Central Provisions
CITY GUIDES | NORTHEAST
These Portland Restaurants Made This Maine Fishing Town a Serious Food City
By Maria Rodriguez | March 7, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: With a day job that requires constant travel, Maria Rodriguez is likely a regular at your favorite restaurant. She’s reviewed restaurants since 2007 in magazines from Barcelona to Bakersfield.
There are cities that appear on my work calendar and inspire all the excitement of a dental appointment. Portland, Maine, is not one of them. Even in February, when the harbor air seems designed to punish me for wearing an ankle-length dress, I’m happy to go back, because this city keeps adding some new restaurant, new chef, or new dish worth folding into the list.
That is what makes the best restaurants in Portland, Maine, so useful to keep tracking. This is, after all, a fishing town that turned itself into one of New England’s most serious food cities. And these are the Portland restaurants that I can’t wait to visit again.
Aomori
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Aomori is chef Masa Miyake’s new family project in West Bayside, opened in December 2025 with Reo Miyake and Helen Carter. And while it’s new, it already feels like the kind of place Portland will be bragging about for years. The space is casual and izakaya-like, with 44 seats and a chef’s counter, and the menu leans into northern Japan with dishes like kai-yaki scallops in the shell, mentaiko cream udon, chicken katsu don, and a seafood charcuterie board they call chinmi. This is not old-master reverence trapped in amber; it is Masa’s world translated into Japanese soul food, late-night hours, and a Maine-to-Tohoku conversation that actually gives the city something new.
Best for: A new restaurant with serious chef pedigree and real range
Central Provisions
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Central Provisions continues to be one of my favorite Portland restaurants because chef Chris Gould never stops innovating. The restaurant opened in 2014 in a historic Old Port brick building, and the menu still moves with the same small-plates logic that made it a national breakout, with dishes like bluefin tuna crudo, spicy raw beef salad, roasted cauliflower, and that marrow toast with fontina and onions. Plenty of restaurants try to feel like the center of a city’s dining scene; this one actually has been for a long time.
Best for: A greatest-hits Portland dinner that still earns the reputation
Công Tử Bột
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This is the kind of restaurant that makes a city feel smarter about food, partly because chef and co-owner Vien Dobui has never had much interest in sanding off the edges. Since Công Tử Bột opened it in 2017, it has kept evolving while staying rooted in Vietnamese cooking, with pho at the center and enough cult around the menu that weekend lunch and half-the-room-for-walk-ins now feel like part of the ritual. Dobui has been in the James Beard conversation for years, and the restaurant still reads like what happens when a chef follows his own palate instead of market research.
Best for: A chef-driven meal that feels personal
Crispy Gài
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Crispy Gài sounds like it might be a one-joke fried chicken place, and then chef Cyle Reynolds and Jordan Rubin remind everyone that Bangkok street food can carry a lot of weight. The restaurant started as a pop-up in late 2020, opened in Portland in 2021, and built its following on Thai fried chicken and street dishes shaped by Reynolds’s time cooking in Thailand, along with a serious community streak that has included thousands of donated meals and thousands raised through menu-item giving. The line between fun restaurant and important restaurant gets blurry here, which is usually when a place starts to matter.
Best for: Thai fried chicken with actual chef chops behind it
Fore Street
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Sam Hayward’s place opened in 1996 and won him a James Beard Award for Best Chef: Northeast. It’s now runs under executive chef Frederic Eliot with the same wood-fired identity intact, turning out dishes like wood oven roasted mussels, grilled squid, hanger steak, and turnspit-roasted half chicken. You go because it is famous, then the hearth, the room, and the restraint remind you why some classics get to stay classics.
Best for: An old-guard Portland restaurant that still feels current
Izakaya Minato
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Chef Thomas Takashi Cooke and Elaine Alden opened the tiny East Bayside restaurant in 2017 after time in San Francisco and Japan, and the place still leans into the closeness of a real izakaya. There’s daily sashimi, dashi dishes, grilled fish, and JFC, their Japanese fried chicken. It feels less like dinner theater and more like slipping into a room that has already decided what it is, which is probably why Cooke earned an appearance on the James Beard Awards semifinalist list.
Best for: A dinner that feels transportive without trying too hard
Magissa
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Magissa filled a real hole in Portland when Nancy Klosteridis and Emily Otero opened their Greek taverna in East Bayside in 2024, because the city had plenty of excellent restaurants and not nearly enough places to eat spanakopita and moussaka. Klosteridis came out of the Greeks of Peaks food truck, Otero handles pastry, and the restaurant has settled into a warm, bright room with a menu that pulls from family recipes and dishes like spanakopita, saganaki, gigantes, htipiti, skordalia, grilled lamb, and ouzo cake. The whole thing feels friendly in a way that you’ll leave the first time convinced you’re now a regular.
Best for: A relaxed dinner that feels distinctly Greek
Miyake
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Miyake remains one of Portland’s defining Japanese restaurants because Masa Miyake never treated precision as a substitute for warmth. It now operates in a refreshed small dining room with a sushi counter, serving lunch, dinner, and reservation-based counter seating, while the menu continues to revolve around elegant Japanese preparations and omakase-minded dining. In a city full of restaurants chasing casual greatness, Miyake still makes a compelling argument for doing things the exacting way.
Best for: A polished Japanese dinner with restraint and detail
Mr. Tuna
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Jordan Rubin started Mr. Tuna as a sushi cart in 2017, moved into a brick-and-mortar on Middle Street in 2024, and has turned it into one of Portland’s modern restaurant success stories. He did that with sustainably sourced seafood, a deep local bluefin program, hand rolls, kaisen don, bara chirashi, and enough acclaim to bring a James Beard semifinalist nod and a Food & Wine Best New Chef honor in 2025. The place looks bright and easygoing, but the obsession level is obvious once the fish hits the counter.
Best for: Sushi people who care where the fish came from
Papi
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Papi could have coasted on style alone, with its Old San Juan-meets-Old Port mood and one of the better bar programs in town. But it also has real food behind it, thanks to LyAnna Sanabria and chef Ronnie Medlock, who puts out empanadas, pernil, pinchos, alcapurrias, tostones, and mofongo. The the bar has earned national attention as a regional top 10 honoree for Best New U.S. East Cocktail Bar at Tales of the Cocktail. Plenty of places promise atmosphere; this one actually has culture in it.
Best for: Cocktails first, then a full Puerto Rican dinner
Regards
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Regards is chef Neil Zabriskie’s restaurant for people who like their seafood bright, charred, acidic, and a little hard to categorize. Zabriskie and his partners opened it in 2022, Bon Appétit put it on its Best New Restaurants list that year, and the menu has kept leaning into its Japanese-and-Mexican inflected coastal style with ceviches, tamales, Argentinian shrimp tacos, mezcal-cured hamachi collar, crab rice, and grilled cabbage Caesar. It is one of the city’s clearest answers to the question of what a modern Portland restaurant should look like if it is not pretending to be a lobster shack.
Best for: A contemporary dinner that feels unlike anywhere else in town
Scales
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Scales sits on Maine Wharf, part of the Fore Street Group, putting out the kind of menu that reads like a polished waterfront greatest-hits reel: oysters, halibut ceviche, tuna crudo, crab fritters, grilled octopus, seafood stew, lobster roll, and steamed Maine lobster. There’s regular specials of whatever is fresh, like maybe razor clams or diver scallops or something else that just came off the boat. The room is handsome, the seafood is the point, and unlike a lot of harbor restaurants, this one has views and creative dishes.
Best for: A big waterfront seafood dinner when only Maine-looking Maine will do
Twelve
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Colin Wyatt came back to Maine after long stints at Daniel and Eleven Madison Park to open Twelve, and Hannah Ryder now leads the kitchen as executive chef. The restaurant has built its identity around polished New England cooking, a prix fixe option, strong drinks, and a few do-not-miss items, including a kombu martini and a lobster roll on a flaky croissant. Set inside the rebuilt former Pattern Storehouse on the waterfront, it’s a place that understands both theater and discipline.
Best for: A dressed-up dinner that still feels rooted in Maine
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