Boda

Dining Out Summer 2021: Short Takes–Ho-Hum, Standouts and Unfortunates

July 23, 2021 / / Restaurants

From Judy Gibson to Boda to Scales and the Luna landscape, Izakaya Minato and  last and very the least the  sandwich shop Cera,  mostly remarkable and a few blemishes.

Luna at the new Canopy Hotel  is a winner. It’s everything a sophisticated, sleek urban outpost should be.  Interesting bar food and drinks, it’s essentially all about the view and the uber chic interior with its outdoor terrace overlooking the best of downtown Portland by the sea.  It makes you wonder  whether  we’ll ever have residential high rises with views like this from walls of glass overlooking our glorious waterfront?  The spate of new condo buildings in Portland  is architecture at its worst.  What is this trend of multi-faced edifices? (Brick meets siding?)  Hobson’s Landing is the worst offender.  Who’s paying nearly$1 million for these apartments with terraces that look like tenement fire escapes?  The Canopy building a few blocks over, however, is beautifully done, with its chic lobby and concierge entry to the Luna rooftop.

Canopy lobby, Luna rooftop pimento cheese and the Luna dining room and terrace

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Bao Bao still worth all of the bows, bowls and buns

January 8, 2016 / / Restaurants

The Sunday dinner menu at Bao Bao was not, as I thought, a more varied affair with bigger multi-course offerings going beyond the restaurant’s signature dumplings.  I was, I admit, wrong to assume otherwise since nowhere on its website did it give that impression. Yet differentiating it from its regular menu as “Sunday dinner” implied a broader range of dishes.

It didn’t.  And our table of four, however, was hardly disappointed with what we ate, though we all expected it to be, well, fuller.

The dining room and bar at Bao Bao

The dining room and bar at Bao Bao

Chef Cara Stadler’s Bao Bao is a dumpling house in the strictest sense. (Interestingly the kitchen does not prepare—as the restaurant’s name suggests—the typical Chinese buns known as cha sui bao or pork buns; yet “bao” literally means wrapped treasure and not necessarily referring to buns.)

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First Look: Veranda Noodle House–good enough in a convenient Old Port location

January 1, 2016 / / Restaurants

Usually   any new restaurant to open in Portland gets loads of attention from the press, food sites and the swirl of food-buzz types who predictably show up on day one especially if there’s a rising star or publicity-hungry chef in the kitchen.  But Veranda Noodle House has bucked the trend, keeping a low profile since opening just before Thanksgiving in the former Salt Exchange space on Commercial Street.

Rear dining room

Rear dining room

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Bet on Boda for great food–if they’re up to snuff

September 4, 2015 / / Restaurants

Sometimes it depends on the dish you choose from a restaurant menu that makes or breaks the meal, and that was my recent experience at Boda, still one of the most popular Asian restaurants in the Longfellow Square dining loop.

Boda's bar captures a lively crowd from 20-somethings on up

Boda’s bar captures a lively crowd from 20-somethings on up

Getting in to this dining darling is not always easy as lines form out the door every night of the week.  When I arrived on Tuesday night there were plenty of parking spaces in the adjoining Joe’s parking area reserved for the restaurant.  But that belied the activity within. The place was packed.  (Ponder this: what happens  when the parking lot behind Joe’s is rehabbed into a high-rise rental and parking is lost?)

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