I wanna go to Maine 🦞

Where to eat in Vacationland, from Portland to Penobscot.

I drove up to Maine yesterday, one of my favorite places in the world. It’s pretty cold up here and some leaves have fallen, but others haven’t even oranged yet. Maybe by the time I leave they’ll all be on the same page. One of the last times I was here, I spotted a painted sign that read “DONUTS Tues 7:30am”. It was a Monday, so my friends and I woke up early the next morning and drove back to the house whose mailbox the sign was hanging on and knocked on the door.

Inside were a dozen people — older couples, a 6th grader and his mom who stopped by on their way to school, a man pulling rings of dough out of a cast iron pot full of hot oil, his wife, passing the warm donuts, around on a stick to all of them. She didn’t ask me and my friends much, but explained that the donuts were fried in bear fat, from a bear her husband had hunted. She asked if I ever fried donuts at home and when I said yes, offered me a frozen bag of it. “It’s the cleanest fat to fry in!” Unsure of how I’d transport several pounds of bear fat back home to New York, I passed but agreed to take a bag of donut holes for the road and nodded as she told us she’d see us next week. Sometimes I wish I had accepted the bear fat — I think it would have survived the drive home in a very cold cooler — but the sign is gone now and I couldn’t dream of identifying the house without it.

I'm wondering where one acquires a wooden stick specifically for passing around freshly fried donuts?

So while I can’t tell you how to have this exact experience on your next trip to Maine, I hope you notice something similarly intriguing and that you pull over and check it out. While you’re waiting for whatever that thing is to make itself known, you can explore the rest of the state with this list as a light guide. From South to North, here’s everywhere I like to eat in the great state of Maine.

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Biddeford

If you like the “elevated diner” concept — cozy diner vibe, better-than-solid food — that places like Phoencia Diner in Phoenicia and Montague Diner on, well, Montague Street have mastered, then you will probably want to make a stop at Palace Diner. Of the three I mentioned, I think Palace feels the most like an actual diner (it’s a railcar with a 15-seat counter) while serving the most exciting and impressive food. You can’t order wrong, but you should try the huge slices of soft challah, either griddled into custardy slices of French toast with exteriors as crackly as crème brûlée, or flipped, fried and holding together a biblically delicious, expertly structured (pickles, swiss, over an inch of iceberg) tuna melt.

My order: tuna melt, fried chicken sandwich, French toast, "Maine born, world famous! Palace potatoes"

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Scarborough

The Dairy Corner is an absolutely perfect ice cream shop. The lines do get long on summer evenings, but if you don’t think waiting in a buzzing line of little kids and teenagers on dates and groups of friends taking a break from driving north for the weekend to get huge servings (the three-scoop cone below is a small) of fun ice cream flavors… then we probably wouldn’t get along so well!

Cake batter ice cream, if I see a sign that looks like this I'm (you're — I can't drive) stopping, magical Prouts Neck trail.

I am sad to report that the Prouts Neck cliff walk is currently closed for maintenance, but let’s all pray that it reopens in 2025 as planned. This is one of the only non-food recommendations on this list and that’s because I think this walk through flower-studded bushes to the edge of the ocean, where you can look out at the water peacefully or nosily peer into the mansions on the waterfront, is a truly magical experience. I felt like Alice in Wonderland traversing through it.

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Portland

I’ll keep this section short and sweet because we have enough coverage of this city… Ramona’s sandwiches are as good as they look. My favorite is the turkey caesar, made with the correct amount of shredded lettuce, a welcome addition of pickled red onion and an absolutely genius, heavy handed swipe of caesar mayo. I like to stop here on the way back to NYC — they make the car ride home bearable.

Undeniably more difficult to eat in the car, but so good it’s worth doing anyways, is Banh Appetit. The vermicelli salad plate is piled so high with noodles, pickled vegetables, spring rolls and slices of sweet, salty BBQ pork that you won’t be able to figure out how they closed the container in the first place. It’s worth pulling over to enjoy properly, though the crusty, buttery, super savory mayo-toasted banh mi is also wonderful and slightly more handheld.

Yes, Tandem Bakery does rock. It will be crowded when you go, you will likely have to wait in a line. But you can use that time to narrow down which of the dozens of pastries in the case you’re going to leave with. The classic biscuit, orange-swirled sticky bun and black sesame banana bread are my favorite.

A spicy cheddar biscuit, a slice of the black sesame banana bread.

My favorite stop in Portland + some Hancock County picks in Belfast, Castine, Brooksville, Blue Hill, Surry & Ellsworth. And a list of candies, mustards & milks (blueberry, coffee, banana!) that you can only find in the state of Maine: