Maine Oct 2010

I was to spend two months of the fall in London. On the way there, I stopped in Maine to visit my parents from Tuesday, October 19, 2010, through Friday, October 22.

Sorry, I didn't take any pictures during this visit.

Tuesday
I flew into Boston on Tuesday. On the way, I grabbed a turkey and avocado sandwich to eat on the plane from Boudin Sourdough Bakery's SFO location. While buying this sandwich, I noticed a woman who wanted rye bread and made a big fuss: "What kind of bakery doesn't have rye bread?" I wanted to shout at her and shake her. The employees, however, were too nice to point out this is a sourdough bakery. It's in the name. That's why they don't have other types of bread.

Wednesday
On Wednesday, my parents proudly took me to Hebert Brothers Seafood, the local fishmonger, where we ate good lobster rolls while sitting on a picnic bench in front of the shop overlooking the water.

In the afternoon, we went to the Wentworth Hotel to stroll through its gardens and along its marina. It's a pretty area.

After that, we headed to Fort Stark, which overlooks the Atlantic Ocean and the Piscataqua River. I guess it's easy to find places that have views of water in this part of New Hampshire and Maine. Incidentally, walking around this derelict fort (much of it was fenced off), we saw places where branches struck out like artillery turrets through the fence around one building. Also, there were some rooms/buildings that I couldn't decide if they were meant to be prisons or barracks.

Later, we drove by more sights, including one place with a metal sculpture of a picture frame (on an easel, with a metal sculpture of a painter nearby) framing a water view. Finally, before returning home, we passed some nice houses in Newcastle, which I'm told is an expensive town.

For dinner, we headed to the York Harbor Inn, which has a prime rib special on Wednesday nights. We ate downstairs, the interior of which was designed to look like a ship and built from nicely glowing red wood. We ate watching the sun disappear through the hatch. We had pretty standard prime rib, not as good as what we've become accustomed to but acceptable nonetheless. The sides were good: mashed potatoes, battered french fries, grilled asparagus, and sauteed brussels sprouts in brown butter. (Yes, I liked the brussels sprouts, a pleasing surprise to me.)

Thursday
After I ran in the morning, we went to Shio in Portsmouth for lunch. It's a perfectly respectable Japanese restaurant; we had sushi (my last chance given London effectively has none) and teriyaki and tempura. I liked the restaurant's varied design, with regular tables, regular booths, and sunken floor Japanese-style booths.

We ate a Thanksgiving-inspired dinner at home: rotisserie chicken from Market Basket, baked sweet potatoes, roasted potatoes, peas, and cranberry sauce.

By the way, for some breakfasts in Maine I ate my mom's banana bread muffins. Good stuff.

Friday
My flight from Boston to London left Friday evening. My parents planned to drop me off at the airport and then eat dinner in Boston so as to wait out the rush hour traffic. Happily, it turned out my plane was delayed--a fact we only discovered once we were already in Boston--and thus I got to eat dinner with my parents.

Dinner was an adventure, and we got to exploit all the restaurant research my dad had done. My dad had a number of suggestions for dining options; he was excited when he saw how many good restaurants there were near the airport.

On the quest for food, we spent some time confusedly driving through the mess that is East Boston near the airport (lots of blocked roads and that kind of thing). The first place we stopped at was a pupusaria. From the outside it looked more like a small, corner Mexican market than a restaurant. There were no customers inside, and the neighborhood was scarily empty. We decided to pass.

Our second choice was a cafe in a shipyard. We thought we were in the same situation again when we found the entrance to the shipyard dark (no street-lights) and guarded by a family of skunks. Slightly perturbed, we detoured and drove to the other entrance, which was marginally more welcoming--there was a guardhouse but still no people.

Once in the shipyard, we found the small restaurant we were seeking: Scup's in the Harbour. It's a cozy space with a couple of bench tables inside, that's all. One orders food from the door to the kitchen. It's funky, given character by exposed pipes in the ceiling, by Christmas balls hanging from the ceiling, by the large, fake spider attached to one wall, and by the paintings.

Soon after being seated, we were greeted by and chatted with the owner for quite a while. She and her husband previously ran Emma's Pizza in Cambridge (a shop I've been to before (though after they sold it) and enjoyed). By the way, it turns out they weren't the original owners--they took over from Emma the pizza Nazi. (Yes, she sounded like the pizza equivalent of the soup nazi.) After they ran and sold Emma's Pizza, they lived on a tugboat in the shipyard for a while, then were offered this place in the shipyard to run. (The previous occupants left.) Anyway, we talked about a lot more than her biography, but those are the highlights.

My parents and I split three dishes:

• Crab cakes. Decent. The crab was the texture of moist bread crumbs in a white cream sauce. I thought they were decent and relatively unusual; my mom thought they were the best crab cakes she's ever had.
• "Ultimate" BLT: house-marinated bacon, cherry tomatoes (sliced in half, which makes them really want to escape the sandwich), greens, cheese, and pesto. (Yes, it's those unusual ingredients that make the chef call it "ultimate.") I thought this was very good, especially when hot, with the bacon being better than most I've had. My mom disagreed, saying the bacon was average. Regardless, I thought the cheese and pesto added a lot, and I think this sandwich will get me to consider ordering BLTs again. (Normally in a sandwich shop my eyes skip over them on the menu because I didn't believe they were something I usually like.)
• Chicken rice bowl with grilled chicken, rice, peanuts, shredded carrots, and green onions, all in a funky Asian sauce (sesame mixed with something sweet?). There were also notes of lemon, chili powder, and ginger. Fine. Nice grill-marks on the chicken. Though I usually like dishes with green onions and/or peanuts, I felt there was too much going on in this dish and it didn't manage to come together harmoniously. My mom hated it, but dad convinced her to take the leftovers home. They said the leftovers were much better. Mom "loved" them. I guess I didn't mix the dish enough the first night, or perhaps the flavors blended better overnight.

After dinner, my parents dropped me off at the airport.

As for the flight itself, because it was an overnight flight, I worked hard to get comfortable and sleep the entire way. The Virgin Atlantic economy seat had too much space (!) between my seat and the window -- I couldn't easily jam a pillow in there to lean on, and if my head let the pillow slip, it would fall between the plane's shell and my seat.

It's interesting that this flight was shorter than the flight from San Francisco to Boston, but this flight crosses five time zones, not three. Can you figure out why this is? (I can.)