Everyone should have a neighborhood restaurant to go to. These are the places that are less somewhere to go on special occasions and more somewhere to go when you’re out of food for the week. They’re extensions of both your kitchen and dining room. You can stop in for a bite at the bar during your break at work, or sit in a booth for three hours well into the evening, talking about your top-five favorite dog breeds or foods you’d want with you on a deserted island. They’re funky, they don’t serve anything with truffle oil, and they’re warm.

Katahdin is not only the West End’s premier neighborhood restaurant, but it also serves as a guardian to the neighborhood itself. Perched on the sometimes frightfully hectic corner of Spring and High streets, it seems a guardhouse to what quickly becomes rows of quiet brownstones and dog-walkers. Then you hit State Street, and it gets all loud and crappy again. But then, making your way past the emergency entrance to Mercy Hospital and then Pap’s, you are drawn into the nestled confines of Portland’s secret architectural Eden, out of which you will most likely be chased by guard dogs and SUVs. If you make it to the Western Promenade, take a deep breath, put your arm around your love, and take in the stunning view. Piles of trashed metal and the airport never looked so beautiful.

Sitting in Katahdin’s brightly painted and warmly lit dining room, complete with metal mermaid over the door and disembodied torch-bearing arm jutting out from the wall, wife Jackie and I felt the whole cozy neighborhood restaurant vibe thing in full swing. There was clearly regular at the bar, eating dinner and carrying on an animated conversation with the barkeep, while the two couples surrounding us (on an otherwise pretty quiet Tuesday night) were, respectively, having a post-work dinner meeting and a first or second date. We even played the Food On A Deserted Island game (Jackie: Mom’s chicken cutlets and mashed potatoes, ice cream, french fries, pizza, and cheeseburgers. Andy: Mom’s beef stroganoff, biscuits with honey and butter, spaghetti and meatballs, BBQ, and prime rib).

Conceptually speaking, their menu is interesting. It seems potentially wonderful, filling, warm fare, especially in light of the recent artic blasts we’ve been getting. Roast Duck Breast with Apple Cider Braised Cranberries, Salmon Fillet with Toasted Pecan Maple Butter, Pan Roasted Pistachio Crusted Oysters — each item was ambitious while avoiding pretension, and the menu was grounded by classics such as Atlantic Fish Chowder and Crab Cakes.

In fact, we chose those two items, and they were solid. The crab cakes were a balanced mixture of the breading, onion, chives, and crab (too often I see too-dry or too-crabby crab cakes), topped with a great sour foil in the roasted lemon aioli. The soup was simple, just the chowder broth and fish. The liquid wasn’t thick — some chowders are gooped up by a cornstarch slurry or flour — but rather loose, well seasoned, and not too fishy.

When choosing entrees, we ran into an increasingly familiar trend. It comes in a few different forms, but the offending menu usually has a phrase that reads something like "Entrees include house vegetable and starch," or something to that effect. If I’m going to pay between 18 and 25 dollars for an entrée, I expect to have some sort of well-thought-out and -composed dinner, not just the prepared meat, a medley of veggies, and reheated mashed potatoes. It takes interesting flavor pairings right off the plate, and turns what might have been a pricey-but-worth-it dining experience into an I-could-have-done-this-at-home disappointment.

Katahdin, to its small credit, offers two starches, mashed potatoes and rice, so if you get a lighter entrée option, you can just choose the rice. Jackie got this with her special, Sesame Coated Scallops with Shrimp and Citrus Reduction and Fried Basil Leaves, and I was not offered a starch or vegetable due to my choice of Butternut Squash Risotto with Savoy Spinach, Fontina, and Fried Leeks.

The risotto was thick and hearty, served over a bed of the spinach and cheese and topped with fried leeks, thus forming a free-form casserole. The rice was just a tad undercooked, and came across as bound more by the melted cheese than the natural starches released in the cooking process. It was that cheese and the fried leeks that made me throw in the napkin, stuffed, after eating only about half of it.

The scallops were cooked and seasoned well, not rubbery at all. The toasted-sesame flavor dominated the plate; this and the shrimp in the reduction covered any citrus present in the sauce. The fried basil, while visually and texturally interesting, added little in terms of flavor but increased the toasted/fried signature of the plate.

The Tangerine Crème Caramel for dessert was a nice saving grace, and the Cranberry Apple Pie was sweet and sour enough to clear my risotto-laden palate despite the presence of slightly leathery apple peels. And frankly, you don’t always go to your neighborhood restaurant for the finest cuisine in the world. It just needs to be interesting enough to keep you coming back, to sit and drink, and eat, and to scratch an itch that has less to do with comfort food than just plain comfort.

Andy King can be reached at snandis@yahoo.com