By Will Grunewald Photos by Nicole Wolf From our April 2024 issue The table setting was pretty darn lovely — a light-gray runner draped diagonally, beneath a small vase of yellow and white tulips and a couple of squat, flickering candles. The napkins were folded just so, the lighting dimmed exactly right. All in a private dining room. Or, more precisely, our dining room — at home. I’d arranged most of the scene myself, so I’m a little biased toward how it turned out. Not often do my wife and I do a fancy meal at home, and I was feeling inspired. As for the meal, it too came together without a ..read more

By Nora Saks From our March 2024 issue During a lull at their booth at the Freedom Farmers’ Market last summer, cheesemaker Amy Rowbottom and her assistant, Erika Noone, began brainstorming new ricotta flavors. “Erika was like, ‘I love fennel,’ and I’m like, ‘I love lemon,’ and so we came up with lemon-fennel,” says Rowbottom, who opened Skowhegan’s Crooked Face Creamery in 2010. The finished product is sweet, tart, and a little crunchy (Rowbottom likes to spread it on graham crackers). She entered it into the World Cheese Awards, held in Norway last fall. Judges sampled 4,502 cheeses from 43 ..read more

By Kate McCarty Photos by Mat Trogner From our March 2024 issue Oak & Ember owner Shannon Keefe The circa 1790 mustard-colored farmhouse at the intersection of Routes 202 and 22 has witnessed the town of Buxton transform from a hub of Saco River mill activity to a rural enclave of metro Portland. The farmhouse has transformed too, serving first as a private residence, then an antiques shop, then the beloved Buxton Common restaurant, and now a new gastropub, Oak & Ember. Last June, longtime Portland bartender Shannon Keefe bought the place from Buxton Common chef Max Brody, who had exte ..read more

By Michaela Cavallaro From our February 2024 issue With its violet wallpaper in an ornate bird print, creamy tin ceiling stamped with sinuous patterns, and elaborately veined pink-marble bartop fronting a wall of shimmery lavender tile, Lauren Guptill’s new Rococo Dessert Bar, in Kennebunk, reads like the design equivalent of one of her decadent ice-cream flavors. The jewel box of a space — conceived with Portland architect Woodhull and Kennebunkport designers Krista Stokes and Christy Reid — comprises eight gilded stools at the bar and three booths with Art Deco–inspired, arched seats in ochr ..read more

By Nora Saks From our February 2024 issue The shiny chrome bags of Fox Family Potato Chips stand out in a snack aisle, although they’ve been conspicuously hard to find lately. According to co-owner Rhett Fox, demand for the Mapleton company’s chips, made with potatoes from surrounding Aroostook County farms, has increased 40 percent in the last two years. As soon as bags hit shelves, they’re gobbled up, despite Fox tripling the size of his production facility last year (capacity: 250,000 pounds of chips annually). He chalks up the chips’ popularity to their chief ingredient. “There’s a distinc ..read more

By Will Grunewald Photos by Nicole Wolf From our February 2024 issue Cara Stadler was just 24 years old when, in 2012, she opened Tao Yuan. Two years later, the Brunswick restaurant earned her the first of what would be five consecutive nods as a semifinalist or finalist for the “rising star” award at the James Beard Foundation’s annual culinary equivalent of the Oscars. Food & Wine twice named her one of the country’s best new chefs. Then, in early 2020, all the momentum at Tao Yuan came to an abrupt halt. Like other restaurant owners, Stadler shut her doors when the pandemic hit. Then, u ..read more

By Virginia M. Wright Photos by Nicole Wolf From our January 2024 issue Pottle’s, which opened last summer in Liberty village, is a den of homeyness. The barroom is dark and intimate, with exposed wooden beams, red-checkered curtains, and a built-in bookcase stocked with vintage tomes and painted a deep blue-gray to match the walls. The adjacent dining room is brighter but no less cozy, with a fireplace, chef Isiah Pottle’s vintage family photos on the walls, and an upright piano that guests play with varying skill.  Pottle’s fare is homey too, most of it created from his family’s re ..read more

By Will Grunewald From our January 2024 issue By 2 o’clock on a Saturday morning, Jeremy Kratzer is out of bed in Saco. By 3, he has driven 45 miles to Brunswick, where he and his wife, Marina, started Dutchman’s Wood-Fired Bagels a little over a year ago. By sunup, Kratzer has shaped hundreds of bagels by hand and cooked them Montreal-style — boiled in honey water, finished in a wood-fired oven — except that, since he shares the space with a pizzeria, he uses residual oven heat from the night before instead of a live fire. The result of that tweaked process is a bagel superbly balanced b ..read more

By Joel Crabtree From our January 2024 issue On a mid-October afternoon, the crimson blueberry fields surrounding Orland’s W. R. Allen blueberry-processing facility were tinged with the scent of wood- smoke — and steamed broccoli. Inside a new 7,000-square-foot addition to Allen’s existing 22,000-square-foot plant, workers were feeding bright-green broccoli crowns from Caribou’s Circle B Farms into a Rube Goldberg arrangement of stainless-steel machinery that chops the vegetable into bite-size florets, then washes, blanches, flash freezes, and deposits them in 600-pound boxes. Those containers ..read more

By Virginia M. Wright From our December 2023 issue For the past 40 years, the Bouchard Family Farm, in Fort Kent, has occupied a niche as one of the country’s few growers and millers of Tartary buckwheat. They’ve typically used the bulk of it to make their own mix for ployes, the crepe-like flatbreads that Acadians who settled the Saint John Valley once served at every meal. “In the last few years, that’s flipped,” Jan Bouchard says. “Now, most of our flour goes to customers who are making their own products.”  One of those products is Diggables, airy, crunchy buckwheat puffs that hit she ..read more