This Week’s Events: Christmas, New Year’s Eve List (Updated)

| Posted in Events

Thursday — it’s Christmas Day.

Saturday — the Winter Farmers’ Market is taking place at the Urban Farm Fermentory.

New Year’s Eve — restaurants have started announcing their New Year’s Eve dinner plans. I’ll add more listings as information becomes available:

      • Artemisia Cafe, 4-course dinner for $65 per person
      • Back Bay Grill, 4-course dinner, $96 per person
      • Bao Bao Dumpling House is holding a Chinese street food party starting at 10pm, “$28 buys you a glass a bubbles and passed bites all night”.
      • BiBo’s Madd Apple Cafe, 3-course dinner, $50 per person.
      • Boone’s, 5-course dinner, $85/$110 per person
      • Central Provisions is throwing a party. The $100 ticket comes with a “welcome punch, passed hors d’oeuvres, 2 drink tickets and a midnight toast
      • Ebb & Flow is serving their regular menu “plus lots of specials” and will be “giving out free bubbles to everyone to ring in 2015”.
      • Eventide, will be throwing a party, $50 per person
      • Five Fifty-Five, 5-course dinner in the restaurant for $100 per person with optional wine pairings and truffle, caviar, and oyster supplements. Five Fifty-Five is also planning a champagne and caviar lounge in their private dinning room for $50 per person.
      • Grace will be serving their regular dinner menu. A cover charge of $20 (which funds the Good Shepherd Food Bank) will get you into the late night party which comes with complementary champagne toast.
      • MJ’s Wine Bar “will be offering 9 different sparkling wines by the glass this year. All at either $6 or $10 a glass”.
      • Petite Jacqueline, 3-course dinner for $70 per person, there are also optional truffle, caviar, oyster and foie gras supplements.
      • Piccolo, 8-course tasting menu with a glass of prosecco, $110 per person
      • Sea Glass at Inn by the Sea, 4-course menu, $85 per person with optional wine pairing for $30
      • The Frog & Turtle, 4-course dinner $65 per person
      • Vinland, 5-course/5-snack tasting menu, $90 per person
      • Zapoteca, 5-course dinner, $70 per person with optional tequila tasting for $25

For more information on these and other upcoming food happenings in the area, visit the event calendar.

If you are holding a food event this week that’s not listed above, publicize it by adding it as a comment to this post.

Map & Menu 2014

| Posted in Reviews

Map & Menu has posted a list of their favorite Maine food and drink of 2014.

We’re finishing up our Best of 2014 posts with the most challenging to whittle down and write – our favorite food (and drinks!) from our home state of Maine. There are plenty of spots in Portland and beyond that we wish we could include on this list, these are simply the dishes and restaurants that stood out to us and kept us coming back for more in 2014.

Review of The Jewel Box

| Posted in Reviews

The Press Herald has published a bar review of The Jewel Box,

The Jewel Box is mellow and classy, but not in a fancy way. There are moments when you feel like you’ve stepped inside a Wes Anderson film, and others when you might be on the set of Mad Men. Either way, Nan’l Meiklejohn, a.k.a. “The Bearded Lady,” and his staff will see to it that you have a well-crafted cocktail, some light snacks and a whole lot of good service.

Maine Craft Distilling in Freeport Now Open

| Posted in Openings

mcd_freeportMaine Craft Distilling is having a soft opening for their new Freeport tasting room/mixology shop today.

Maine Craft Distilling-Freeport edition is now open for biz. We are calling it our “soft” opening and are sure there is much that we will need to improve upon but come on by and try us out!!! The gala grand opening will be in the new year.

The tasting room is located at 7 Mill Street.

Under Construction: 46 Market Street

| Posted in Under Construction

The Golden Dish reports that Steve and Michelle Corry have leased 46 Market Street where they plan on opening a

casual restaurant serving French-inspired café  salads, sandwiches, soups and wine throughout the day with breakfast, lunch and dinnertime service.  The focus, however, will be on pastry, headed by a highly regarded local pastry chef, whose name was not, as yet, revealed. Count on Parisian-style espresso and coffee, killer croissants at breakfast and classic eclairs and Napoleons, French onion soup and salad Nicoise as part of a casual menu of light fare.

Pig + Poet/Chef Sam Talbot

| Posted in Under Construction

samtalbotLark Hotels has announced that chef Sam Talbot will be joining Lark to launch Pig + Poet, the restaurant at Whitehall, their new property in Camden which is slated to reopen this May.

Talbot was the Founding Executive Chef at Surf Lodge in Montauk and the Imperial No. Nine in NYC. He’s the author of The Sweet Life: Diabetes without Boundaries and was a semi-finalist and “Fan Favorite” on season 2 of Top Chef.

Here are some additional details on the restaurant from the Lark press release:

Focusing on Maine’s farmland, fisheries and game, the restaurant will feature a raw bar, signature roast pork dishes, Sam’s fresh take on lobster rolls, chowder and blueberry-sweet corn cobbler just to name few items. A charcuterie bar will offer sausages and cheese selections. The “poet” in the name is a nod to the chef’s role in the creative process, as well as a subtle wink to Edna St. Vincent Millay, a Pulitzer-prize winning poet who was discovered at Whitehall Inn in 1912.

“I’ve always loved the great outdoors and having a real connection to the food that comes out of my kitchen,” Chef Talbot said. “It’s become a bit of a cliche to say that my food is farm-to-fork, but that’s truly what it will be. Being in Camden is an inspiring opportunity for me to work with new local vendors, flavors and experiences. I have always been drawn to the water and waterfront towns and I’m excited to join the amazing food movement going on in the MidCoast, Portland and throughout Maine.”

Lark Hotels runs a several well regarded boutique inns including the Pomegranate Inn in Portland.

Interview with Fred Forsley

| Posted in Beer, People

The Press Herald has published an interview with Shipyard co-owner Fred Forsley.

Q: From the business perspective, is it complicated?
A: It looks like a simple business, but it can be complicated in the sense of getting a brand to grow and to get more than an initial sampling. From day one, the product was world-class and that made it easier to sell. At the end of the day, sales and marketing is a key ingredient, but it’s the quality of the product.

Under Construction: New Street/Hayward Restaurant

| Posted in Under Construction

The Golden Dish has a report on the as-yet-unnamed new seafood restaurant being developed on the Portland waterfront by Dana Street and Sam Hayward.

It hasn’t been named yet, but Street described it to me as a classic New England seafood house reminiscent of the way fish houses were in the early part of the 20th century as brasserie-style dining rooms. While he didn’t go into much detail about the menu, he offered this: It will resemble the simplicity of Fore Street’s straightforward approach, using the finest and freshest local ingredients. The focus will be on seafood but will also include steaks, chicken, lamb and pork done in the inimitable style of Hayward and his team of chefs. The food will be at once old-fashioned yet contemporary…

Gulf of Maine Fisheries

| Posted in Fisheries

The New York Times published an article this week about the impact warming sea temperatures are having on cod and other fisheries in the Gulf of Maine.

In the vast gulf that arcs from Massachusetts’s shores to Canada’s Bay of Fundy, cod was once king. It paid for fishermen’s boats, fed their families and put their children through college. In one halcyon year in the mid-1980s, the codfish catch reached 25,000 tons.

Today, the cod population has collapsed. Last month, regulators effectively banned fishing for six months while they pondered what to do, and next year, fishermen will be allowed to catch just a quarter of what they could before the ban.