Category: Openings

Hi-Fidelity Beer (website, facebook, instagram) is launching their East Bayside brewery and tasting room this Friday. They’ll be opening at noon and are located in Unit 6 of the Urban Farm Fermentory building at 200 Anderson Street.

Owners PD Wappler and Dante Maderal are focusing on low ABV  beers. Their opening day line-up will include:

• Just Sound – a British ordinary bitter, 3.3% ABV
• Terribly Misleading – an American IPA, 4.7%
• Gunpowder Eyes – a smokey porter, 5.2%

Moving forward Hi-Fidelity will be open Thursday through Sunday, noon to 1 am, and Mondays 2 pm to midnight.

Yordprom Coffee (instagram) owner Tom Yordprom has launched a new takeout restaurant in the West End called Tobi. Shown here is the Pad Pik Pao prepared with stir fried rice noodles, peppers, onions, tomatoes, chicken, and chili soy paste, eggs, and basil and a side of the crispy chive cakes.

Tobi is located on Walker Street in the former takeout kitchen that was home to Figgy’s. They’ll be open Tuesday through Saturday, 5 – 8 pm to start.

Here’s a look at the full opening night menu:

Prior to launching Yordprom Coffee in 2010, Tom Yordprom operated Siam Grille on Fore Street in Boothby Square.

Fish & Whistle (website, instagram) is slated to open this Saturday and Sunday. F&W is being launched by Kate Hamm and husband Jason Eckerson at 299 Maine Street in Biddeford. The restaurant is named for a song by John Prine.

Fish and Whistle is opening this weekend with a reduced menu (see below) but will eventually serve fish and chips as well as fish and chicken sandwiches, a calamari burger made with Maine squid, smoked tempeh sandwich, salad, chowder, hand cut fries, seasonal vegetable slaw and a chip butty sandwich. Additionally, the dessert menu will includes soft serve ice cream as well as Hamm’s deserts.

Hamm is the former pastry chef at Leeward and founder of Sweet Woodruff Provisions. Eckerson has worked for Big Tree Hospitality where he’s been the sous chef at Eventide and seafood buyer.

A new (or at least new to Portland) food truck called All Grill (instagram) is at Crescent Beach in Cape Elizabeth today. All Grill hails from Tampa, Florida and serves a menu of “[g]rilled food with a Venezuelan touch”.

Staff at Scratch Baking Company (instagram) are busy putting the finishing touches on their newly renovated bakery. They are scheduled to reopen their landmark Willard Square location Thursday May 26th. Going forward their new hours will be Wednesday through Sunday, 7 am – 2 pm.

The new space features a roundtangle shaped space with a center island. Customers will enter through the left set of doors. First up on the trip around the bakery will be breads and bagels, followed by pastries along the long back counter, and then refrigerated and packaged goods on the final side. Coffee will be available—drip and espresso drinks—from the central island.

The long awaited reopening of Tandem’s Anderson Street location is taking place Tuesday May 24th. Little Tandem will be open Tuesday through Saturday 8 am – 1 pm to start.

The newly renovated space features additional counter and table seating including a spot that the architect has labeled “Kathleen’s Cozy Corner”. As you can see from the photo, the coffee bar has moved from the left side of the building to the section of the building where the original roastery was located.

The Little Tandem building in East Bayside is where Kathleen and Will Pratt first opened their coffee roastery and coffee bar back in 2012. Tandem’s Congress Street coffee shop and bakery opened in 2014.

Browne Trading has launched a takeout lunch menu which includes offerings such as: a smoked salmon BLT, BBQ hamachi collar and tuna tartar.

You can find the full menu on instagram. Lunch is available Tuesday through Friday, and outdoor seating will soon be available.

After a soft opening on Thursday, Roll Call (website, instagram) is scheduled to open their new lunch counter today in the Public Market House.

The new Roll Call features an expanded menu which includes their wonderful roast beef sandwich as well a braised lamb quesadilla, a breakfast sandwich, a buffalo soy sandwich, and other offerings.

Roll Call will initially be open Wednesday through Friday, 10:30 – 2:30

The second volume of the Maine Community Cookbook is now available for pre-order on Kickstarter.

The overwhelmingly positive reception of the Maine Bicentennial Community Cookbook inspired us to continue our project, and to expand it. In 2021, we began to solicit recipes for this second volume. Though our country’s divisions are increasingly on display, these community cookbooks focus on what connects us: food, family, and a love for the state of Maine. The book’s contributors are all united by one thing: they are generous enough to invite us into their kitchens and share their family’s food traditions with us. We are grateful to them, and excited to share more Maine family recipes and stories with you.

A $24 pledge on Kickstarter will get you a copy of the book shipped to you “hot off the press” when it’s released in July. Other pledge amounts include incentives like cooking with the editors, a guest appearance on the Maine Community Cookbook podcast, and even a private tour of the collections at Rabelais for you and 12 friends.

The Maine Donut Tour (website, facebook, instagram) launched last week. The tour combines stops at Portland donut shops with historical highlights in the Old Port. Eighty 8 Donuts, The Holy Donut, and Hifi Donuts are the featured donut shops.

Tours run Tuesday through Saturday at 9:15 and 11:15 each morning—book your spot online.