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The Portland Region
A boiled lobster is a perfect meal at Two Lights Lobster Shack in Cape Elizabeth.
This big chapter covers the coast from Biddeford to Freeport, with Maine's largest city, and its varied assortment of places to eat, right in the middle.
One of my predecessors in this line of work, Cynthia Hacinli, who wrote about Maine restaurants in her 1991 book Down Eats, reported that the city fathers said Portland had more restaurants per capita than San Francisco. Not true, many others have since argued.
But that conveys the gist of our enthusiasm.
A lot of Portland's residents go out to eat or have something to do with making dinner for others-growing, selling, or preparing the food; serving it up, eating it, and always talking about it. Some restaurants, like Street and Co. and Back Bay Grill, have been serving dinner since Hacinli wrote about them. Fore Street, too, is an institution, a revelation to newcomers and a pleasure that the rest of us rely on, especially in the cold winter.
Even the city's best places shun dress codes, having chosen to welcome all their customers, while those diners who like to dress elegantly can outfit themselves to the nines, more for their own pleasure than to conform to demands.
In the last couple of years a rash of new places has spread from one end of town to another, and many are thriving and expanding. Bar Lola serves small plates, The Front Room serves big ones, and Ladle is filling soup bowls. Caiola's on Pine Street fills plates with ever-changing pleasures and has brought back the feeling of neighborhood to a section of the West End.
Up in Yarmouth, SeaGrass Bistro has made a name for itself with inventive arrangements of the finest fresh ingredients.
Everyone involved in making these places work, from the dreamers who sink their money into a new design to the chefs who insist on high-quality ingredients to the customers who praise and criticize to the servers who can suffer from both the kitchen and the dining room, are trying for the Holy Grail of a night out: the bliss of a perfect meal.
May they get it right, just like Mrs. Dalloway.