The Il Leone kitchen consists of a trailer, which serves as pantry, refrigerator, and prep station, and a wood-fired oven, which has two wheels and a tow hitch. They’re parked next to each other on the periphery of Peaks Island’s small downtown, in a shaded grove with 10 picnic tables beneath bistro lights strung from branches. That’s pretty much all there is to it — either a food truck without a truck or a restaurant without walls. And whether in spite of or precisely because of that operational minimalism, Il Leone is maximally good.

The sense of simplicity extends to the menu: pizzas that reflect a reverence for both Neapolitan tradition and the Maine farm-to-table ethos. Owner Ben Wexler-Waite’s naturally leavened dough, after just one minute in the 850-degree oven, comes out airy but chewy, bespeckled with char, and possessed of subtle sourdough tang. He makes tomato sauce with San Marzano tomatoes, imported from Italy. His cheeses come from specialty producers, foreign and domestic. And he gets most of the toppings — eggplant, basil, garlic scapes, lobster, zucchini — from around Maine.

Il Leone operates from May to October, and on a visit earlier this year, asparagus was in season. Wexler-Waite had sliced the stalks longways, into thin strips, and laid them among dollops of mozzarella. The crunch and the bittersweet grassiness of asparagus was a gentle counterpoint to the silky, creamy cheese. A halved lemon came with the pizza, for squeezing over top, adding some brightness that balanced the earthy and salty hit of freshly grated pecorino Romano.

Each element was a clear expression of itself, but everything worked together — a distinctly Italian culinary sensibility. No surprise, then, to later learn that Wexler-Waite, who moved to Peaks in 2019 and opened Il Leone two years after that, has spent a good deal of time in Italy. The flavors on the asparagus pizza, for instance, were inspired by a pasta dish he tried in Siena. Il Leone also offers salads (arugula dressed with lemon and olive oil and sprinkled with Parmigiano-Reggiano and black pepper) and antipasto platters (vegetables, cured meats, cheese, freshly baked flatbread). In all instances, Wexler-Waite seems to abide by Italian cookery’s central tenet, something like: find the best ingredients, and don’t ruin them by getting too fancy.

Il Leone has another thing going for it, which is that a visit feels like a proper escape. Sure, Peaks is part of Portland and catching the ferry is about as involved as hopping a bus from one end of Congress Street to the other. But one moment you’re weaving through summer crowds in the Old Port, and the next you’re gliding through the harbor on the 15-minute ride to the island. After that, it’s a short stroll to the stand of trees glowing with bistro lights and scented by the wood oven. And while the ferry will get you across Casco Bay, the restaurant (or food truck or whatever it is) very nearly transports you across the Atlantic. No wonder pizza boxes have become such a ubiquitous sight on the return trip from Peaks.

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In 2017, brothers Alan and Jonathan Hines were on vacation in Copenhagen, and a lightbulb went off when they happened upon a food stall packed with locals enjoying pints of beer along with smørrebrød, open-faced sandwiches served on squares of rye bread. Smørrebrød (pronounced like “s’more-brood”) is, traditionally, a way of using up leftovers, but it’s lately been showing up on restaurant menus around Scandinavia, getting chefier treatments. The Hineses, who had already been toying with the idea of opening a bar back in Maine, decided to make smørrebrød their bread and butter.

The brothers started hosting smørrebrød parties for friends at home as they patiently looked around for the right location. In 2021, Stones Cafe & Bakery, in North Yarmouth, came up for sale. The old café building would become the restaurant, while a large adjacent barn could host events. After a year of renovations, they opened Trudy Bird’s Ølbar (named for their maternal grandmother, plus the Danish word for a beer bar). The interior has Scandi vibes, with a mix of rustic wide-plank hardwood floors, a shiplap-covered bar, and mod furnishings, like matte-black light fixtures, camel-colored leather barstools, and accent wallpaper that looks like a murmuration of swallows. It’s what the Danish would probably call hygge, all snug and comfy and convivial. 

The menu is a smorgasbord of smørrebrøds. You can approach them as bar snacks, or you can build a meal out of them. One smørrebrødfeatured classic Scandinavian flavors: cold-smoked salmon, chopped-up hard-boiled egg, and pickled beets. The fresh, earthy notes of egg and pickled beet nicely complemented the rich, oily salmon. Another smørrebrød was topped with crunchy, juicy fried chicken and creamy, dill-inflected kohlrabi slaw. Against the dense, nutty rye bread, it played like a Nordic riff on Southern chicken and waffles — the Hineses, who relocated to Maine a decade ago, are Georgia natives. 

Alan, a chef with 25 years of restaurant experience, is responsible for baking and plating the bread. He might top it with local seafood, like fried hake (with sauce gribiche, a sort of herbaceous, caper-y tartar sauce) or cold-smoked haddock (with fennel cream). Another option was fried pimento cheese and tomato, nodding again to the brothers’ Southern roots. 

In Denmark, the Hineses often saw smørrebrød accompanied by aquavit, a Scandinavian liquor, and they opted to carry that custom across the Atlantic. Their bar offers several imported brands of the typically caraway- or dill-infused spirit, but they also make some of their own flavors in-house, from strawberry to brown butter. I’m not much for traditional aquavits, but I tried the brown-butter version and loved it. It put me in mind of warm apples and buttered rum. Beer drinkers will find 20 taps pouring top-notch local options — an Oxbow lager, an Allagash sour, and so on — as well as some Euro specialties, like Belgian quad or a German smoked beer. 

The food and drink at Trudy Bird’s will probably hit some new notes for many Maine restaurant goers. Smørrebrød was certainly new to me, but it also seems perfectly matched to the state’s culinary DNA. In these northern climes, there’s no going wrong with hearty breads, belly-warming drinks, and an atmosphere conducive to good company. Now, we just need to add a new word to our local toasting vocabulary: “Skål!” 

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Jasper Ludwig grew up in Newcastle, just seven minutes down the road from the Alna Store, which was originally owned by friends of her parents. Her dad used to take her there to buy strawberry milk on their way to the transfer station. She moved to the West Coast for college, bounced around the country for a few years, and, in 2014, opened a hybrid restaurant, café, and market in Tucson with her partner, Brian Haskins. She knew that, one day, she’d want to come back to Maine and replicate the model. “We wondered where we might find a home here,” she says. “I always secretly hoped it would be the Alna Store.” 

In the “dark days of 2020,” her Tucson restaurant was only doing takeout and wildfires were running up nearby mountains, so she and Haskins drove east. As it turned out, the owners of the Alna Store, who had built a following around tacos and other Mexican dishes, were looking to sell. “Serendipity,” Ludwig calls it. Among the many renovations she and Haskins undertook, they replaced the bar, much of the kitchen, the electric, and the plumbing. They added windows to the south-facing wall, to drench the space in sunshine. During construction, longtime customers would occasionally stop by to see what was happening. “If you still tag deer and sell beer, I’ll be here,” one told them.

The Alna Store reopened late last year, still looking very much like a classic country store from the outside, perfectly at home in a rural town of only 700 people. “A gas station with no gas,” Ludwig calls it. At noon on a recent weekday, the parking lot was completely full. At the bar, two women raved about their sandwiches — an Italian and a cheeseburger — while Ludwig, pulling double duty as bartender and barista, served up a Bloody Mary garnished with a green olive and a boiled and salted fingerling potato, then made a cappuccino with a leaf artfully patterned in the foam. 

One evening a few weeks later, the place was buzzing again. The dinner menu, from chef Devin Deirden, changes often, always drawing on locally sourced meats, cheeses, grains, and produce. That night, a wedge salad comprised a delicate green-and-purple head of radicchio from Chase’s Daily farm, in Belfast, plus capers, sliced radishes, and fried shallots. The buttermilk dressing with bonito flakes made it difficult to refrain from licking the plate. Another appetizer — grilled cauliflower on a puree of yellow-eye beans and sunflower seeds, with spicy walnut dressing and shavings of cured egg yolk — should have been tough to top, but then there was the coconut cod entrée, with a complexity that took me right back to an until-now incomparable fish curry I had on a trip in southern India two decades ago.

Chef Devin Deirden; Jasper Ludwig tending bar.

The cocktails — a Negroni that subbed out gin for prosecco, a mezcal margarita, and a Manhattan — were bracing and not too sweet, a masterful exercise in balance. And for dessert, a grapefruit tart on cardamom shortbread, with a brown-sugar meringue, melted in the mouth. Then, there was also the option of combining cocktail and dessert into one via the coquito slush — a Puerto Rican relative of eggnog, made with rum, cream of coconut, and condensed milk, poured from a slushy machine that came with the place when Ludwig and Haskins took over. My group shared one. Followed by another.

Elsewhere around the dining room, a couple with a young teenager nibbled on french fries and chit-chatted with nearby friends. A bearded guy in a knit cap, Carhartts, and boots sat at the bar and nursed a drink. During the week, a group of old-timers gathers regularly for coffee. “They call themselves the Old Farts Club or the Rusty Zippers,” Ludwig says. “They said they’ll do me a favor this summer by providing the local color.”

People also come and go to grab snacks and groceries from the market, which occupies a back corner. The shelves are stocked with natural wines, chips, cheeses, and vegetables from nearby farms. There’s beer in the reach-in fridge. And yep, the store still has its license to tag deer too. 

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 If you’re like me, you’ve never asked for a grilled cheese but, please, hold the cheese. So it was only warily that I ordered a sandwich described on the menu at Toast, in Kittery, as “not your typical grilled ‘cheese’” — which sounded a little menacing to me, a fan of cheese in the usual sense, sans quotation marks. Fear was, however, unfounded. The “cheese” isn’t the store-bought vegan stuff that’s waxy and vaguely, disconcertingly evocative of something almost familiar. Rather, shop owner Nina Holland makes “cheese” by soaking raw cashews in water and then blending them in a food processor with lemon juice, nutritional yeast, garlic, and sea salt. The texture is creamy — almost ricotta-esque — and the flavor is mellow and earthy. There’s no mistaking it for actual cheese, and that’s quite all right. Holland has built her menu not around pale imitations of animal-derived foods but rather around plant-based foods that stand on their own.

That cashew “cheese” gets paired with sweet blackberries, peppery arugula, and basil, all smashed between two slices of griddled gluten-free sourdough, which I only realized was gluten-free when I reread the menu later. (The shop is dedicated gluten-free, it turns out, safe for people with celiac disease.) Holland, previously an elementary-school administrative assistant, opened Toast (stylized “t o a s t”) early last year after going through more than half a dozen experimental recipes for the bread. The one she eventually arrived at uses quinoa flour and Maine buckwheat flour and plays like any good, freshly baked, hearty bread.

Holland spends Monday through Thursday baking the bread in small batches, then she sells sandwiches Friday through Sunday — it takes about 50 loaves to get her through the weekend. The shop itself is tiny. Inside, Holland works solo behind the counter, and there are only four seats. Outside, a picnic table is around back, and Holland has plans for more outdoor seating this summer.

The menu rotates fairly often, with a few staples that stick around. That rotation is partly driven by seasonality — Holland sources produce from local farmers when she can, and even her salt comes from just up the road, at York’s Slack Tide Sea Salt. It’s also partly driven by Holland always wanting to try out new things. For inveterate carnivores, the exclusively meat-free lineup might be a high hurdle, but it needn’t be. The sandwiches are sufficiently loaded up, providing the same sort of messy, work-to-get-your-mouth-around-the-first-bite pleasure of, say, a classically meaty Reuben.

Plus, working without animal protein seems to spark a good deal of creativity. The VBLT, an all-veggie BLT, has lettuce and tomato, naturally, as well as avocado, black radish, pickled onion, and sprouts. Holland remedies the absence of actual bacon by making what she calls “carrot bacon” — she soaks carrot slices in a mix of coconut aminos (a soy-sauce substitute), maple syrup, paprika, garlic, salt, and liquid smoke, lays them in trays, and bakes them until they’ve just started to crisp around the edges. The result possesses undeniably bacon-y notes, but there’s also no mistaking that it’s a vegetable. And that’s for the best. 

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The first and obvious thing to say about Rio’s, in Searsport, is that it’s a heptagon. You can’t help but notice the shape, appended to one end of a sort of mini strip mall on Route 1. The more linear section of the building houses a company specializing in locking systems for hotel-room doors. Russell Manton owns that business, and he and his wife, Oana, intended their heptagonal space to become a café, but the concept evolved into a restaurant. In the unlikely event a guest doesn’t immediately register the dining room’s unusual geometry, decorative polygons are embedded in tabletops and the floor and dangled from the peaked ceiling. Compared to a regular old four-sided room, the shallower angles that join the seven walls produce something of a circular flow around a central stone fireplace. There’s a simultaneous impression of spaciousness and coziness — the effect is rather yurt-like, and actually, it works.

When two of us visited on a recent chilly night, we opted for seats at the table-height counter built around the fireplace, soaking up the warmth thrown by the gas flames. The standout dishes from chef Gary Cooper were several: smashed, fried sunchokes, served with a chili-and-lime aioli; house-made ricotta with smoked beets, sliced almonds, and parsley oil; fresh farfalle pasta in a buttercup-squash cream sauce laced with smoked oyster mushrooms and Serrano ham, topped with a poached egg. The nuanced cooking was no big surprise — Cooper moved to Maine fresh off a stint as executive sous chef at a stalwart restaurant on the Washington, DC, fine-dining scene. 

My favorite bite of the night came from a New York strip — medium rare, alongside a mélange of charred leek and sweet onion and crisp baby bok choy, atop a swirl of silkily pureed celery root and red-wine jus. That jus was the kicker, reduced until deeply savory, almost caramelized, retaining the slightest undercurrent of sweetness. It was vaguely reminiscent of a good mole. Loading up a fork with bits of every element on the plate was a challenge worth the reward.

Much of the menu stakes out the same sweet spot as the strip steak — classics imbued with distinguishing creativity. A bone-in pork chop is accented with a sweet-spicy scallion sauce, a play on French onion soup is made with lobster broth and chunks of lobster meat, and so on. The bar, too, is adept at the classics, like a New York sour or an old-fashioned or, for something lighter, a version of a Hugo, with prosecco, elderflower liqueur, lime juice, and mint. It’d be awfully difficult to make any missteps ordering here. Even the bread service, which I’m usually loath to pay for, is sufficiently cheffed-up to warrant the few extra bucks — airy focaccia with a trio of pea pistou, whipped chive butter, and carrot-cardamom puree.

For dessert, blondies were a pleasure to polish off even as we felt borderline uncomfortably full. The bars were warmed and their edges crisped. The potentially cloying sweetness of white chocolate was smartly balanced out by the addition of miso. A scotch-infused caramel brought a toasty dimension. A dollop of whipped cream wrapped everything else in velvety coolness. I only wondered, could the kitchen not cut blondies into heptagons? 

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Among hashtagged images on Instagram, #pancakes has more than double the representation of #waffles, which seems to me an injustice. I could no more choose between them than pick a favorite child, but as a palette for creative expression, a pancake would seem to have nothing on a waffle, which both accommodates more elaborate toppings (thanks to its surface area and squares) and better lends itself to savory interpretations. Yet foodie photogs post far fewer waffle pics, which might be because of what the Portland Press Herald pointed out last year, in a piece explaining why waffles are restaurant-menu rarities even in epicurean Portland: waffle irons are space hogs, and while they crisp one waffle at a time, a griddle the size of two of them can turn out an armada of flapjacks. So pancakes proliferate, while it’s hard to go out for waffles.

Not so in Dover-Foxcroft, where Peace, Love & Waffles has 23 menu entrées, 22 of which are waffles. Owner Michael Begley envisioned a food truck when he first came to the Piscataquis River town, in 2019. An itinerant Kansan, he’d been running a gyro truck in Prescott, Arizona, that catered to a bar crowd, and it was a grind. So when his mom (herself a nomad who came to D-F for the scenery and affordable real estate) suggested they launch a waffle truck, he packed his bags for Maine. Then, a downtown space came up for rent, and they thought, why not? Peace, Love & Waffles opened there first. After COVID nixed indoor dining, though, Begley’s mom and stepdad put a kitchen and a ton of renovation into a 19th-century barn on their property east of town — an idyllic spot with fruit trees and room for an outdoor waffle garden — and, in 2021, the idiosyncratic restaurant reopened, even idiosyncratic-er.

At first, Begley worried his downtown regulars wouldn’t schlep six miles for their waffle fix. But schlep they have, and the waffle barn is a destination for brunch buffs from Bangor, 30 miles away, which is where I came from on a recent visit. My family scanned the chalkboard menu above the pellet stove, placed orders at the counter, then settled into the snug, maximally homey dining room, where six tables are surrounded by country bric-a-brac and wall-to-wall chalkboards full of coffee-klatch koans and Friends and Gilmore Girls quotes. Begley recently took over as sole proprietor, after his mom and stepdad moved to Missouri, but his mother’s cheery stamp is all over the décor.

The waffles? Superb! My kids went sweet: a mound of house-made whipped cream cheese crowned both the blueberry-cheesecake waffle, smothered in berries, and the Black Forest, atop a chocolate waffle with cherries (there’s a concise kids’ menu, but it’s basically all a kids’ menu, if your kids are hungry enough). My wife tucked into a feta- and spinach-topped beauty, one of several golden potato waffles made with spuds from nearby Smith’s Hideaway Farm. My chicken-and-waffles was an outstanding vehicle for several generous pours of addictive habanero-infused syrup, from G&M Maple Products, in neighboring Charleston. In season, PL&W gets produce from Stutzman’s Farm Stand, in Sangerville, and its apples, pears, blueberries, and black raspberries from right out back. The batter filling the kitchen’s five waffle irons? Good old Golden Malted.

And yep, every plate on the table was colorful and decadent and extremely Instagram friendly — although the friendliness that has mattered most to Begley has nothing to do with social media. “It’s crazy how much people have appreciated us here,” he says. “I mean, in Arizona, we made some good chicken gyros, but no one appreciated them. The response from people here has just been huge.”

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Ever since opening in Portland, in 2013, Bissell Brothers has made some of the finest, most sought-after beers in Maine, most of them hazy IPAs, from the ubiquitous Substance to the limited-release Swish, a rare perfect 100 on the review site BeerAdvocate. In 2018, the namesake brothers, Peter and Noah, opened a second outpost in an old snowmobile shop in their small Piscataquis County hometown of Milo, with all the same beers but none of the long, jostling lines typical of the Portland flagship. One recent afternoon, I strolled up to the bar in Milo, admired the dozen shiny tap handles plus a fridge full of interesting cans and bottles, and ordered meatloaf.

Meatloaf, to be clear, is not the name of a beer. Rather, it was several thick slabs of finely ground pork and beef, glazed with tomato gastrique and garnished with crispy bits of fried onion, resting on a hillock of a sweet and earthy parsnip-potato puree. A side of roasted peas and carrots was topped with a blackened sprig of rosemary, and satiny gravy pooled all about. If a better meatloaf is out there, I’ve yet to meet it, and so attractively was it plated that if a server in black vest and bowtie laid that exact entrée on a white tablecloth in some fancy restaurant, I wouldn’t bat an eye if it cost $30. Instead, a buzzer I’d been given at the bar went off, and I grabbed the food at a window, pulled a fork and a knife from the utensil holder, and went back to my picnic table. The dish cost $16 — nowadays the price of a mediocre cheeseburger at any old place.

A decade ago, a new state law allowed breweries to start selling pours on-site without also needing to offer food service. Rid of a dependence on distribution and growler sales, scrappy startup breweries took off. And for many brewers, it was somewhat a point of pride to channel all their energies into making good beer, undistracted by the demands of running a brewpub. Lately, though, something funny has been happening: brewers who came up in those heady, earlier, food-free days of Maine’s beer boom — at Oxbow, Rising Tide, Maine Beer Company, Bissell — have reconsidered the brewpub model, and newer entrants are increasingly likely to include non-liquid sustenance in their business plans.

Bissell Brothers Three Rivers (the proper name of the Milo location) added its own food program last spring. Joe Robbins runs the kitchen, and his menu ranges from chefy to pubby. There’s herb-crusted pork tenderloin with wild rice, pork jus, and apple compote on the one hand, fried mozzarella with tomato sauce on the other. It bears noting, though, that the mozzarella is hand-pulled in-house, using milk from a small farm in Jackson, and seemingly nothing on the menu lacks creativity. Navajo Tacos, for instance, comprise ground bison, from a farm in Eustis, topped with iceberg and tomato tossed in crema, all folded into fry bread, a chewy, crispy-edge flatbread thought to have originated with the Navajo, using government rations on a 300-mile forced relocation march in the mid-1800s.

Robbins, who grew up in Old Town, is a member of the Penobscot Nation, and he likes to scatter his menu with eclectic indigenous influences. The Iroquois call corn, beans, and squash the Three Sisters, a trio of crops foundational to their agriculture, and for his Three Sisters Succotash, Robbins sautés lima beans, corn, and butternut squash with butter and fermented honey, then plates that vegetable medley with a schmear of raspberry wojapi, a Lakota fruit preserve, and crowns it with a poached duck egg. “Dynamic” is not a word I’ve associated with succotash before, but it certainly applies here. The interplay of so many textures and flavors leaves no bite quite the same as the next.

There was lots more I’d have liked to try: poutine with Pineland Farms cheese curds, chicken and waffles with buffalo whipped cream, a tamale sandwich. But portions are ample and there were just two of us at the table, so I only ordered one other dish, a fried-chicken sandwich with a piquant mix of barbecue, buffalo, and Italian-herbed cheddar sauces. I had a couple of beers too, of course, and they were excellent. They did not, however, steal the show.

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Could it be that my new favorite cocktail bar in Portland is a chain hotel’s lounge? Those sorts of places are supposed to be for weary business travelers too uninspired to venture elsewhere, and yet the question weighed on me as I sipped a very good old-fashioned — subtle sweetness, restrained bittering, judicious dilution — at Top of the East, in Marriott’s downtown Westin. I tried to talk myself out of it: the vests and bowties on the staff were, perhaps, symptomatic of trying too hard at sophistication, and ouch, 20 bucks is awfully steep for an old-fashioned, even in our inflationary age. But Top of the East is the rare exorbitant cocktail joint that’s probably worth the price of admission, especially on account of the stellar views from 15 stories up.

What’s now the Westin Portland Harborview isn’t a typical cookie-cutter chain. Opened in 1927 as The Eastland, it was the largest hotel in New England at the time, a grand addition to the city. Over the years, it hosted dignitaries ranging from Charles Lindbergh to Margaret Thatcher to Ozzy Osbourne. Management once refused Eleanor Roosevelt a room because she was traveling with her dog (the rooms are pet-friendly these days). The uppermost floor started out as a sunroom — the hotel debuted during Prohibition — and didn’t become a bar until 1963. Since then, it has gone through various design iterations but always boasted floor-to-ceiling windows looking out across the city and over the harbor. The scene is particularly lovely at dusk, as the natural light of day gives way to the electric light of evening.

Top of the East closed for refurbishment at the start of this year, even though it had gotten a face-lift just nine years earlier “that doubled our size and tripled our iconic ambiance,” per the bar’s website. I’m not an interior-design mathematician, but I’d hazard that the most recent changes have quintupled the ambiance. Blond wood floors have replaced red-and-black carpeting. Cozy circular banquettes were added along one wall. Lamps now cast a low, warm glow across the room. And leather-upholstered, mid-century seating feels like a fitting throwback to the early ’60s. An intimate vibe prevails, almost in spite of the magnificent panorama outside.

There are other bars in Portland with a more ambitious repertoire of well-executed cocktails — the Bramhall, the Jewel Box, Hunt & Alpine Club, et al. — and my first drink of the night at Top of the East was merely good, combining mezcal, lime, raspberry puree, and red-bell-pepper juice. The latter was a creative touch, but its dry, vegetal effect lingered a little too long. The usually humble gin-and-tonic, on the other hand, was a work of art, served in an oversize wine glass and garnished with mint leaves, a sprig of rosemary, and pansy petals, with pink peppercorns floating amid the ice cubes.

Shareable small plates were artful too. Victoria Currie-Girard, formerly executive chef at Kennebunkport’s Breakwater Inn & Spa, created the new menu. Her ample crab cake was laced with sweet potato — a sweet-savory, creamy counterpoint to crisply seared edges. Cheddar biscuits topped with lobster and caramelized onions and bathed in Newberg sauce played like deconstructed (and improved-upon) lobster bisque. For dessert, baked Alaska, which had a heyday at fancy restaurants back when Top of the East first opened, hid whoopie-pie cake under the warm, gooey meringue. It was excellent alongside a Cafecito cocktail — coffee and vanilla vodkas, orange-vanilla reduction, and oat milk frothed tableside. By the time I’d drained the last drop, the truth felt unavoidable: indeed, my new favorite Portland cocktail bar is inside a chain hotel.

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Two unorthodox decisions paved the way, recently, for one of the best dinners I’ve had out all year. The first was when I reserved a table for a wedding-anniversary date night at a new-ish restaurant my wife and I had never visited. A roll of the dice! But we’d been slow to call around, and all our favorite spots around Camden were booked solid. So when I saw a single 8 p.m. slot available at wolfpeach, a farm-to-table, fine-dining place that had opened last winter, I nabbed it without even consulting Elsa.

wolfpeach’s proprietors, Gabriela Acero and Derek Richard, stylize the name (a translation of the Greek-derived scientific name for a tomato) with a lower-case w, the kind of convention flouting that irks copy editors and that, frankly, this magazine would typically choose to ignore. Except this was among a handful of details Elsa and I had absorbed about wolfpeach that had given us the vague impression it might be, well, a bit precious. It surely didn’t help that the restaurant occupies an 1840 modified Federal that was formerly the Drouthy Bear, a Scottish pub shuttered by the pandemic that we liked for its burger and lack of pretense. Or that photos of lovely, spartan dishes on wolfpeach’s social-media feeds were accompanied by declarations about “centering community and creating joy, both of which are their own forms of power and resistance” — perfectly admirable sentiments that could nonetheless read a little woo-woo. And maybe something rang a smidge messianic about the GoFundMe video Acero and Richard circulated last fall, explaining how wolfpeach would depart from the flawed “normal restaurant model” by, among other things, abolishing tips and paying all staffers a living wage.

But ugh, these were petty observations of a grumpy, aging Xer who’s lived in small-town Maine for too long. And on one’s anniversary, one must eat. So we went, and man, am I glad we did.

The space that houses wolfpeach has lost none of its charm since the pub moved out. It’s a former B&B invariably described as snug, with wood floors and a beautiful, six-seat bar separated from the main dining room by a big brick hearth. Cozy as it is, the room is uncluttered: Windsor chairs, fresh flowers, a single bookshelf. Low lit, its walls minimally adorned (with, among other works, some cool abstract inks by midcoast illustrator Chelsea Witt), the place has a parlor feel, graceful and welcoming and not at all precious.

That feel of elegant simplicity extends to the menu, which on our visit contained just 13 items, none described in more than six words. The single word “love” alongside a fermented dilly-bean starter was probably the twee-est thing about the whole evening. But what more to say? We did love the crisp and tangy beans, grown down the road at Monroe’s Second Frost Farm (I asked). We also loved, off the small-plates list, a tray of oysters from South Thomaston’s Weskeag Oyster Company, a jar of bright and piquant kimchi, and a basket of sourdough bread, a passion of Richard’s, which was near to the Platonic ideal of sourdough: crispy outside, cloudlike inside, and served with butter flecked with bits of kelp from Biddeford’s Atlantic Sea Farms. (We over-ordered starters; a table of two could suffice with one or two.)

Local sourcing is enshrined at wolfpeach, as Acero and Richard explained during a follow-up visit. “I feel bad when I get food that’s from, like, southern Maine,” laughed Richard, who runs the three-person kitchen, while fiancée Acero oversees the beverage program and front-of-house. Restricting ingredients to what’s farmed, fished, or foraged nearby isn’t just an ethical decision. “I kind of like forcing myself and my cooks into limitations,” Richard explained. “I think when you have access to everything, then you can’t make anything. But if it’s like, ‘We only have these 10 things — how do we make a creative menu out of that?’ then there’s much more room to use different techniques and approaches. How do we make a tomato three different ways on our menu, and they’re all delicious?”

Acero, a Waterville native and a vet of several buzzy NYC restaurants, and Richard, who cut his teeth at the Hudson Valley’s Michelin-starred Blue Hill at Stone Barns, let that essentialist approach inform the restaurant’s whole concept. Initially, they conceived it as a “Maine riff on a chophouse,” Acero said, “kind of paying homage to old classic scenes in New York and Montreal and Chicago, but not necessarily using beef at all.” The influence is evident on wolfpeach’s approach to entrées: three are typically on offer — usually a meat, a veggie pasta, and a lower-on-the-food-chain fish (don’t come looking for tuna or halibut) — and they’re served unaccompanied and simply plated, to be complemented, if you like, with something off an a la carte menu of shareable salads.

Which brings me to my second unorthodox decision: I am an ambivalent carnivore who almost never orders a big slab of meat. But Elsa got the pasta alla norma, and I wasn’t up for the whole trout, so I ordered the smoked pork chop, and hoo boy. It was downright luscious — a generous loin, impossibly tender and pleasantly gamey and just a little sweet, ringed with a halo of smoky char and fat, topped with a peach-and-poblano compote and sage crisped in butter. The meat was raised at Bristol’s Broad Arrow Farm, where, coincidentally, I’d been the week before, my kids tossing acorns and bread chunks to the pasture-raised heritage hogs. About every two weeks, Broad Arrow supplies wolfpeach with a pig, which is butchered in-house.

Other than the chop, my plate was bare. “I’ve just always hated extraneous garnishes,” Richard told me later. “I think a lot of chefs count on plating techniques and the amount of ingredients in a dish to cover up for technique and skill.”

Elsa’s pasta was similarly simple and decadent, with savory eggplant playing nicely off dollops of sweet and garlicky Dairy Duet cheese, a cow-and-goat-milk blend, from Washington’s York Hill Farm. A succotash-like salad of charred corn and tomatoes, in a fermented tomato vinaigrette, was light and just right as a shared side. (wolfpeach is big on house fermentation — not least because Maine’s winters are long and its growing season short.)

The unique beverage program deserves more attention than I’m giving it, totally focused on the Northeast, with no European wines and a small, smart list of beers, ciders, and unconventional spirits, all made in Maine or nearby (Acero and Richard met while helping open Oxbow Brewing Company’s Oxford restaurant and beer garden). We stuck to cocktails, Elsa’s a refreshing concoction of cucumber and aquavit from Rockland’s Luce Spirits, mine a “parsnip punch,” made with a blackened-parsnip simple syrup, house bitters, Vermont-made ice cider, and rum from Camden’s Blue Barren Distillery. It was, like the entire evening, sophisticated but none-too-complicated — and deeply comforting.

Also none-too-complicated? Settling the bill without tipping. Acero expected some diners to be perplexed by it, but for the most part, she says, everyone seems to like the no-tipping mandate, and questions about the policy have made for welcome entries into deeper discussions about wolfpeach’s philosophy and approach. The service, meanwhile, was gracious and didn’t miss a beat. Sometimes, unorthodox moves are the right ones.

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Salt & Pepper and Sugar Too resides in a low-slung, unassuming former Greek-pizza joint in rural Wilton, among a patch of roadside shopping plazas along Route 2. It’d be easy to whiz right past without registering, though that would be a shame. Inside, the dining room has a serene sort of diner-meets-farmhouse vibe: rows of mod-ish, slate-gray banquettes, white shiplap walls, a sliding barn door to the kitchen, and freshly cut flowers throughout. There’s neither a trace of road noise nor a whiff of old pizza. On a recent evening, my family and I were seated near a group of chatty older women finishing their desserts. They told us we were in for a treat, and they weren’t wrong.

We started out with a mushroom crespelle, an Italian version of a crepe, that expertly played the earthiness of aged Gruyère and mushrooms against the sweetness of caramelized onions. Since grilled cheese gets dunked in tomato soup all the time, our server suggested we try dipping bites of crespelle in a bright, creamy asparagus soup, which turned out to be an excellent idea. Rounding out appetizers was the fried calamari, both tender and crunchy and served with a tangy Asian-style dipping sauce.

It came as no surprise to later learn that owners Don and Mary Beane first bonded over food. “We met 35 years ago or somewhere around there,” Don recalls. “She was a pastry chef and a waitress at a friend’s restaurant, and I fell in love instantly.” Mary, with a laugh, disputed some of the details of the story, but agreed that they’ve been inventing recipes together and aspiring to open their own restaurant ever since. Over the years, Mary ran a catering business, Don cooked in the dining hall at the University of Maine at Farmington, and they jointly managed an island resort in Belgrade Lakes. When Don saw a for-sale sign outside the old pizza place on his daily commute, they put in an offer, did a complete remodel, and finally opened their dreamed-about restaurant three years ago.

Mary heads up the front-of-house and the kitchen and likes to make recipes she and Don have honed at home, while Don manages operations and mans the grill and fry station. Mary does most everything from scratch, from pasta to pastries to scallion mousse (the latter goes with ham, asparagus, and cheddar for a grown-up spin on grilled cheese, a rotating offering). And while some customers call ahead and reserve her often-sold-out beef, pork, and veal meatloaf, the dinner menu goes beyond upscale homestyle. Green-chili barbecue pork, with fire-roasted peppers, is heaped over a griddled masa corn cake. Vegans, meanwhile, might opt for the cauliflower puttanesca or the “zoodles” — zucchini noodles tossed with sesame peanut dressing and bell peppers, carrots, scallions, and pea pods. The local duck breast, smothered in a sauce of wild blueberries and balsamic vinegar, was accompanied by a comforting mound of creamy mashed potatoes — typical of the way Mary and Don balance heartiness and finesse.

The couple also has a knack for hospitality, and their restaurant has a “when you’re here, you’re family” spirit about it (nothing else about it brings the Olive Garden to mind). “They really nurture the people they hire,” one waitress said to me, unsolicited. “Everybody flourishes just knowing the Beanes.” I certainly felt better off for having met their cooking, and as I put my blinker on and turned back onto Route 2, I hung onto the memory of the light-as-air caramel cream puff I had for dessert.

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Unless you’re one of Peaks Island’s few thousand year-round and summer residents, a visit to Jones Landing starts with a boat ride. From the Maine State Pier, in the Old Port, the Casco Bay Lines ferry blows its horn and leaves the hubbub behind, chugging past plucky little Bug Light and austere Fort Gorges, while the dramatic silhouette of Portland Head Light, on its rocky promontory, hangs in the distance. Peaks, technically a Portland neighborhood, is the most easily accessed of the city’s ferry-serviced islands — about a 15-minute ride, with boats running almost every hour from early morning to midnight. That’s lucky, because Jones Landing is the kind of place that can inspire a person to skip the next ferry in favor of another drink.

For years, it was primarily a wedding venue, open to the public only on Sundays, for bar service and live reggae, a rollicking affair that developed a cult following among Portlanders. This past winter, though, Molly Ritzo signed a lease for the space and began converting it into a proper restaurant (that, yes, still hosts reggae Sundays). From the dock, the restaurant sits a few dozen paces uphill, and its spacious deck looks right back across the water to mainland Portland, some two miles distant. Inside, there’s a cozy bar-and-lounge area with a billiards table, but the deck is the undeniable star, with its salt-air breezes and westerly water views. It’d be a real shame to leave before sunset.

Ritzo first served food on Peaks seven years ago, when she started Milly’s Skillet food truck, offering lobster rolls, fish sandwiches, tacos, and more. In the intervening years, she also leased a disused farm in Falmouth and started Old Smith Farm restaurant, which does weekday dinners in the summer and fall, plus weddings on weekends, and has a year-round breakfast-and-lunch bakeshop. At Jones Landing, she’s repeating the process of breathing new life into an underutilized spot. During the day, guests can bring food down from Milly’s Skillet and get drinks from the bar. In the evenings, Jones Landing’s own kitchen starts firing up dinners.

Celia Conaghan is the head chef, and her husband, Nick, is the general manager — she previously cooked out of the food truck on Peaks for a couple of years. Among appetizers, the oyster trio feels like a good way to kick off an island meal. The oysters come from Basket Island Oyster Co., a Casco Bay aquaculture operation owned by a Peaks resident. One is served raw and drizzled with zingy mignonette, one is grilled and accented with garlic butter and Parmesan, and one is fried and dolloped with a cocktail-sauce aioli. The quick succession of contrasting textures makes for fun eating — firm and fresh, pillowy soft, crunchy.

A bar-food section of the menu comprises fries, burgers, fried monkfish sticks, and other casual fare. Then, there’s what the menu calls “Island Plates” — build-your-own entrées, with everything piled together on one dish so that the component parts combine a little differently in every forkful. Fried flounder, grilled haddock, and jerk chicken are among the feature ingredients, which can be accompanied by either little red Maine potatoes (roasted with herbs from the on-site garden) or coconut rice. Each dish also comes with greens and slaw and one of three house-made condiments — chimichurri, sweet-chili hot sauce, cilantro-lime aioli. A little back-of-the-napkin math says that, after picking any given protein, there are six different ways to put it all together.

We ordered the fried flounder with coconut rice and sweet-chili hot sauce, which added up to a sort of southeast-Asian flavor profile. The flounder was delicate and crispy (and gluten-free to boot — the kitchen always uses gluten-free breading in its fryer). With grilled haddock, we did potatoes and cilantro-lime aioli for a more classically New England experience. All of this was accompanied by drinks, which skew summery and bright — mojitos, slushy rosé wine, palomas. The Casco Bay Mist was a surprise hit, an improbably refreshing Highlands-meets-Tropics combination of mildly peaty scotch and sweet, nutty coconut water, garnished with a sprig of mint.

For dessert, a slice of cream pie topped with a tart raspberry jam seemed to sum up the meal, balancing hearty and light in each bite. By the time we’d scraped up the last crumbs, we were really just playing for time — one more beer? a glass of wine? why not? — as we watched the color slowly drain from the sky and the city lights start to twinkle across the water. Eventually, though, we saw the ferry gliding toward the dock and resolved, reluctantly, that it was probably time to go.

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Elevation Sushi and Tacos is not, for the most part, a fusion restaurant. Kim Morton, Mike Perez, and their son-in-law John Dexter all moved from the Los Angeles metro to western Maine in the past several years. “The things we really missed were sushi and street tacos,” says Morton, a schoolteacher who used to have her own restaurant. So, when they opened a small place together in Bridgton last summer, they devoted one section of the menu to sushi and another to tacos. There are tuna rolls, salmon, and California rolls. Then, there are steak tacos, chicken tacos, and pork tacos. All the classics from both genres. However, there are also sushi tacos.

Minimal menu notes — “tuna poke tacos with microgreens” — leave, perhaps, too much to the imagination: cold tuna dressed in salsa and wedged into warm corn tortillas came to mind. Nevertheless, when sushi tacos are offered at a restaurant specializing in sushi and tacos, one must give them a shot. They turned out to be the most memorable dish of a recent outing, in only good ways. The shells were not warm, thankfully, and were in fact not tortillas at all. Rather, Dexter, who previously worked as a sushi chef in LA, had decided on wonton wrappers, folded and fried. Ruby-red pieces of tuna were laid within the crispy shells and topped simply with a dab of spicy mayonnaise, peppery snippets of micro cilantro, and thin slivers of red onion. It was the architecture of a taco applied to the flavors of sushi, and the cumulative effect was bright, refreshing, and, most of all, surprising. Sushi nachos are on the menu as well — these sounded like a bridge too far on a first visit, but they’re in the queue for next time.

Most sushi at Elevation is not taco-shaped. The Sebastian roll, for instance, comprises soft-shell crab, asparagus, and avocado rolled inside rice and doused with eel sauce and garlic ponzu sauce. That in itself would be plenty of heft and flavor, but the roll is also topped with a long pearlescent strip of seared albacore. I found myself occasionally picking off the albacore; its texture was so perfectly silky I had to enjoy it on its own. The Caterpillar roll felt generously proportioned too, filled with seared eel and cucumber and topped with copious slices of avocado and a drizzle of eel sauce. The relatively simple spicy tuna roll, meanwhile, showcased the underlying quality — beautiful hunks of fish, rice that’s sticky enough to hold together yet pleasantly fluffy, an artistic dappling of black sesame seeds, freshly pickled ginger, and piquant wasabi.

Most of the sauces, from the ponzu to the salsa that comes with tortilla chips, are made in-house, and when the owners can source something locally, they will. The microgreens come from Morton and Perez’s neighbor, the lobster and sea urchin come from Maine waters, and the meats used in the non-sushi tacos come from Maine farms. The pork tacos start with a slow-cooked slab of belly that’s pulled and then griddled, rendering out some additional fat and crisping the edges. The supple corn tortillas are made daily. A creamy slaw adds crunch. And a pineapple salsa, spiced up with habanero, makes for a play on traditional tacos al pastor, typically made with grilled pork and diced pineapple.

Drinks too fall on either the Japanese or Mexican side of things, from sake to margaritas. Sake with tacos? Margs with sushi? No wrong answers there, although a margarita seems like a fine choice after a sun-drenched day on one of the lakes around Bridgton. To keep up with the summer rush after last year’s opening, Dexter had to start training Perez, who recently retired from a 30-year career with a national car-battery distributor, on sushi prep. This summer, the menu is expanding, with Japanese fried chicken, vegetable and shrimp tempura, and beef teriyaki becoming regulars. Two more varieties of sushi tacos are joining too, one with yellowtail and the other with salmon.

There’s something admittedly jarring, at least at first, about jumping between Mexican and Japanese flavors in one sitting. I’d almost be inclined to pick a lane and stick to it on each visit — but just almost. In fact, maybe even more fusion is in order? Merely spitballing here, but why not, say, wrap that slow-cooked pork inside sushi rice, with some black beans, and then top it with spicy pineapple salsa and microgreens? If sushi tacos can turn out delicious, I’m more than willing to give taco rolls a try.

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