Poking around Portland: harboring more than lobsters and lighthouses, Maine's largest city is ready for prime time

Travel America, Jan-Feb, 2005 by Randy Mink

The lobsters can be packed for travel, shipped home, or cooked at the pierside Portland Lobster Company restaurant. On warm days, diners take advantage of the outdoor deck. The menu also lists clam cakes, fried scallops, lobster and crab rolls, and lobster stew.

Casco Bay Lines and other operators offer a variety of narrated sightseeing cruises that take in the forts, lighthouses, islands, and wildlife. Or tag along as a passenger on the three-hour mailboat run to five islands within the Portland city limits.

Peaks Island, a 15-minute ferry ride from the mainland, is the most populated, with 800 year-round residents, 3,000 in summer. Tours to Eagle Island feature the summer home of Arctic explorer Admiral Robert E. Peary, a Portland native. To navigate the harbor at your own pace, consider renting a kayak.

Docked in Portland on certain days from May to October are mega-ships of Holland America, Cunard, and other lines that operate itineraries with port calls in New England and Atlantic Canada. The Scotia Prince, a cruise ferry that carries up to 1,000 passengers and 200 vehicles, offers 11-hour overnight voyages from Portland to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, from April to November. Besides saving vacationers 1,500 miles of roundtrip driving, the ship offers live entertainment, a casino, fine dining, a massage spa, and private cabins.

DiMillo's Floating Restaurant, a landmark on Long Wharf since 1982, is a converted car ferry that played a major part in making the waterfront an inviting place to visit. Every table has a view, and there's an outdoor deck. Besides seafood, DiMillo's serves steak, chicken, and Italian dishes. The place is enormous.

RiRa's, a waterside restaurant with an Irish flair, has an antique bar imported in pieces from the Auld Sod and a second-floor dining room overlooking the port. Irish beers on tap include dark creamy stouts like Guinness and Murphy's. A pint of Guinness also makes the appetizer list. RiRa's version of shepherd's pie contains not only ground beef, vegetables, and mashed potatoes but Guinness and tomato sauce as well. The Irish soda bread comes with Guinness butter, and there's Guinness gingerbread for dessert.

At just about every Portland restaurant you can wash down your meal with locally produced microbrew beers. One of the most popular brands is Shipyard, which gives tours of its waterfront brewery daily from May through December. Aromas from the brewery tantalize cyclists on the nearby bike path, a route that also offers whiffs of a sewage plant and the B & M baked beans factory.

Downtown's Portland Public Market, an airy glass-and-timber building, is a showcase for purveyors of Maine's agricultural and marine bounty. On the mezzanine level are places to sit and eat, plus a state-of-the-art demonstration kitchen where chef-instructors conduct cooking classes and offer samples from Maine recipes.

Besides seafood, market vendors sell artisanal breads, pies, jams, maple syrup, flowers, Maine wines and beers, and seasonal produce, such as wild or cultivated blueberries. (Maine is America's No. 1 blueberry producer.) You can pick up elk and buffalo meat at The Game Table.