The Salt Exchange

• September: Bourbons
• October: [Naturally infused] Vodkas
• November: Scotch

Stay tuned for details.

Our favorite part of the New York Times' piece "36 Hours in Portland, Maine" is its opening:

PORTLAND, Me., is known for three L’s: lobster, lighthouses and L. L. Bean (O.K., make that four L’s). Here’s another: local. In recent years, this city on the coast of Maine has welcomed a wave of locavore restaurants, urban farms and galleries that feature local artists. Abandoned brick warehouses are being repurposed as eco-friendly boutiques. In the main square, a 19th-century building has been refashioned into a farmers’ market. And everywhere you look, this once-sleepy industrial town is showing signs of rejuvenation — usually by keeping things local.  

We are happy to know that folks have been noticing! 

The pictures above are of produce Chef Jacob picked up at the Portland Farmers' Market this week.

Mitch Miller, resident forager extraordinaire, poses with his fresh-picked, beautiful black trumpet mushrooms. They will be served tonight (Friday) and tomorrow night along with our Grilled Pork Flatiron with Mushroom-Cabrales Blue Cheese Bread Pudding and Crispy Artichoke.

 For your reading and web-browsing pleasure:

• Tatum was on Good Day Maine discussing being a bartender in Portland, and her part in Portland Monthly's Portland Bartender issue. And in case you needed another reason to pick up said issue, our very own Ben Row is also featured for his acting skills. We've got a talented bunch over here.
• We just read this from the folks at Eat Maine / Maine Magazine (on their Facebook Page): The Eat Maine Guide was printed and delivered to the offices of Maine Magazine. It's amazing and we would NOT nor could NOT have done it without you. Magazine subscribers: yours will be mailed. Fans: if you don't subscribe you can buy a copy before it gets shipped. Get yours for just $5.95 -- be the first kid on the block to have one.
• The ever-excellent Joe Appel writes about enjoying red wine in the summer.
• Meredith Goad tastes some of the best ice cream in Southern Maine.
• Publications are still taking a really close look at the President Obama's trip to Maine. Take a look at the Detroit Free Press' piece on the Bar Harbor trip.
• The Forecaster discusses preparing a barbecue feast.
• Don't forget that the Festival of Nations is coming up this weekend. The Press Herald previews it here.
• Many congratulations are due to Cheryl Dixon: "Congratulations to Cheryl Dixon for winning a national award of excellence for her work as the food service manager at Kittery’s Horace Mitchell Primary School! In addition to teaching good nutrition and promoting healthy eating habits, Dixon’s award-winning program includes a Farm to School initiative to provide schools with farm fresh foods, and a third component on composting and recycling." Keep up the great work!
• We are hosting a Cruzan Rum Tasting event on Wednesday evening. You can learn more about it here. Also, did you know that some folks just sort of sit around and edit movie scenes into dance remixes? Fortunately, someone has made one featuring Jack Sparrow asking, "Why is the rum gone?" Go ahead and throw away a couple of your hard-earned life minutes.

A couple of weeks back, we ran a post about a Gulf of Maine Research Institute [GMRI] event called "Trawl to Table." The event was targeted at local restaurant chefs, and was intended to take a look at - and demystify - the concept of trawling as sustainable practice. Charlie attended the event, which had such an impact on him that The Salt Exchange is now offering more sustainable catch fish.

Well, the Portland Press Herald has since featured GMRI's efforts, and The Salt Exchange is mentioned:

That's the message from the Portland-based Gulf of Maine Institute as it begins an effort to create markets for under-used fish species. Seafood caught in the Gulf of Maine is among the most sustainably harvested seafood in the world, says Jan Levin, manager of the organization's sustainable seafood program.

[...]

Charles Bryon, owner of The Salt Exchange restaurant on Commercial Street, decided to offer hake, an under-used Gulf of Maine species, on his menu and donate $2 from each hake entree sold to the research institute.

Bryon said a seminar that the institute sponsored to reacquaint restaurant owners and chefs with Maine-caught fish led to several changes at the restaurant.

The article also touches on the efforts of other restaurateurs present at the Trawl to Table event, including Michelle Corry, owner of 555:

[The restaurant] started selling ocean-themed drinks a couple of months ago and donating $1 from each drink sale to the institute, for projects related to sustainable fishing.

This is a great article about a great effort, and we hope that you will read the rest of it here.

A couple of weeks ago, I was fortunate to have the chance to talk with The United States of Arugula author David Kamp. Kamp is also a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and GQ, and he maintains a pretty great blog in which he discusses the coffee fixation of Steig Larsson characters and mourns the loss of Law and Order. He was incredibly generous with his time - I expected him to be able to spare only 15 minutes and we ended up chatting for 45 - and, in an incident that occurred not long after our chat, a coffee spill on my laptop led to the loss of the audio and we are left without any proof that said generous, thoughtful interview ever took place.

Major bummer.

We reached out to Kamp because Charlie is head-over-heels in love with Arugula, a book that documents the rise of food culture and appreciation in the United States. The book has been praised for many reasons, particularly its smartness, and especially its optimism, which - for those who remember the pre-rise-of-Pollan mid-Aughts - was particularly rare with regard to food back in 2006. Optimistic is an appropriate way to describe Kamp's general attitude and he brought much of that optimism to our conversation. He remains fascinated by food, and the movement that has built around it.

We talked Top Chef, which had not yet reached the air when Kamp was researching for and writing the book. He explained that he had talked with Chef and show creator/host Tom Colicchio while researching, and that Colicchio wasn't even sure the show was going to work out (seven seasons later…) We discussed the role of the small, artisan farmer as the new punk rock hero, and we chatted about food snobbery, a subject that Kamp has playfully meditated on in his snob series.

We also touched on Kamp's upcoming book about the 70s, a decade he explained gets an undue bad rap (see: optimism). The subject is one that he became more intimate with by way of the research he did for Arugula, and if Arugula is any indication, it should be well worth the read. Do check it out should you get the chance. I was very lucky to have the chance to chat with Kamp, and I thank him for his willingness to do so. Should he ever find himself in Portland, I hope the next time we talk farms, punk rock, and Tom Colicchio, it will be over a bottle of wine and a great meal prepared by Chef Jacob and his team here at The Salt Exchange.

- Alex Steed

For your reading and web-browsing pleasure:

We will celebrate (!):  Today marks our one year anniversary, and we just can't believe it. We will be offering new signature drinks and complimentary canapés from 5-7. As always, there will be free parking available in the MEMIC lot and we are so excited to see you. It has been a fabulous year for us at the restaurant, and we have received so much love and support from the community. For that, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts.  

• Also worth noting (especially for those of you with a taste for literature): Our anniversary falls on Bloomsday, a day set aside to celebrate the life of author James Joyce. More about the day can be read here, and we encourage you to have a drink for James. The Writer's Almanac writes about Bloomsday here, and you can hear Garrison Keillor talk about Bloomsday here. 
• Finally: Joe Ricchio made a beautifully entertaining appearance on WCSH this morning, where he made tripe soup. Topics covered included soups that make for good hangover cures, living safely through vicarious blog-reading, and - of course - early morning tripe-eating. You can watch his performance below. 

The Portland Press Herald reports that Becky's Diner and the Porthole will both be featured on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, the Food Network's serial tribute to three classic American culinary institutions.

The article, which you can take a look at here, is well worth checking out, though this excerpt is a nice testament to Becky's:

Allison Page, vice president of programing for the Food Network, said Becky's has everything the show looks for -- great characters and great food.

The episode on which the restaurants will be featured is not yet scheduled. Many congratulations to Becky Rand and Oliver Keithly, owners of Becky's Diner and the Porthole respectively, on this much-deserved coverage of these Portland, Maine institutions.

[Photo Credit: Gordon Chibroski / Portland Press Herald]

A couple of years after its publication, Charlie has finally gotten around to reading - and loving - David Kamp's The United States of Arugula. If you are not familiar with it, upon the book's publication, Alison Arnett of the Boston Globe described wrote that the book is "a lively assessment of how far we've come as food mavens and who got us here." She goes on to say that it "stands out from a sea of issue-oriented books written in the last few years."

We're lucky to have an interview with Kamp for the blog lined up for next week. In preparation for that, we've dug up some Arugula-related treasures online, which we think you'll find interesting whether or not you have read the book.

Kamp's website is hilarious, as it features blog entries entitled A Borscht Stain on the World Wide Web and A Valediction on the Passing of "Law & Order." On the latter subject, he writes (in the style of Auden):

It was my North, my South, my East and West,
My DVR mainstay and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that L&O would last forever: I was wrong.

(We feel your pain, David)

• The New York Times Book podcast interviews David Kamp here.
• You can here more audio of Kamp here, this time on NPR's On Point, on which he discusses his book in the context of Thanksgiving. 
• The New York Times' A.O. Scott reviews Kamp's "lively, smart, horrendously titled new book," explaining, "The cover depicts Lady Liberty clutching a bunch of greens in place of her torch, proving that Kamp’s publishers have turned a deaf ear to the wisdom of a leading American gourmand, Homer Simpson, who once observed that you don’t win friends with salad."
• Joe Meyers, of Connecticut News, wrote of Arugula: Clearly, we were long overdue for a book explaining how this all came to pass in a country where TV dinners and Howard Johnson galvanzied the populace only 50 years ago." He goes on: “The United States of Arugula” is so well written that you don’t really have to be a foodie to enjoy it: Kamp makes a strong case that the story he tells is as important as the rest of the cultural history of the past half-century.
• Powell's features this talk with Kamp, in which he reflects on the book, being lucky enough to interview Don DeLillo, and author A. J. Liebling, who Kamp claims "ate food the way Charlie Parker played sax."
• And finally, David Kamp shares with New York Magazine his favorite NY food books.