PORTLAND, Maine — Lights, camera, satisfaction. Harvest on the Harbor is on in Portland.
A cadre of top Maine chefs cooked in the rain Wednesday night outside the Merrill Auditorium for the inaugural harvest dinner. The edible extravaganza ushered in the four-day celebration of the state’s culinary scene, which runs through Saturday in Portland.
If dining is theater, the opening seven-course feast, served center stage underneath the newly renovated Kotzschmar organ, captivated to the last bite — a caramel, root vegetable, crystallized, glazed dessert by Chef Ilma Lopez of Piccolo in Portland.
Organized by the Greater Portland Convention and Visitors Bureau, Harvest on the Harbor is Maine’s largest food event and is expected to draw more than 4,000 people for a gastronomic romp through haute cuisine, barbecue, beer, worldly wine and the state’s crown jewel — lobster.
There will be tastings throughout the weekend. Friday features include the Triple B Barbecue: Brews, Booze, Blues and the Beer Experience. Saturday’s food marketplace, The Big Eat, will be held at The Portland Company Complex. Thursday’s Grand Tasting and Friday’s Maine Lobster Chef of the Year competition remain waterside at Ocean Gateway, as does Friday’s Wine Experience.
On Wednesday, several diners in the sold-out crowd of 112 drove hours south from Presque Isle and hours north from Maryland to taste the best of Portland, a city regularly touted in the pages of Bon Appetit and Food and Wine magazines for its white hot chefs and mixologists.
After three hours of over-the-top courses — including foie gras cured with Allen’s Coffee Flavored Brandy, which chef Harding Lee Smith topped with sweet pumpkin seeds and paired with a gewurztraminer from Alsace — diners left sated and impressed.
“I am completely overwhelmed by the experience,” said Santiago Melendro, an IT health care consultant for Maine Medical Center, who snapped each course on his iPhone.
“Portland is a food town,” said an excited Eric Flynn, chef at The Harraseeket Inn in Freeport, who helped dream up the harvest dinner and prepared an ocean perch on a colorful carrot puree for course four. “We thought, let’s bring an event into the heart of the city.”
Attached to Portland City Hall, the setting couldn’t have been more central. Now in its seventh year, the festival, primarily held on the waterfront, was ready for an upgrade.
“In order to pull high-end chefs away from their restaurants, this had to be ultra special,” said Lynn Tillotson, president of the Greater Portland CVB.
From a new Lobster Chef of the Year format to spreading out events from the harbor to the hill, Harvest on the Harbor is maturing like a fine Malbec.
The changes were enough to lure Smith, who owns four restaurants in Portland, including Boone’s Fish House and The Grill Room, back into the fold. “I like that this is a donation for a good cause,” Smith said, squirting quince paste while plating his foie gras course. “They have really changed things this year. There’s a new director, new energy. … That’s why I’m here.”
Twenty-five dollars from each $150 ticket for Wednesday night’s Harvest Dinner on the Stage was donated to the Auburn-based Good Shepherd Food Bank to feed hungry children in Maine during the summer months.
Coffee By Design owner Mary Allen Lindemann matched the donation. Tillotson called Lindemann a community builder and said while celebrating food in Maine it’s important to “really think about the children who go hungry every summer.”
Tillotson presented the Good Shepherd Food Bank with a check for $5,000.
The cause was not lost on chefs like Shannon Bard.
The owner of Mexican restaurant Zapoteca in Portland, who will appear on the Food Network’s “Kitchen Inferno” on Dec. 24, prepared a smooth and succulent venison dusted with red chile, served on ancho-cocoa mole sauce with celery root puree and garnished with a tequila-roasted tomato.
Paired with an Argentinean red wine, it was a fiery, refined morsel.
“I’m really excited to be here with some of the best chefs in the state,” said Bard, who told the crowd not to feel bad for the cooks laboring backstage. “We are having some wine too.”
Chef David Turin of David’s Restaurant in Portland, fresh from preparing dinner at New York’s James Beard House the night before, browned duck and chicken sausages on a rented stove outside the auditorium. He equated the experience to cooking a popup dinner.
“You have to plan your menu carefully. We are not overstocked with equipment, so you have to know you can pull it off with a limited amount of supplies,” he said.
As diners swooned over his elevated autumnal course, served with a micro tangerine salad, he succeeded.
Amid the bold-named chefs were students from Southern Maine Community College.
Here to assist in plating, the budding chefs had an opportunity to rub elbows with rising stars like Cara Stadler of the days-old Bao Bao Dumpling House in Portland and Tao Yuan in Brunswick and watch pros like Turin in action.
“These are the chefs of the future,” said Geoff Boardman, chair of the school’s culinary arts program.
Dressed in chef whites with a towering toque, Boardman served English Cape porpoise chowder and told diners, “I hope that Portland will be the No. 1 food city and knock San Francisco right into the bay,” to cheers.
On their way into the theater, guests were reminded that Portland’s celebrated food scene is in part because Maine’s growing back-to-the-land movement.
To celebrate the connection, a traveling photo exhibit by Connecticut photographer David Owen called “The Story Behind Maine Farmers” opened here Wednesday.
In vivid photographs, Owen depicts agrarians like Dan Stewart of Stewart Farms of Presque Isle and Theo de Koning, a fifth-generation mussel farmer from Bar Harbor, looking directly and honestly into the camera.
Owen, commissioned by the Maine Farm Bureau for the project, visited farmers from Dayton to Caribou. He found “they all had the same attitude. They all lean toward enthusiasm. No one is sullen or stuck in something they don’t like.”
This window into the growers that chefs rely on for fresh ingredients, will be on display during Harvest on the Harbor, including the Maine Lobster Chef of the Year competition on Friday.
“There is such a food celebration going on right now,” Owen said. “Farmers are the bedrock of this country.”
Harvest on the Harbor continues Thursday, with The Grand Tasting at 6 p.m. The Maine Lobster Chef of the Year competition is Friday at 1 p.m. Bangor Daily News blogger Fia Fortune will be serving up samples from a roasted squash soup recipe from 12-2:30 p.m. Friday and from 4-6:30 p.m. Saturday at The Big Eats event at The Marketplace. For more information, visit harvestontheharbor.com.
