

Today’s Maine Sunday Telegram includes an article about how chef Eric Bufo at Wayside Food Programs uses donated ingredients to prepare meals for members of the community.

Bufo isn’t running a fancy farm-to-table restaurant. He’s kitchen manager and head chef at Wayside Food Programs, where he works with a rotating volunteer crew to cook as many as 800 free meals a week for Greater Portland homeless shelters, schools, senior homes and other community centers where Mainers need hot, nourishing meals.

Today’s Maine Sunday Telegram includes a feature article about the growing availability and complexity of mocktails.

Like craft cocktails, mocktails have come a long way. For decades, they were little more than afterthoughts or uninspired riffs on a Shirley Temple: fruit juice topped with soda water, or ginger ale with a splash of Luxardo cherry juice. Many bar staffs now take mocktails quite seriously, and the best ones rival alcohol-based cocktails in their flavor complexity.

An article in the October edition of Food & Wine focuses on the rising utilization of seaweed on the menus at Maine restaurants. Fore Street, Bread & Friends, Norimoto Bakery, Heritage Seaweed are all mentioned as is a seaweed cacio e pepe that was on the menu at The Alna Store last fall,

At Alna Store, a market and restaurant in Alna, Maine, where the menu changes often, we tried a mind-blowing seaweed cacio e pepe — the pecorino and black pepper sauce seasoned with wakame, dulse, nori, and kombu. It was rich, earthy, and savory, with a subtle aquatic funk: a new frontier of salinity.

The James Beard Foundation has announced the annual Open Call for the 2026 James Beard Awards. Recommendations from the general public, industry professionals, and regional judges are considered by the awards committee as they put together the list of semifinalists for each year.

Calling all chefs, beverage professionals, food industry leaders, creators, and more: the open call for entries and recommendations for the 2026 James Beard Awards…Whether you’re submitting your own entry or recommending your favorite neighborhood restaurant, we want to hear from YOU—who deserves to be the next James Beard Award winner?

Which Maine restaurants, bars, chefs, bakers, beverage professionals, restauranteurs that you know are meeting a high standard for excellence? To bring them to the attention of the Beard Foundation just create an account and submit your recommendation on the JBF Awards Platform. The deadline for the open call process is Friday, November 21st.

If the 2026 awards process follows a similar pattern from last year, then we can expect to see the semifinalist list come out in late January, and the final nominee list to be announced in April.

For your reference here’s:

• A list of the chef and restaurant awards categories
• An overview the chef and restaurant awards process
• A list of past Maine award winners, nominees and semifinalists

The Maine Monitor has published an article about volunteer shortages and funding cuts at impacting Maine’s food pantries.

Complicating matters is the infrastructure through which the United States distributes most food to those who need help. In Maine, the nearly 600 hunger relief agencies that get free and low-cost food from Good Shepherd Food Bank rely on volunteers. This includes 250 food pantries as well as soup kitchens, senior centers, shelters, schools and youth programs.

More than 75% of these organizations rely completely on volunteers, with no paid staff, according to Good Shepherd. 

Are you available to volunteer? The State of Maine and Portland Public Schools have lists of local food pantries which you can use to a find a pantry to help.

Bar Publica has announced that they’ll be closing for the season on October 5th with plans to re-open next year on April 6th.