The large, white-framed windows of our shop face the sidewalk, which sits alongside a fairly nondescript street, which for much of the day serves as a conduit for people going elsewhere; office workers shuffle downtown in the mornings; restaurant goers eagerly head for the many choices for lunch or dinner. In between, the sidewalk can be quiet. It’s during the “in between” time that a world previously invisible to me has made itself known.

When we opened our shop, we were thrilled to be in the midst of a rapidly expanding neighborhood of restaurants, bakeries, coffee houses, and specialty grocery markets. Portland Maine’s restaurant scene was finally getting some serious attention from the rest of the country, and this seemed a sensible and exciting place to create a bookshop dedicated to food and wine. Our instinct has proved right, and we’re happy to be a contributing part of the scene, making good new friends on the way and eating better than anyone really deserves.

We’ve long been more than interested in good eating. And the local / fresh / seasonal food concept has been an ideal we strive for. But over the months, our store windows have been an education in local / fresh / seasonal. Parking spaces in front of our shop are often occupied by the vehicles of various purveyors, including organic vegetable farmers, fishmongers, wine merchants, butchers, mushroom foragers and others. Out of these cars and trucks come some of the finest raw materials to be found anywhere, most of them sourced right here in Maine. A few of these suppliers have national reputations, including Rod Mitchell’s Browne Trading Company, which supplies fish, shellfish, caviar and more to some of the world’s best chefs, including Jean Louis Palladin, Daniel Bouloud, Eric Ripert, Alain Ducasse and Charlie Trotter among others. Another is Ingrid Bengis, who became widely known as “the Fish lady”” when she was profiled in Thomas Keller’s French Laundry Cookbook. Bengis is considered to be one of the most exacting suppliers of fine fish and foraged foodstuffs to chefs including Keller, Eberhard Müller, Wolfgang Puck, Jean-Georges Vongerichten and others.

The wine and spirits salesmen occupy a middle ground between the bon vivant lifestyle projected by the wine business, and the pavement pounding reality of their endless sales calls. They seem a naturally curious bunch, and often exhibit an admirable comraderie, even while competing tooth and nail for the next sales. Wine can do that. The salesmen seem to survive this dissonance by maintaining healthy egos, and developing enough stamina to spend the days selling and (frequently) the nights partying. But they’re quick to share a tip on an undervalued Spanish red or on a small shipment of unusual Alsatian whites.

Other suppliers might better be described as humble, but not for want of a better product. The foragers come and go in smaller vehicles, not needing large trucks for their precious cargoes of sea urchins, matsutake mushrooms or surf clams. Rick Tibbets, a near legendary Maine wild greens and mushroom forager, comes by during the high seasons, with trays full from his laborious, and sometimes secret, harvests. A few weeks ago, Steve (another new friend made through the store), arrived at the shop around 7pm with a ten gallon bucket of surf clams, freshly harvested from a local beach. He wasn’t selling, just needed to share the news of his find with someone who might appreciate it.

Matt of Swallow Arc Farm is young and lanky. He drives a one-ton truck with a homemade box on the back, and displays much evidence of his early morning’s work under his fingernails. But out of the back of that slightly misshapen truck come vegetables as good as any I’ve seen or tasted. Ground cherries were a real treat, and he recently challenged us to bite into some lovely, medium-sized turnips, which had the crunch and consistency of an apple and a sweetness one would expect more from a fruit than a root vegetable. Matt told us to wait for the first hard frost to harvest rutabagas, turnips and some other roots, which would allow the frost to work its magic on the cell structures of the vegetables, producing more sugars. Now, this seems to us an indispensable piece of food knowledge.

So all along, while we’ve been busy in our shop, hoping to offer some bookish information to customers, right outside our windows, a complete education in good real food is available, right on the sidewalk, in this small city in Maine.

 A postscript: for readers interested in the meals created with these raw materials, some of the purveyors’ goods can be found, transformed by talented cooks and chefs, at Bresca, Duck Fat, Food Works, Fore Street, Hugo’s, Norms, Pepperclub, Ribollita’s and Two Fat Cats Bakery; all different, all good, and all less than one minute from our windows.



Don Lindgren is an antiquarian book dealer, and co-owner, with his wife Samantha, of Rabelais, a food and wine bookshop in Portland, Maine. Don and Samantha live in Alfred, Maine with their dog, cats and chickens.

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