Knightville renaissance

Beale Street Barbeque and the restaurant rebirth in South Portland

By Joan Lang

BORN AGAIN BBQ: Beale Street Barbeque is the newest addition to Knightville.

If new restaurants are any indication of a neighborhood’s vitality, the post-bridge-construction rebirth of South Portland’s Knightville area is well underway. After

the new bridge was completed in 1997 and traffic was rerouted away from the row of storefronts on Ocean Street, a quiet set in over Knightville that is beginning to lift. In the past six months, no fewer than three new eateries have set up shop in the vicinity of Mill Creek, already home to Uncle Andy’s, Bridgeway Restaurant, and a SoPo outpost of Susan’s Fish & Chips — plus a handful of national fast-food chains.

“Now that the bridge project is finished and everyone’s settled in, it seemed like the time was right to investigate the area,” says Alex Gingrich, owner of Fresh Market Pasta in the Old Port, which will open a second location in the Mill Creek Shopping Center in a matter of days. “It’s real busy around here now and the response to the new restaurant has already been overwhelming.”

Though smaller at 25 seats (plus outside seating for another 20 during the summer), the new Fresh Market Pasta will feature the same menu of moderately priced pastas, salads, and soups served in the original Exchange Street location. Gingrich also plans a selection of panini — Italian-style sandwiches that were extremely successful in Fresh Market’s test at this year’s Old Port Festival — as well as a selection of prepared foods for takeout, such as family-style portions of lasagna.

“We’ll be testing that this summer,” he says, “but the location shows a lot of potential for take-home meals.” Also on the agenda is a wine-and-beer license.

Gingrich isn’t the only one betting the business on Knightville. Rather than choosing another location, Molly McCaffry and partner George Hood decided to buy the old Mill Creek Café, where McCaffry worked, and turn it into the Q Street Diner, which opened last November. Adding more seats and lowering the prices, McCaffry and Hood have succeeded in re-establishing a loyal clientele drawn to the simple all-day menu of breakfast specialties and sandwiches.

It’s a great place to while away the morning over the huge omelets (made with not three but four eggs), pancakes, egg scrambles, and breakfast sandwiches. Burgers, wraps, and daily lunch specials like shepherd’s pie, meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, and boiled dinner are also favorites. “Now that things have finally calmed down from the bridge construction, people have started to find us,” says McCaffry. “Business has really picked up a lot in the past few months.”

Every neighborhood needs a magnet, and if any place has the potential of drawing folks in it’s the new Beale Street Barbeque & Grill, which opened last month in the old Mister Bagel A-frame on Waterman Drive.

Patrick Quigg and his brothers, co-owners Michael and Mark, are actually old hands with emerging parts of town, having opened their first restaurant in a similarly on-the-rise part of Bath four years ago. “Since we moved in there, two or three other restaurants and five retail shops have come in, changed hands or upgraded,” says Quigg, “and we think we can do the same thing here in South Portland — pull people in.”

Drawn by relatively inexpensive rents and a landlord willing to work on a revamp, the Quiggs identified the site last year, having looked at other areas in Falmouth and Portland first, and deemed them too pricey. “Here, we can be on the ground level of a redevelopment, same as we were in Bath,” he says.

If the crowds that have already started to queue up at the new Beale Street are any indication, he’s spot on. On a Thursday night just two weeks in, the restaurant was jammed to the rafters with people piled into the banquettes, perched on prime seats at the bar or waiting for takeout. The friendly staff had things well in hand, and rollicking blues from the sound system kept up the pace.

This is good ’cue, too, and different from the kind most locals are used to. The emphasis is on Tennessee- and Texas-style smoked meats, not the messy, barbecue-sauce-drenched stuff one usually associates with the word “barbecue.”

Cooked on premise over hickory, the meats are dry-rubbed with flavorful “magic dust” (as Quigg refers to the proprietary seasoning rubs), then smoked slowly at a low temperature to keep them moist. The delicious pork goes for 12 to 14 hours, then it’s pulled by hand and piled on a bun — you, the customer, add the barbecue sauce. Pork ribs are the big St. Louis-style, the Cadillac of ribs, not the skimpy baby backs. The smoked chicken is wonderful, moist and pink under a mahogany-colored skin. Most unusual is the tender, intensely flavorful beef brisket, a hallmark of Texas barbecue, but not often seen up North. If you can’t possibly decide, the $14.95 Barbeque Sampler is your prayer answered.

There’s also a clutch of fun appetizers, like chicken wings, stuffed jalapenos, and quesadillas stuffed with that marvelous chicken, and a whole part of the menu I never even got to, featuring Southern-style specialties like jambalaya, smoked sausage, Creole shrimp, and grilled fish. All the barbecue is available for takeout — as Quigg says, “it’s a great traveler” — and there’s also catering.

As a matter of fact, brother Mark started in business 10 years ago with a roadside barbecue stand hard by the Big Indian in South Freeport, and did the county-fair route for years before Mike and Patrick joined him. They can do parties of up to 5000, with portable smokers, vans, mobile kitchens — the whole nine yards. That’s something I’d really like to see: pulled pork and brisket for 5000.

Joan Lang can be reached at joanmlang@aol.com.