Category: Profiles

Flood’s received a shout out this week in the New York Times Style Magazine.

Like Palace, Flood’s offers creative comfort food like juicy burgers and pancetta toast with apple butter, as well as a laid-back environment personified by several unofficial and irreverent mascots from the minds of the Atlanta-based design and consulting group Office of Brothers, Inc., such as a beanie-wearing, cigarette-smoking fish. “I’m not in the business of challenging people with my space or my food,” Mitchell told me. Rather, Flood’s is about feeling like you’re a regular.

The American Rum Report has profiled Three of Strong, a distillery located in Bayside.

In other words, Three of Strong had focus, experience, and novelty on its side from day one. So I was optimistic and interested in what they were making.

The Press Herald has published a profile of Plucked Fresh Salsa, a Fork Food Lab success story.

Now the brand and its whimsical name can be spotted at dozens of Hannaford  and Whole Foods stores, as well as on colleges campuses, across the Northeast. It just passed the $1 million mark in sales. Not bad for a business that started in her kitchen, moved to her basement and then nearly cost Towle and her husband their home.

The Blueberry Files has posted an overview of the local food truck fleet.

It’s been a few years since my last survey of the food truck fleet in and around Portland, Maine, and as you’d expect from these mobile eateries, a lot has changed since then. Here’s an update of who’s slinging food from a truck/cart this summer and where you can expect to find them.

The Maine Sunday Telegram has published an article about the Portland area’s traditional red-sauce Italian restaurants.

Instead of starkly decorated dining rooms with lines and lighting reminiscent of an industrial site, these old-school restaurants keep flowers, candles and linens on the tables. The soothing tones of Frank Sinatra and other old-time crooners add to the atmosphere instead of drowning out conversations. In these places, the long-gone Village Cafe – a popular Italian-American family restaurant in the Old Port that was driven out by urban renewal and is still mourned by Portlanders on social media – is remembered with reverence, and the Olive Garden is dismissed as irrelevant.

Life & Thyme has published a profile of Rabelais Books and its owner Don Lindgren.

For Don Lindgren of Rabelais, an antiquarian bookshop in Biddeford, Maine, these culinary texts serve a purpose even more expansive than the preservation of recipes. Widely considered a leading buyer and seller of antiquarian cookbooks and culinary ephemera, his work consists not just in seeking out rare material, but in helping others understand the role those books played in the lives of both their individual owners and society at large.

The Boston Globe has published an article about the East End of Portland with a focus on the restaurants and other food purveyors located there.

Last year, Kittery stalwart Bob’s Clam Hut opened an outpost at the corner of Cumberland and Washington avenues. If you’re not in the mood for fried clams, Washington Avenue boasts an Ethiopian restaurant, an African market, a boutique Texas barbecue place, a vegan cafe and marketplace, a pho joint, and a Salvadoran restaurant. Drifters Wife, a chef-driven locavore restaurant with its own wine shop (Maine & Loire) in back, is a national critical darling.

The West End News has published an article about The 5 Spot’s basement bar, the Philly Underground.

Costello’s newest establishment, a Philadelphia themed watering hole dubbed The Philly Underground, opened on September 6th in the basement below The 5 Spot. It’s a genuine no frills, homie bar where the prices of the drinks won’t break the bank.

“It’s about trying to hold this together as a community,” said Costello. “Because what I think and what a lot of people see across town in Portland is that the small-town feel is being squeezed out.”