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Blue Sky
2 Beach St., York Beach
(207) 363-0050
www.blueskyonyorkbeach.com
Open: Dinner serves nightly Sunday to Thursday 5:30 to 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday 5:30 to 11. Bar Vivo open till 1 a.m.
Hospitality: Casual service could use a little polishing in this swanky setting, but no doubt that will follow with more experience
Entrees $22 to $38 ($48 for a stuffed 2-pound lobster)
Handicapped accessible
High quality straightforward meals are served in cushy, immaculate surroundings in this totally renovated building in the middle of York Beach
Lydia Shire has many restaurants in Boston over the past decades. She used her eye for a beautiful room to transform the second floor of this building, the Atlantic House, into an elegant destination in York Beach; her restaurant Blue Sky opened in late 2007 upstairs. The scruffy downtown of this village on the sea, so long focused on the waves fringing the endless beach, has something else to contemplate this year, but the restaurant itself has no water view.
Shire's menu is straightforward, perhaps acknowledging a need to keep it that way in a town used to simpler ways. But sophistication touches the dishes via resurrections of the past, as in the lobster fried in homemade lard, with homemade baked beans ($38). It takes an epicurian to retrieve that kind of past (which never left the kitchen of Condon's Doughnuts in Wells, a short drive up the coast – they are fried in lard too).
Skirt steak, roasted Scottish salmon, pappardelle with bacon, squash, and pumpkin seed brittle are also ready to be tasted. We had the lobster broth with gnocchi – flavored a shade too intensely for my enjoyment – and the simple, perfectly cooked swordfish with fried calamari ($29). Great wines by the glass, like a dark, earthy Portuguese red called Cortes de Cima Chamine, an '06 made with Aragonez, Portuguese for Tempranillo, make the bar a perfect place to relax and imbibe, but the prices are high. Complaints about a high noise level and decent food that doesn't seem to justify the high tab are common about Blue Sky, but it's early days yet.
Dessert was the climax of our good meal, with a steamed chocolate cake that was light and intense at the same time, and the "sunshine sauce," an airy lemony sabayon look-alike.