Reservations accepted. Smoking after 10:30 p.m. in bar area.
Credit cards: MasterCard, Visa, Discover, American Express.
Access: Fully accessible.
FORE STREET
288 Fore St., Portland
Maine
(207) 775-2717
Restaurant reviewed 08/11/97 by Alison Arnett
One of the newest ideals of our overprocessed, ultrastyled world is simple food, beautifully prepared, true to its origins. Chefs talk about that purity all the time; diners claim to dream of it after a surfeit of sauces, of teased and sometimes tormented gourmet creations.
After a while, one yearns for less, not more.
Fore Street in Portland, Maine, comes mighty close to that ideal. Here executive chef Sam Hayward creates magic out of wonderful raw ingredients, practicing what he calls a ``noninterventionist'' policy. He and owners Dana Street - who has another restaurant, Street & Co. - and Vic Leon wanted to create a different kind of restaurant, dedicated to exploring what Hayward calls ``Thoreauvian simplicity.''
This is the place to go to savor Maine halibut hours out of the water, grilled over apple wood, enhanced only with a little ragout of pancetta and fennel.
The fish, cooked on the bone, has such sweetness that the flesh literally still tastes of the sea.
Bluefish, too often maligned, shows off its bold flavor. Roasted in the wood oven with only a dusting of bread crumbs, the bluefish is plump and delectable, with none of the flabbiness that can afflict a fish stored too long.
Despite this simplicity, there's nothing stark or severe about Fore Street. The dramatic room is centered around an enormous brick and soapstone oven with a 35-square foot hearth. The building, which once housed tanks in World War II, looks rough-hewn when one first walks in. The oven, with chefs working in front of it in the completely exposed kitchen, chickens and meat turning on spits, first catches one's eye. Then there are a glassed walk-in cooler packed with produce and a wood grill.
It's a little dizzying, like walking into a live medieval feast. But once seated, one is soon put at ease by the casual decor with its soft-hued woods, upholstered banquettes, and clever architectural details.
The wait staff adds to the comfortable feeling; our waitress gave our party the time to chat without abandoning us, and was solicitous throughout the evening.
Salads, as one might expect, are fantastic here, the combinations of vegetables as imaginative as the presentation is elemental. In a vegetable salad, local beets, crunchy wedges of jicama and red onions are jumbled with beautiful crisp greens - everything from small lettuces to tangy arugula and tatsoi. Fore Street summer salad featured chunks of steamed artichokes, tiny fingerling potatoes and thin green beans punctuated with stronger bursts of flavor from slivers of licorice-scented fennel and salty white anchovies. Panazella, with big squares of sourdough bread soaked in a little balsamic and tossed with tomatoes that tasted like tomatoes, was another wonder. Each salad was dressed with a simple vinaigrette that enhanced rather than cloaked the tastes.
The superlative appetizer, though, was the most complex. Giant oyster mushrooms, an African species grown on a farm in the White Mountains, had been wood-roasted and then tossed in a sauce of 8-year-old balsamic vinegar, creme fraiche, leeks, and apple wood-smoked bacon. The mushrooms, less muscular in flavor and texture than the very popular portobello, had an appealing delicacy; the sauce was so good our party of six practically fought over it.
Meats work well here too. Lamb sirloin, roasted on a turnspit, has been marinated in garlic and molasses, a very old-fashioned recipe, Hayward says, that imparts a distinction to the moist meat. Another old-fashioned treatment, stuffing a poussin (small chicken) with sourdough bread crumbs, onions, and herbs and then roasting it in the wood oven with splashes of Madeira and chicken stock, created a delightful, fulfilling dish. The side vegetables with these dishes, from truly remarkable mashed potatoes that had been crisped brown on top in the oven but were creamy inside, to almost perfectly round carrots just barely cooked, were another great detail.
Only in a few cases did the treatment seem to underwhelm the ingredients. A whole grilled squid was perfectly nice but needed more smoke or a lot of lemon juice to zip it up. A vegetarian dish of tagliatelle benefited greatly from the roasted tomatoes and basil that provided its most memorable flavor. But the pasta had gone just over the line past al dente, a mite too limp. All in all, more vegetarian entrees might be expected at a restaurant where so much attention and loving care is devoted to vegetables.
Although not architectural or highly decorated, the desserts by pastry chef Karen Parham, who previously was at the Gramercy Tavern in New York City, are far from spartan. The star was a peach tarte tatin with a Southern peach so bursting with goodness that it brought exclamations all around the table. Done in a small skillet, big peach slices are sauteed with cinnamon and honey and then covered with buttery puff pastry and baked when ordered. It's a true summer treat. Chocolate souffle cake, dense and satisfying, was another lovely dessert, set off by cappuccino ice cream. A lemon verbena creme brulee was more subtle but also delicious. Only a plate of cookies, from molasses to chocolate to a nut butter cookie, fell short.
Fore Street may fly in the face of those who want a chef's skill at alchemy - changing raw ingredients into something new. But to taste the real character of fine ingredients, carefully chosen, Fore Street is a revelation, a look at one hopeful direction in American food.
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