Target: Fore Street

Local restaurants are revamping (or opening) with hopes of stealing some high-end customers from Portland’s leader

by Joan Lang

FOOD FIGHT: restaurants are looking for a piece of the Fore Street pie.

Hey, Fore Street. Watch out. You’re about to have some more competition on your tail. In fact, I guess I can’t remember the last time there was so much action on the high-end of the restaurant scene here in Portland.

What with chef changes, menu revamps, and new arrivals, there’s going to be enough new seasonally changing, ingredient-driven, quality-oriented, internationally influenced, casual-but-upscale restaurants to go around for a while.

They’re all after the same little niche that Fore Street and a few others — most notably Back Bay Grill, Rachel’s, and Aubergine — have tapped with varying degrees of success: savvy, affluent diners who want a sophisticated meal and a nice bottle of wine in stylish but friendly surroundings. No boring food, no jackets and ties, no stiff service and intimidating wine.

And the menu’s got to be sensible, not all tricked up with weird combinations and food that’s not from around here. The French call it cuisine de terroir, or cooking of the land, and it’s the reason the food in Provence is so different than the food in Brittany. It’s also the reason Sam Hayward at Fore Street spends so much time and energy seeking out Pemaquid oysters and Merrymeeting Farms chicken and local artisan-made cheeses. His food tastes of the place from which it comes. It works. And other people know it.

Ask Michael O’Neill how he’s changed the menu at Gabriel’s since he took over the stove this summer, and he talks about “sophisticated comfort food,” and ingredients that are “fresh, local, and organic” whenever possible. Nancy Pugh and Rob Evans, the new owners of Hugo’s, are calling their food “upscale peasant food,” “refined but accessible,” and based on as many seasonal, Maine-based products as they can get. And Commissary, Matthew Kenney’s new restaurant set to open this fall in the Portland Public Market, will source many of its foodstuffs right there at the market.

Sound familiar? You bet it does. Anyone who’s eaten in Europe or some of the better restaurants here in the United States have already come up against this idea of basing the menu on the freshest local products of the season. It’s the best way anyone’s come up with yet for having a good meal.

Take Gabriel’s, for instance. Pick up a menu and you know what time of year it is, based on the fiddlehead ferns in spring or the beets in fall and so on. Former chef and co-owner Gabe Bremer was probably a good cook, but his ideas were so over the top that some of them didn’t always work. So when he quit and partner O’Neill had to take over this summer, he knew enough to dumb it down a little.

“Before, we were missing something,” says O’Neill, “the kind of food people could just come in and order without having to learn a totally new language. And we were very expensive.”

Now, you’re more apt to see things like braised lamb shanks and pan-seared sirloin steak with red-wine sauce and grilled roast pork chop. And the prestigious Wine Spectator just blessed Gabriel’s with one of its awards, so O’Neill’s got that all sewed up. “I wouldn’t have chosen to get back behind the stove in the middle of the busiest season, but I have to admit, I’m having a ball,” he says.

Pugh and Evans are pretty excited, too. Evans, the cooking part of the new Hugo’s equation, came in quietly a few months ago to help out original owner Johnny Robinson in the kitchen, and he and his fiancee signed the papers to buy the place at the end of September. They closed for a week in order to clean house, paint, and replace some of the tableware, but they’re keeping the funky status quo for now — except that the name’s changed from Hugo’s Portland Bistro to Hugo’s Maine to reflect what they plan to do.

“We’ll be redefining the food that has been the basis of New England cooking — the potato, the lobster, corn, venison, salmon, scallops — and giving it a twist that will make diners say, ‘Wow, I’d never have thought of doing this with that,’ ” explains Pugh. Evans certainly has the credentials, for anyone who knows the shorthand, having worked at the Inn at Little Washington in Virginia and The French Laundry in California’s wine country, two of the top-rated restaurants in the country.

The new menu is small but interesting: parsnip agnolotti (half-moon pasta) with cracked hazelnuts and sage; shiitake mushroom terrine; slow roasted lobster tail; duck confit with fall vegetable hash. In addition to the regular a la carte menu, there will be a $38 Taste of Maine, a six-course prix-fixe menu reminiscent of the elaborate parade of small dishes you get at The French Laundry. Wine dinners in cooperation with The Clown are also in the works.

Then there’s Commissary, the restaurant that’s slated to open in the Public Market in mid-November. The owner is Matthew Kenney, a hotshot chef from Manhattan, and one of the Young Turks who has helped redefine new-wave Mediterranean food in this country. Kenney is a very talented chef — I know, I’ve eaten at all four of his New York restaurants — and he grew up in Searsport (where he plans to open another restaurant next spring) and has an abiding love of Maine and the food that’s grown and produced here.

That big space along the Elm Street side of the market will house a 70-seat restaurant, complete with a dramatic open kitchen with wood-fired ovens and rotisserie, and a long communal table where people can dine en famille if they choose. Chef de cuisine will be Alan McGrath, who spent four years at . . . you guessed it: Fore Street. The pastry chef is also an FS alum.

True to the commissary theme, the rustic American menu will follow closely what’s in the market, including grilled meats and poultry, seasonal fruits and vegetables, and plenty of fresh fish. One can only hope that the added business will be another incentive to the state’s vastly underutilized agricultural skill — in addition to supplying Commissary, Kenney sees the venture as a way to find interesting local foods for his restaurants in New York. And God knows the market needs a destination restaurant to help create a lively urban scene.

There’s one more new contender coming in, and that’s Decoupage restaurant in the newly refurbished Eastland Hotel, set to open around the first of December. Earlier this year, the aging but still sound hotel was bought by Bill Burruss of Magna Hospitality, an entrepreneur and developer whose “hobby” is bringing historic hotels back to their former glory. The Eastland certainly needs the $4 million Magna is spending to redo all the rooms, change the signs, freshen the façade, and load up the lobby with marble and a new wine bar.

According to general manager Heather Strauss, who has worked at top hotels in Chicago and New Orleans, the old Rib Room is being recast as Decoupage, a classic neo-Continental restaurant complete with tuxedoed service and tableside Chateaubriand (that’s a prime steak for two, Otis). The atmosphere will be upscale men’s club, heavy on the brass rails and uplit palms, with ceramics and custom tableware by local artist Scott Potter. “We’ll be offering a total experience,” she says. “Great food, terrific wine list, superb service.”

Chef Lee Skawinski was lured away from the Harraseeket Inn, and brings his sous chef and pastry chef with him — who said the restaurant business is heartless? — and he’s starting work on the menu now. But Strauss promises all kinds of high-end goodies, like foie gras, tableside Caesar salad, and flaming desserts, as well as novelties like grilled veal flank steak and Maine diver scallops. Dinner prices will run $25 to $30 before liquor.

“We’re after the same folks who go to Fore Street,” she says, “but we’re going to do it one better.”

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