Maine dining is often pictured as lobster rolls served beside the ocean.
That is certainly part of the story, although the state’s restaurant landscape keeps changing, including the recent loss of one of Maine’s longest-running pizzerias.
Maine also has restaurants floating on former ferries, squeezed into antique railcars and accepting reservations only through postcards.
Here are five of the state’s strangest dining experiences.
DiMillo’s On the Water in Portland
DiMillo’s is not merely beside Portland Harbor. The restaurant floats on it.
The massive dining room occupies a former car ferry permanently docked at Long Wharf. Guests walk aboard for lobster, seafood and harbor views while surrounded by the structure of an actual vessel.
The converted ferry is large enough that it can initially feel like a conventional waterfront restaurant. Then a glance outside reminds diners that the entire building is sitting in the water.
Maine has countless seafood restaurants. Few began life transporting automobiles.
Palace Diner in Biddeford
Palace Diner operates inside a tiny vintage dining car.
The narrow space has counter seating, old-fashioned details and little room for anything unnecessary. Diners sit close to the grill and close to one another while cooks prepare breakfast and lunch just a few feet away.
The physical limitations are part of the attraction. Palace Diner feels less like a restaurant decorated to look old and more like a working artifact that happens to serve excellent pancakes and sandwiches.
Large groups should not expect a banquet room.
The Lost Kitchen in Freedom
The Lost Kitchen may have America’s strangest reservation system.
Instead of opening an online booking calendar, the restaurant asks hopeful diners to send postcards to its address at 22 Mill Street in Freedom, Maine. Postcards are drawn at random, and the lucky few receive a call in April to arrange a dinner date. It sounds quaint until you hear the scale: more than 20,000 postcards arrive every year for roughly 4,600 available seats per season.
The restaurant is the creation of chef and owner Erin French, who opened it in 2014 in a restored 19th-century gristmill in rural Freedom — a town of fewer than 750 people about 90 minutes from Portland. The Magnolia Network has aired a show about her and the restaurant. French’s cookbook has extended the story further.
Those who get in receive a $295 prix fixe dinner, typically around 12 courses served over five or more hours, based heavily on Maine ingredients from local farms and fishermen. The menu changes daily according to what is fresh. The restaurant is open Saturdays, May through October only. Town liquor laws don’t permit alcohol service, but guests are welcome to bring their own.
The combination of postcard lottery, remote location, old mill and multi-hour meal makes dinner feel like winning admission to a secret culinary society.
The Holy Donut
The Holy Donut makes doughnuts with an ingredient more commonly associated with mashed potatoes.
Maine potatoes are mixed into the dough, creating a rich, moist texture. Flavors range from familiar glazes to dark chocolate, maple, blueberry and toasted coconut.
Potato doughnuts have historical roots, but they still sound like someone confused two separate side dishes.
The concept proved popular enough to grow to several Maine locations, demonstrating that “put a potato in the doughnut” was not as strange an idea as it first appeared.
McLoons Lobster Shack on Spruce Head Island
McLoons sits on a working lobster wharf, not a polished imitation of one.
Diners can watch boats, traps and local lobstermen moving through the harbor while eating lobster that traveled an unusually short distance from water to plate.
The shack’s bright red exterior and island setting look almost too perfectly Maine to be real.
It is less theatrical than the other entries, but eating beside the working system that produced the meal is an experience few restaurants can copy.
Maine’s strangest restaurants are not strange because they are artificial. They are strange because old vehicles, local ingredients and working waterfronts become completely normal places to serve dinner.
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