Think Global, Eat like a Portland Local

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 USM program in hospitality and tourism around town on our World of Flavors circuit, which I put together as a next-level route for people who have already done our guided Culinary and/ or History outings while covering entirely new ground and information without duplication. I have already established that Maine seafood is the best available, and that New England culinary traditions are a rich mixture of French and English cultural traditions, built upon a foundation of 12,000 years of pioneering local indigenous foodways. I will go into the latter in more detail another time. While it is excellent comfort food offering substantive insight into the historical development of local culture, and demonstrating the quality of local seafood, Portland offers A LOT more than vernacular New England food, and our walking tours specifically seek to reflect that broad range!

Portland attracts chefs from all over the nation and world, defying the notion of Maine as a homogeneous population. Some are locals done good, some chefs come from other cities nationwide, lured (at one time) by relatively low start-up costs and overhead, and others arrive in Portland as immigrants, seeing opportunity to add diverse and authentic foodways to Portland?s world-class culinary scene. As a dedicated resettlement city for immigrants, Portland also offers vernacular Mom-and-Pop dining opportunities from a wide variety of cultural traditions; we have many very high-quality restaurants owned and managed by members of cultural groups preparing their own traditional foodways from across the globe and adding it to the American culinary melange.

As a guide, I like stepping aside when I see something happening that demonstrates what I am saying tangibly, and letting others speak when they have expertise and knowledge that exceeds my own. Portland is at its best when one takes a random cross-section of the city and it speaks for itself, illustrating one?s points candidly and believably. I believe that authenticity and transparency are crucial to our walking tours; the things I like most about Portland are its genuine character and historical continuity. Very often, things are exactly what they appear to be, there is no Disney-fication of the scene, it has evolved into what you see, demonstrating its development openly and honestly. The waterfront and Old Port is not a theme park or a simulation. When you get curious and zoom in for more information, you are rewarded by finding more reality. Yes, we have tourists, but we don?t pander and sell ourselves out to create an image, we are what we are, and what we are is better than glitz and theater: it?s the reality of the food scene that the crucial element of our attraction. We were wise to protect the fishery here in the ?70s, when it became endangered by waterfront development. That foresight has paid great dividends in the years since. It is why we can do genuinely locavore culinary walking tours in an urban environment. It?s truly extraordinary.

In the World of Flavors I like to extend the same idea, at another level. I?ve oriented the planning both to locals who want to try something new and gain information about unfamiliar foodways, and I want to show off Portland?s ethnic characters and the depth and breadth of our vernacular food scene to people who already appreciate some of the ethnic foods we offer. In fact, the primary recommendations I make locally to visitors are two of our outstanding ethnic traditions, in Japanese and Italian-American food. It?s hard to imagine people not being exposed to these foods yet, but it is not available in all localities. I phrase these local food experiences as ?opportunities knocking,? something to try in town that one wouldn?t necessarily predict. Given the virtuosity of our seafood scene, many ethnic traditions are great options locally, given much of human development was built on seafood. I recommend Japanese food, for instance, to visitors from Japan, Hawaii, and the West Coast, which seems counterintuitive, but we also offer very high-quality raw materials, though from a totally distinct fishery, the North Atlantic, than what they are typically exposed to, that of the Pacific. We have 6 or more chefs born and/or trained in Japan who were drawn here, I suppose this could be the topic of another blog, by the quality of our seafood, but also the fact they have an opportunity to do things with often utterly different materials than they have quality access to in the Pacific world. And our food scene also transcends seafood now. Several of our restaurants offer seafood as a part of the menu, though not necessarily as the main event.

I was raised in some world-class food cities: NYC, Austin, and Portland, and my paternal great-grandparents owned a restaurant in Mexico City, a city which I have visited multiple times over the years for family events. I was a History professor for 15 years, so I have read several walls of books, many of them in Environmental History touching on foodways, as well as the history of migration and ethnicity in the Unites States. I love sharing my knowledge and blowing people?s minds. The World of Flavors enables me to introduce people to new things and local eating opportunities, as I see them. I often customize my recommendations to visitors to present opportunities they wouldn?t necessarily find at home, encouraging adventurous eating and seizing the day.

I love demonstrating that American food is a crazy mix of every major ethnic immigrant group that has arrived on this continent, whether 20,000 years ago or last week, and sharing and borrowing from and transforming one another. It is what makes us distinctive as a nation and what makes us, our food, and all our other pursuits, great. We have also contributed disproportionately more than our fair share to world foodways and culture as a result. Have a look at the New York Times? restaurant critic, Pete Wells? 100 Best Restaurants in NY this year. Le Bernardin and Bouloud are there to be sure, but far more often than not, the greatest number of mind-blowing eating experiences to be had there are from Mom-and-Pop vernacular restaurants representing the traditions of recent migrants. And Portland has riches at both ends of the spectrum at a smaller scale, in a manageable city: fine-dining opportunities that raise food preparation to the level of art, and top-quality vernacular foods that demonstrate authenticity and dyed-in-the-wool local traditions, enriched by waves of migration.

Back to my student group from last week! They were 15 restaurant and hotel management students, most of them in the U.S. for the first time. I have had similar groups from Europe, but this group was special. They were from Greenland! ?an Inuit (indigenous Arctic) and Scandinavian mix from the largest and northernmost island in the world, with a virtually non-existent growing season. Like Iceland next door, they are from a very limited and isolated cultural tradition. It was exciting for me to introduce all the varieties of cuisine in the U.S., but also to learn a little about Greenland, which I learned was first settled by Norse people, who were then colonized by Native Americans! Mind-blowing.

So as the tour progressed, I put myself into their shoes mentally and got to experience Indian, Mexican, Japanese, and Italian food for the first time on the same day, can you imagine?! It turns out that many among them had tried Japanese food back home, so Crunchy Pok