Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [15]
The Clam Shack
Route 9 at the bridge
207–967–2560
Kennebunkport, ME
LD (summer only) | $$
The Clam Shack anchors one end of the bridge that connects Kennebunk to Kennebunkport. Fried clams, sold by the pint, are some of the best anywhere—crisp-crusted and heavy with juice-bursting marine succulence—but it’s lobster rolls that are stratospheric. Big hunks of fresh-picked meat are arrayed across the bottom of a very nice round bakery roll. It is your choice to have them bathed in warm butter or dolloped with cool mayonnaise before the roll’s top is planted. It is not a huge sandwich, dimensionally speaking, but its flavor is immeasurable: a Maine summer pleasure to make any lobster-lover weak-kneed.
Whole lobsters are boiled and sold from an adjoining store that is also a seafood market and bait and tackle shop. Upon receiving a cooked lobster, and maybe a half-pound of steamer clams, it is the customer’s job to find a place to eat. There are benches on a deck in back and seats facing the sidewalk in front, where fish crates serve as makeshift tables. (Town zoning forbids proper seating here.) Potatoes? Rolls? Corn? Dessert? None are available. You are on your own. The store does sell bottles of beer and wine.
Cole Farms
Route 100
207–657–4714
Gray, ME
BLD | $
Inland Maine, east of Sebago Lake, waitress Dawn Ross grieved as she arrived at our booth with a steaming hot plate of lipstick-red franks and beans; “The red hot dog is going the way of beef liver,” she declared. We had come to Cole Farms looking for vintage Downeast meals. Of all the nation’s regional cooking styles, none is as endearingly candid and so irredeemably unfashionable as what you get in an old Maine diner. Forget such culinary values as creativity and sensual delight. What matters here are parsimony and plainness. Opened as a farmland diner in 1952, Cole Farms still can be relied on to serve such parochial arcana as boiled dinner and mince pie in the autumn, corn chowder every Wednesday, and a choice of sweet beverages that includes both milk shakes (no ice cream, just milk and flavoring) and frappes (what the rest of the world knows as a milk shake, made with ice cream).
We want to call the kidney beans on the lunch platter puritanical: no syrup, minimal sugar, only hints of spice. Each distinct one is a sturdy packet with silk-smooth skin and flavor that is nothing but bean. (Pea beans also are available: smaller, firmer, and more elegant.) With these forthright legumes come a brace of blubbery frankfurters with skin as enthusiastically red as a maraschino cherry. Such naughty weenies have long been a favorite at lunch counters and in cheap-eats shops throughout the region, where they are more commonly sold in steamed-soft buns and embellished with bright yellow mustard, but red franks seem to be as scarce on local menus as the once-popular liver and onions, which, like franks and beans, is part of the Cole Farms repertoire every day.
It must be noted that Cole Farms is not preserved in amber. Remodeled and expanded at least a dozen times, the building is now huge and features a gift shop as well as a banquet room. Lunch choices include wraps and modern salads with fat-free raspberry vinaigrette dressing alongside such longtime kitchen specialties as clam cakes and chicken potpie. Even morning muffins aren’t quite as dour as they used to be. “We’ve tweaked them over the years,” says proprietor Brad Pollard. “People want their muffins sweeter. You have to keep up.” Such changes notwithstanding, a Cole Farms muffin is demure, nothing like a cloying cake-batter pastry.
A good measure of Cole Farms’s personality is American chop suey, a déjeuner maudit listed on the menu side by side with “Campbell Soups.” Rarer than