Fore street: Portland, Maine

Nation's Restaurant News,  May 21, 2007  by Mary Caldwell

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For chef Sam Hayward, co-owner of Fore Street restaurant in Portland, Maine, serving local food contains an element of education.

It's about introducing people to Maine's foodways and "the traditions and history of farming, fishing and foraging in this northernmost corner of the East Coast of the United States," he says. That means showing diners there's more to New England food than chowder, beans, lobster and blueberries.

The education of Hayward himself goes back to his days as a classical musician in Ithaca, N.Y., where cookbooks began to take over his personal reading list. One day in the winter of 1974, a music student enrolled at the Cornell Hotel Restaurant School said to Hayward: "Hey, you like to cook for a hobby. How would you like to chuck all this music business and come spend a summer on an island off the coast of Maine?"

The student was scheduled to be the head chef in the kitchens of the Shoals Marine laboratory there.

"So I took the job," Hayward says, "and fell in love with cooking and ... with the Gulf of Maine."

Hayward gained hands-on experience working his way up in a series of restaurant kitchens and made Maine his permanent home in 1977. From 1981 to 1991, he owned and operated a 90-seat restaurant in Brunswick called 22 Lincoln, which he says was "culinarily successful, but a financial disaster." He later worked at the Harraseeket Inn in Freeport before opening Fore Street in 1996 with part hers Victor Leon and Dana Street.

Nancy English, restaurant reviewer for the Maine Sunday Telegram, who gave the venue the highest rating of five stars last summer, says "Fore Street was one of the first great restaurants in Maine to focus so passionately on local and fresh produce and meat and fish."

Russell Libby, executive director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, or MOFGA, also compliments Hayward's high sourcing standards.

"I've known Sam for 20 years through several different restaurants," he says, "and all the way through, his philosophy has been to find really good sources of local food."

Even the huge, glass-fronted produce cooler near the restaurant's entrance gives guests "a really clear picture that this is a business built around what's available in season," Libby says.

Hayward currently is vice president of MOFGA's board.

Wood fuels fire, adds flavor

Besides highlighting local from day one, the signature element of Fore Street's cuisine is wood-fired cooking. While soups, pasta and some side vegetable dishes come off of a gas-fired saute range, most foods cook in the restaurant's wood-fired brick oven, wood-fired grill or wood-fired turnspit, located in full view of diners.

"We knew that we wanted to burn wood and use that as a primary fuel for cooking most of our food," Hayward says. "We really loved the flavors and thought that that sort of primitive cooking technology would be of interest to the public. So we actually built our kitchen right out in the middle of the dining room.

"We had this idea for a fairly rustic kind of food that was direct, simple, straightforward--trying to make the food as good as it could possibly be without adding so much extraneous stuff for the sake of creativity that we began to interfere with the quality of the raw materials that we were buying."

Supporting suppliers

Libby notes that Hayward has maintained relationships with some of his growers and suppliers for more than two decades and calls Fore Street cuisine "real food."

"There's no transforming the food into something else and then making it look like it originally was," he says. "It's very simply presented."

In the years between Hayward's arrival in Maine and the opening of Fore Street, the small group of artisanal and organic food producers he had relied on to supply his Brunswick restaurant grew to the point that he could meet nearly all the restaurant's needs with local growers.

But that wasn't always the case.

"When I first came to Maine," Hayward says, "I could get all the seafood I wanted in incredible variety, but it was very difficult to get meats, and in some cases it was difficult to get good produce. It was hard to get herbs, for example. I had to get all of my herbs from away. I had to get most of my green vegetables from away."

He credits "back-to-the-landers," people coming to Maine in the 1970s to pursue organic farming, with helping to promote a resurgence in locally produced, sustainable agricultural products.

Unpretentious ambience

Although some customers may come to Fore Street in jacket and tie, there's no dress code, and you're as likely to see guests in blue jeans.

"[The atmosphere] is upbeat and casual enough so you can feel comfortable coming in from the farm, as I do," Libby says, "but you can have a fancy dinner there or you can have a family dinner. It's the full range."