New England's Culinary Gem — Portland Maine punches far above its weight: more restaurants per capita than any city in America, Fore Street's wood-fired live-fire cooking sparked a national movement, and the lobster rolls on Commercial Street with views of Casco Bay are the best in the world
Portland, Maine is the commercial hub of New England's northernmost state — a compact peninsula city on Casco Bay with one of the most remarkable restaurant scenes per capita in the United States. Portland's Old Port district, with its Victorian brick warehouses along the waterfront, hosts dozens of acclaimed restaurants; Fore Street (James Beard Award winner Dana Street's anchor restaurant, opened 1996) is one of the most influential restaurants in American culinary history — its whole-animal, wood-fire rotisserie approach pre-dated the nose-to-tail movement and became a model for farm-to-ta…
The Casco Bay peninsula has been home to the Wabanaki Confederation (Abenaki, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy peoples) for thousands of years. English settlement began in 1632 at Machigonne; the settlement was destroyed and rebuilt three times in conflicts between French, British, and Indigenous powers before the current city was incorporated as Portland in 1786 (it was briefly the capital of Maine before Augusta). Portland was the birthplace of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807), whose Portland house is now a museum and the oldest surviving residential building in the city. The city's role as a majo…