Category: Profiles

This week’s Portland Phoenix includes an article about the SMCC culinary school.

Their instructor, chef Bo Byrne, explains why he has 50 pounds of chicken bones in a pot in the back corner of the kitchen (for 20 gallons of chicken stock) to be mixed into the pot of beans he also has going for a traditional French cassoulet.

Near the conclusion of their two-year education at the South Portland bayside college, these young professionals are on a new, nuanced track into the hospitality industry.

Visit the SMCC site for more information about the SMCC Culinary Arts Program.

Mainer has published an article about the Fresh Approach Market.

During its first week, in February of 1992, the fledgling family business also got a boost from an unexpected source: Portland’s restaurant industry. Steve Harris, the legendary proprietor of Ruski’s Tavern, on the West End, and Rosie’s, the Old Port pub on Fore Street, walked into Fresh Approach just days after they’d opened and placed meat orders for both establishments. Harris, who passed away in 2009, was also the head of the local restaurant association, and by the end of the week Fresh Approach had eight or nine restaurant accounts. 

The USM Free Press has published an article about the Urban Farm Fermentory.

Cayer created this company as a way to collect the tastes and smells and local goods of his community to take a visceral snapshot and a reflection of the time. Only using local and native ingredients as a base of all of his flavors. 

The Washington Post has published an article about Bresca and the Honey Bee and its owner Krista Kern Desjarlais.

Kern Desjarlais never stops experimenting. Her latest creation: artichoke ice cream. Basing her technique on a French recipe that dates back to 1825, she poaches fresh artichoke hearts in a sugar syrup with vanilla, and orange and lemon zest, then purees the mixture and folds it into a sweet cream base. After the ice cream is done, she tops it with candied grapefruit and toasted pistachio. This recipe seems to meld her interest in history, food and creating flavors that few have tasted before.

Eater has published an in depth look at the Preble Street food program and the many challenges it’s navigated during the pandemic.

But on March 25 last year, for the first time in its history, Preble Street closed its dining room. Suddenly, the delicate web of social services that Portland’s unhoused community relied on to meet basic needs, a system largely concentrated in Preble’s Bayside neighborhood, began to unravel. This unravelling, which led to a forced dispersal of the city’s homeless population, brought into stark relief the conflicting imperatives of public health, public safety, and emergency services brought on by the pandemic. It became clear that if Preble Street was going to keep feeding people, the model — and maybe even the organization’s entire mission — would need to be rethought.

The article was written by Christian Letourneau with photography by Greta Rybus as part of a collaboration between Eater and the Food & Environment Reporting Network.

For more information on the Preble Street visit www.preblestreet.org.

The Portland Phoenix has published an article about Blackstones, a gay bar in Longfellow Square.

The coronavirus pandemic has left many local bar owners without a path forward, and reality set in for Blackstones manager Carl Currie last month.

Currie had just come out of a staff meeting with bar owner Matt Pekins where they decided they would have to ask the community for money to stay afloat until spring.

He said the decision was a difficult one that he and Pekins tried to avoid, and that it made him uncomfortable. But less than two weeks after he created a GoFundMe page asking neighbors to help save Portland’s last gay bar, they had raised enough in pledges to survive the winter.