Chow Maine - Restaurant Guide

In this section of the Maine coast lies a town that has been a tourist destination for generations. Boothbay Harbor, crammed with shops and restaurants, fills up with crowds in the hot summer months. Sited in a lovely stretch of harbors and islands, it's a good place to start from, but a great place to leave-for a drive southwest to Southport Island, either for dinner at an old inn like the Lawnmere, over the swing bridge on Townsend Gut, or for lobster on a deck at Robinson's Wharf, overlooking an uncrowded harbor.

Or drive east and south to Ocean Point, another classic inn with simpler meals.

Just around the harbor itself, down at the end of Atlantic Avenue, you can enjoy the most elegant meals in the area at the Spruce Point Inn.

But Boothbay, while many people's destination, shouldn't keep a visitor long. A drive farther up the coast leads to more charming stretches of windswept, granite peninsulas, ending at Pemaquid Point and its lovely lighthouse. Or wind around Round Pond, with its artists in residence and lobster served on a wharf. The peaceful loneliness of this landscape paradoxically draws those crowds, but a taste of the forests are at hand for anyone who cares to walk down the many land trust and park trails.

Wiscasset and Damariscotta, the former right smack on Route 1, to many of its inhabitant's dismay, and the latter smugly just off, on Business Route 1, are delights to visit, with good antiques shops, bookstores, and clothing stores, along with several fine places for good meals.

Wiscasset is also the site of a friendly rivalry that mirrors the coast-long competition to serve and sell seafood, in particular the predominate lobster rolls.

A while ago a place in Damariscotta, Larson's, now closed, sold the biggest lobster rolls, with perhaps 6 ounces of lobster meat in each roll. Today the prize for largest must go to Pemaquid Fisherman's Co-op Harbor View Restaurant, with 8 ounces (in the photo above).

But the little toasted and buttered hot dog rolls with 4 ounces are considered the gold standard, and two businesses face off at the bottom of the hill in Wiscasset, by the bridge on Route 1. Sprague's Lobster and Red's Eats both claim to serve that fully adequate amount. It's easier to buy one from Sprague's, at least so far, because there is not usually a line.