Thursday, September 17, 2009

Food Scene in Portland, ME (NY Times)


THE overnight temperature is dropping toward frost this week and probably won’t rise above it until May. Most of the cruise ships are gone, and with them the fudge buyers, the lobster seekers and the chowderheads who clog the Old Port neighborhood in the summer.
But the quiet and the chill are deceptive. Portland’s many chefs and bakers, its turnip farmers and cookbook sellers and assorted mad food geniuses are gearing up for another lively winter.

“I wouldn’t call it a competition, I’d call it a collective,” Josh Potocki, the chef and owner of 158 Pickett St. Café in South Portland, said of the city’s food scene. “We are all trying to raise the level of food in Portland to insanely high.”

It’s working. With a simmering sense of injustice, I recently ate my way across some of the city’s new and offbeat restaurants. Why doesn’t my neighborhood have an all-day restaurant that makes its own spicy sausage, or one that produces house-made crackers and hot sauce for oysters? When will my market organize a ratatouille contest?

And how is it that students at Southern Maine Community College have unfettered access to long-fermented water-boiled bagels, when I have none?

In the last decade, Portland has undergone a controlled fermentation for culinary ideas — combining young chefs in a hard climate with few rules, no European tradition to answer to, and relatively low economic pressure — and has become one of the best places to eat in the Northeast. The most interesting chefs here cook up and down the spectrum, from Erik Desjarlais’s classically pressed roast ducks at Evangeline, to the renegade baker Stephen Lanzalotta’s gorgeously caramelized sfogliatelle (sold out of the back of Micucci Grocery, an Italian-imports shop), to Mr. Potocki’s simple but brilliant chili-garlic cream cheese and handmade bagels.

Tablecloths, Asian fusion and spherification are out (the locals aren’t interested in, or rich enough to indulge in, frivolous food experiments, the thinking goes). Nose-to-tail, rustic French and Italian, and small plates are in.
“I’ve cooked all over, and I kept coming back to Portland,” said Krista Kern Desjarlais, the chef and principal owner of Bresca, who has worked at Gotham Bar & Grill and Guy Savoy in Paris. Her butter-browned gnocchi with charred cherry tomatoes and her blueberry tart — a creamy filling, usually so dull, transformed by buttermilk — are infuriatingly delicious.

Chefs here feed off one another’s work in a way that’s impossible in larger cities (Portland’s population is about 65,000, and it has a compact urban center), constantly eating in and commenting on one another’s restaurants. “I’ve made enemies, for sure,” said Joe Ricchio, a bartender who makes Vietnamese pho on his days off, has a weakness for flaming scorpion bowls, and writes a blog titled Portland Food Coma.
In 2007, Mr. Ricchio started a festively debauched event now known as Deathmatch, a kind of extended “Iron Chef” dinner, with each invited chef contributing a course. “Each one takes five years off your life,” Mr. Ricchio said.

The first one was a foie gras gorge, and later themes have included venison, Japan and, most recently, death itself, an 18-course fantasia of a last meal. That dinner began predictably, with osetra caviar, but spiraled toward feijoada, a huge croquembouche, and bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches served by young women dressed as Catholic schoolgirls, wielding hot mayonnaise in squeeze bottles.

Most of Portland’s young chefs are men, marked by tough-guy tattoos and a combination of culinary idealism and anarchy. Many have worked in — and walked out of — one another’s kitchens. Some have paired off (the chefs of Evangeline and Bresca are newly married but maintain separate restaurants) or undergone messy splits (like Mr. Potocki and his former partner Allison Reid, who now plies her bread peel a few blocks away at Scratch Baking Company, making deeply browned levain loaves and a competing strain of bagel).
Many have cycled through the twin temples of Sam Hayward’s Fore Street or Hugo’s on Middle Street, where Rob Evans is the chef. These are the kitchens that first defined Portland as a destination for rigorously local and regularly delicious food.

“Faites simple,” Escoffier’s famous motto “make it simple,” is painted on the wall at Evangeline’s dining room. Mr. Desjarlais, the chef and principal owner, says that his major culinary influence is Richard Olney, the American food writer. (Mr. Desjarlais, now 33, had not yet been born in 1974, when Mr. Olney published “Simple French Food,” a rustic and revolutionary answer to Julia Child’s formal recipes.)

Mr. Desjarlais’s kitchen, however, has a more stress-inducing motto posted over the door: “Always Work With a Sense of Urgency.” In his entree of chicken breast neatly rolled in prosciutto, the flavors are almost shockingly spare — chicken, broccoli, carrot, butter, ham — but each plays off the others. And for an ambitious young chef to serve a boneless chicken breast dish in this day of off-cut fetishism — even a clabber-fed, organic one — shows true courage.

Local food lovers say that kind of self-directed cooking is what makes Portland’s food so good.


read more.....

BRESCA 111 Middle Street (Franklin Arterial), (207) 772-1004.
COFFEE BY DESIGN 43 Washington Avenue (Cumberland Avenue), (207) 879-2233.
EVANGELINE 190 State Street (Congress Street), (207) 791-2800.
THE FRONT ROOM 73 Congress Street (Howard Street), (207) 773-3366.
MICUCCI GROCERY CO. 45 India Street (Middle Street), (207) 775-1854. (italian import store)

MIYAKE 129 Spring Street (High Street), (207) 871-9170.
158 PICKETT ST. CAFÉ 158 Pickett Street (Broadway), South Portland, (207) 799-8998.
PACIARINO 468 Fore Street (Cross Street), (207) 774-3500. (also sells home-made organic pasta)
RABELAIS 86 Middle Street (Franklin Arterial), (207) 774-1044.
ROSEMONT MARKET 559 Brighton Avenue (Montrose Street), (207) 774-8129, and 88 Congress Street (Merrill Street), (207) 773-7888.
SCRATCH BAKING CO. 416 Preble Street (Pillsbury Street), South Portland, (207) 799-0668.
VIGNOLA 10 Dana Street (Commercial Street), (207) 772-1330.


Others, not mentioned in the article:
Cinqueterre, 36 Wharf Street Portland, Maine 04101

James Beard Foundation praises Cinque Terre's authentic Italian cuisine: "Many guests find it hard to remember they’re in Portland, Maine, as they tuck into chef Lee Skawinski’s 'casually elegant' Northern Italian specialties at Cinque Terre. Skawinski not only crafts an authentic Italian menu, he aims to create a truly Italian dining experience...To really take you away, the meal can be augmented with wine from the restaurant's award-winning, all-Italian wine list. What makes the whole thing sing, though, is the logic behind the magic. Located on the cobblestoned Wharf Street in the heart of the city’s Old Port, Cinque Terre is smack in the middle of a vibrant seaside community, reminiscent of its namesake region...So remember, despite what your atlas says, Cinque Terre, Maine, makes perfect sense."

Hugos, Chef Rob Evans won James Beard Foundation Best Chef of the Northeast 2009


My favorite:
The 2 Fat Cats Bakery, right next to Micucci.

Bon Appetit: Portland, the Foodiest Small Town of the U.S.



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