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Fore Street
(207) 775-2717
288 Fore Street, Portland
www.forestreet.biz
Hospitality—Great service without a rush, despite the crowd
Open daily for dinner weekdays 5:30–10, weekends until 10:30
Entrées $17 to $34
Handicapped accessible, reservations almost always a necessity.
If you arrive early you can get your name on a list for the tables kept open for walk-ins, or you can eat at the bar.
Go here for the best evening out, with an exciting dining room and wonderful meat and fish.
Chef and part owner Sam Hayward has presided over the kitchen since 1996. In 2006, Gourmet magazine included Fore Street among the top 50 restaurants in the country, just as it had five years earlier. Hayward’s great recipes have been written up in the New York Times. I rated his restaurant with five stars, the maximum in the reviews I write for the Maine Sunday Telegram.
The big dining room with its high rafters and exposed bricks centers on the open kitchen and its fires. Servers leap to pick up meals when they’re called, while a cook shoves roasting pans deep into the wood-burning oven and another cuts apart turnspit-roasted loins of pork with triumphant exuberance. This hearth draws all eyes, not just for the flames dancing inside the wood-burning oven, but more particularly to watch the chefs, like dancers, turning, stooping, sliding dish after dish and plate after plate, making dishes for hundreds, among them oven-roasted mussels with a large scoop of almond butter scented with garlic, and a splash of vermouth.
Hayward has been buying the best local produce for years, and some of it sits on display like the art it is in the restaurant’s glass-windowed produce closet. Wild Maine chanterelles foraged by Rick Tibbets, one of Maine’s best foragers, might arrive at the table in a soup with spinach ($8.50), or in a side dish with opal basil butter ($12). Fore Street moved its side dishes into a separate list in 2006; a close comparison with other years’ menus shows no significant change in prices, especially when a side of house-rendered lard roasted red potatoes ($4) serves two generously.
The restaurant serves pizza and a pasta dish that could suit any reasonable child while her parents are rooting in their big bowls of fish and shellfish stew, or platters of wood-oven-roasted wild king salmon or whole lobster. Some children have become roast pork fanatics after a taste of the pork loin ($21), even though they might skip the house-pickled onions.
While some dishes are costly, the juicy roast chicken and roast monkfish are not, something to remember when a dinner at Fore Street seems out of reach. In 2006 a friend and I ate here for $106 with tip.
Dessert is astonishing—if you feel you can’t taste another bite, consider your figure blessed.
Warm chocolate soufflé cake ($8) has been toppling diners’ resolutions since Fore Street opened in 1996, and the peach tarte tatin ($7.50) is just as effective, with its silk fruit and tender, flaky puff pastry. A warm plum and peach cobbler ($7) had a tanginess of warm fresh fruit that makes one of the best endings to a meal.