Travel and Leisure has included Cinque Terre on their list of Great Farm-to-Table restaurants.
When chef Lee Skawinski travels around Italy each year, he′s not just sourcing recipes. Strains of beans, squash, and lettuce from the area wind up on a five-acre farm in Greene, Maine, then at his Italian restaurant 45 miles from there, in downtown Portland—proving that farm-to-table cooking can have geographic underpinnings an ocean away.
Three more Portland restaurants have joined the OpenTable online reservation service: Bresca, Evangeline and The Salt Exchange. The website enables you to quickly find a table without having to call around to see where’s there’s space available.
The September issue of The Bollard is now out. This month’s newspaper includes articles on where to find free coffee in Portland, a perspective on food stamps, a Breakfast Serial review of local venues that sell breakfast sandwiches, and a new installment from the Land of Forgotten Cocktails series by John Myer.
The Great Wall Super Buffet in South Portland was sued yesterday by nine former employees. MPBN was at the restaurant today and broadcast this story.
One day after a lawsuit filed by nine former workers against the Great Wall Super Buffet in South Portland was made public, the restaurant was closed without explanation today, and Chinese workers staged an angry protest and a press conference to discuss their treatment. They claim they were not paid overtime, forced to work for tips only and required to pay the restaurant owners bi-weekly “kickbacks.” The former workers and their supporters are demanding an investigation and asking customers to join a boycott.
The Food & Dining section in today’s Press Herald includes a pair of articles about Maine Fare which is taking place in Camden next month. Meredith Goad authored an overview of the food festival
If you’d like to learn how to pair Maine-made spirits with smoked seafood, if you want to experience an old-fashioned beanhole supper – even if you’re curious about how to properly butcher a whole hog – Maine Fare is the place to be, whether you feel comfortable calling yourself a foodie or not.
“People need to know that it’s OK to care about what you eat, that it’s not being a snob to care about what you eat,” Jenkins said.
and Avery Yale Kamila tackles the topic of the keynote address “Can Maine Feed Itself?”
The panel brings together a number of movers and shakers from Maine’s food scene for a conversation centered on how the state can become more self-reliant when stocking our grocery stores and filling our dinner plates.
Also is today’s paper is an article about a Maine Cooperative Extension seminar designed to help farmers cope with this year’s poor growing season, and a short piece on Chef Hayward’s shaved head.
Public radio is on a roll when it comes to food reporting. In addition to the piece mentioned in the prior post there’s also a pair of audio articles that were aired today on disputes among lobstermen and on the confusing new wine tasting law.
Public radio is on a roll when it comes to food reporting. In addition to the piece mentioned in the prior post there’s also a pair of audio articles that were aired today on disputes among lobstermen and on the confusing new wine tasting law.
Chow Maine has taken a look at one of the more unusual provisions of Maine’s new wine tasting law. While the law provides shop owners with more flexibility on what can be part of tasting or how frequently they can occur, it also specifies that they must “be conducted in a manner that precludes the possibility of observation by children.”
The changes made by the new legislation won’t go into effect until September, so it’s unclear how the “no children” aspect of the law will affect specific shops. However, an overly strict interpretation of this provision might make it impractical, or even impossible, for some shops to continue to conduct wine tastings.
Blogger and former Maine Switch staffer Avery Yale Kamila is now writing a weekly column for the Press Herald Food & Dining section called Natural Foodie. The first of the series appeared in today’s newspaper.
Which brings me to the purpose of this weekly column. Here I’ll chronicle the latest trends in natural food, plus introduce you to the people and products feeding Maine’s healthful eaters. You can look forward to reading about a wide rage of eating styles, such as local, organic, vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, raw and macrobiotic.
Please send me your thoughts and story suggestions and, until next week, don’t forget to eat your vegetables.
MaineBiz has investigated the longstanding, but unverified, claim that Portland has the “highest or second highest number of restaurants per capita behind San Francisco”. While the source is still murky they were able to calculate the number of “registered food service establishments with food preparation” in the two cities relative to their population. Portland has 1 registered food service establishment for every 118 people and San Francisco clocks in at 1 for ever 231-311 people. The bottom line from MaineBiz:
That math seems to support the claim that Portland has more restaurants per capita than San Francisco. It’s still muddied, though. Those eatery licenses in the Portland City Hall include every school, nursing home and office cafeteria in the city, along with any other location that prepares and serves food.
So where does that leave us on the fact or fiction scale? Somewhere in the middle, leaning toward fact, but not enough to meet Mainebiz‘s high standards of reporting. But for PR purposes, it’s just fine.