Category: General News

The Food & Dining section in today’s Press Herald includes a feature story on Maine restaurants use of Twitter.

Arsenault was still new to Twitter, so when she organized a “tweet-up” at the inn for the folks who had been following her posts online, she hoped that maybe 15 people would show up.

“And then people just started piling in,” she said.

To Arsenault’s surprise, 37 diners drove to Scarborough to take advantage of the inn’s tweet-up specials – $5 mussel appetizers, $2 beers and $5 glasses of wine. Many were new to the inn, and some of them stayed on for dinner.

Evangeline was included in a list of the ten “best French restaurants to hear bon appétit” put together by Saveur Editor-in-Chief James Oseland for USA Today.

At Evangeline, nose-to-tail dining meets French technique: Think crispy roasted calf brains and roasted beef shins with warm marrow for spreading on crusty bread,” Oseland says. “Dishes are built from the ground up with the highest-quality ingredients and with an eye toward what’s local, seasonal and ripe for experimentation.”

Justin Ellis from the Press Herald has a report on the annual meeting of the youth group Rooted in Community.

It’s the annual conference for Rooted in Community, an organization that works with young people in areas like urban agriculture, sustainable farming and environmental awareness.

But these folks didn’t just happen to pick Maine at random. Local youth farming groups, such as Cultivating Community and the Local Sprouts Cooperative in Portland, as well as Lewiston’s Lots to Gardens, are hosts for the whole shindig.

The Portland Daily Sun has published enthusiastic praise for portlandtaps.com, “Brilliant. Folks, portlandtaps.com is Einstein-level brilliance.”

Terrence Henry is a journalist who is making a food tour of US, Canada and beyond and reporting on the experience at TheAtlantic.com. He’ll be spending 24 hours in Portland and is asking for advice on where he should eat. Five Fifty-Five, Evangeline, Duckfat, Fore Street, Hugo’s and Bresca are all on his short list but he’s open to other ideas. The poll results are favoring Fore Street over Five Fifty-Five by a 2-1 margin at the moment. (via Port City Sally)

Had I planned this all out better, we would probably be spending a few days in Portland instead of just 24 hours. But this being a trip on a budget, we have to get to New York by Thursday to enjoy four nights of free accommodation (thanks, Mom!), so we’re left with too little time to sample what’s on offer in the promising city of Portland, Maine (this may necessitate a return trip in the future).

OpenTable, an online restaurant reservation service, has never had that many Portland area restaurants to choose from on their site. That’s now starting to change. Bar Lola, Bull Feeney’s, Cinque Terre, David’s, Five Fifty-Five, Fore Street, Street & Co, The Frog and Turtle and Vignola are now all listed on the site. I hope they continue the expansion. It’s a very useful service, especially when looking for last minute reservations or trying to get a table for a larger group.
Restaurants are charged a fee for every reservation made through the site but the fee is less if you link to the OpenTable reservation page from the restaurant’s own website. So if you want to cut your favorite place a break go to their site first and click on their reservation link. Fore Street, Street & Co and Bull Feeney’s are the only ones that don’t have a reservations link on their own site.