The flourish and fanfare that swirled around the opening day of the Portland Patisserie and Grand Cafe last week—with many of the city’s serial foodies assessing and inspecting-doesn’t even begin to show the depths of this French-inspired grand café. Classic breakfast fare like croissants or almond-topped brioche breads are part of the lineup in addition to all the Euro-style pastries and cakes, sablés and cookies, salads, soups, quiche, crepes and sandwiches on house-baked baguettes or focaccia for lunch or light suppers. It’s all prepared in the long narrow kitchen in the rear of this corner retail space on Market and Milk streets in the Old Port.
Five Fifty-Five
You can dine out every night of the week in Portland and confine yourself to the upper echelons of every new restaurant that has opened recently. This week alone two pivotal establishments have debuted: the sumptuous Tempo Dulu at the Danforth Inn and Evo, located at the base of the Hyatt Place Hotel on Fore Street. (The latter is not, however, a “hotel restaurant” as described in a recent post on a food site but rather merely a leased retail space at the streetside corner of the hotel that was transformed into a stunning two-level dining room.)
The dining room at 555 at last year’s Christmas dinner; a quiet corner table is a coveted spot in the dining room
Still the baubles of Portland’s increasingly frothy world of fine dining are on a magnanimous tear. More than ever, perhaps, mightn’t it behoove one to pay homage to the core posts of dining in the city, the ones that made our mini-metropolis into a national destination for foodie obsessives?
