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With the calendar officially reading October, it’s time to secure tickets for Harvest on the Harbor, October 24-26, 2024!  Georgetown’s Eros Oysters offers a dory full! Harvest on the Harbor offers focused samples from local distilleries, oyster farms, and lobster prepared by local chefs. It’s like one of our foodie tours, but the vendors come to…

Wallace Stevens, the great imagist poet is famous for his statement that “there is no Emperor but for the Emperor of Ice Cream.”  Well, if there is an “Emperor of Ice Cream,” you can be pretty sure he lives in New England.  In fact, the average New Englander eats 22.8 quarts per year compared to…

It is summer and happy hour on Wharf Street in Portland Maine presents the itinerant ambler with a cornucopia of delights.  There’s lots to eat and drink, and see. Maine – maybe because of the sometimes harsh weather and rocky coast – has always taken its fun seriously.  In the 1840s about a half million…

One of the most interesting groups of visitors we have led yet! Maine winters are cold and inhospitable, our growing season and summer are pretty short, right? Our local culinary traditions are supposed to be comparatively limited, too. Hold your horses for this one. Last week I led a group of exchange students from the…

What the heck is this? Or this? Look up and you’ll see these things all over the place on the waterfront in Portland, Maine.  Sometimes they are not even stars! What’s going on?  The answer is that these decorative metal pieces are not ornaments.  They serve an important function, literally keeping many of our turn of the…

Along with fiddleheads, which we shouted out recently, another Spring delicacy showed up locally in the past few weeks. But it’s not local, although it illustrates an interesting connection to Maine foodways, so bear with me. Harbor Fish has reciprocity agreements with a slew of fish markets nationwide and around the world, I’m not sure the actual mechanics, maybe it’s a proprietary secret. If there is a groundswell of demand, I will look into it. You will notice the fish market regularly features fresh fish from Hawaii, the Mediterranean, the Gulf of Mexico, Blue Crabs from Chesapeake Bay, etc. I describe that lobsters (and Maine bluefin tuna, oysters, scallops, elvers (baby eels), and urchin) travel all over the world via air freight, and other fish markets abroad send their stuff back on the return flights. I’m pretty sure it’s an…

A Portland Macaroni factory, 1924 Combing through old tax photographs of Portland?s Old Port from 1924, I happened upon this gem, which emphasizes Portland?s strong tradition of Italian-American food, one of my top recommendations, depending upon where visitors are from. Check out the kid smiling at the bottom too, he?d be 107 or so today….

There is an old saying that it’s not always the prettiest woman or most handsome man that makes the best dance partner.  Sometimes, at a party, you don’t want flashy, you just want steady, reliable, and solid.  Portland has plenty of pretty buildings, a surfeit of them.  With our rich Victorian pedigree, this is easily…

Fiddleheads:

I love the West End of Portland.  It’s architecturally significant and varied and every architectural style in America in play between 1870 and 1920 is on display there.  The Old Port section of Portland is beautiful too.  I’d take either of those neighborhoods out for dinner and drinks.   But, for my money, if you want…

Did you know Portland, Maine has burned to the ground four separate times in its history?  We’re the newest old city that there is in New England.  Longfellow House, boyhood home of Walt Whitman (kidding…Longfellow) is pretty much the oldest building in town, built in 1786, just after the American Revolution.  Consider that the founding…

It’s Valentine’s Day in Portland, Maine, or as we refer to it, Valentine Bandit’s Day.   Every 14th of February the city wakes up to our downtown festooned in red hearts.  Who does it?  Where do they all come from?  Who has that much tape?  Somebody knows – multiple people know because there are 1000s of…