Portland Food by Kate McCarty

Author:Kate McCarty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2014-07-05T16:00:00+00:00

Atlantic salmon at Browne Trading Company is cured with salt, sugar and scotch whiskey before it’s cold-smoked. Photo by Kate McCarty.

It may be true that locals don’t see Browne Trading Company as the everyday seafood market in Portland. In a city with so many retail markets and restaurants providing great local seafood, such quality and abundance are taken for granted. It’s the relative scarcity of quality seafood that makes Browne Trading Company’s customers in New York and the South appreciate Maine products. But Mainers in the know seek out Rod Mitchell’s products, whether it’s a cut of local fish for dinner or a tin of caviar and fine wine for a special occasion.

To find the other popular Portland seafood market, walk east on Commercial Street from Browne Trading Company and take a right onto Custom House Wharf. The wharf is one of many that make up the city’s working waterfront. At their Commercial Street ends, Portland’s wharves house businesses that cater to tourists: restaurants, clothing boutiques and ice cream shops. But toward the water, their occupants quickly change into marine-related businesses: seafood processing plants, boatyards and the ferry terminal. This mixed-use zoning is mandated by a city ordinance that gives precedent to marine-related businesses on the waterfront.169

Many of Portland’s wharves will give you the feeling that you’re somewhere you’re not supposed to be, in the presence of pickup trucks, boat jacks and forklifts. But Custom House Wharf, also home to the Porthole restaurant, a local favorite, feels more welcoming than others. And that’s largely thanks to the presence of Harbor Fish Market. The market is easy to spot, with its signature red storefront, photographed and painted so often that the owners had the image trademarked.170 The undulating roofline hints at the lifetime of the pier-side building, which has been a fish market since the 1800s.171

Inside, the market bustles with activity. Shoppers are picking out fish filets for the evening’s dinner—local cod and haddock or imported Faroe Island salmon—and others are bagging up live Damariscotta River oysters or Bangs Island Mussels. All of the action is accompanied by the gurgling sounds of sea water as it pumps through several large, open tanks along one wall. These tanks hold Harbor Fish Market’s live lobsters in a “pound” full of circulating sea water that’s pumped right in from below the market. The tanks hold lobsters that have been weighed and sorted, from the smallest one-pound “chix” to one-and-three-quarter-pound “jumbos.” Upon receiving a customer’s order, a staff member will fish out a lobster from the appropriate tank with a large green mesh dip net.

Harbor Fish Market’s practices are inspired by traditional fishmongers and lobster pounds, the first of which was developed on Vinalhaven in 1875. But the forty-five-year-old family-owned business has had to adapt its practices to the constant demands of the seafood world. The Alfiero family has vowed that they “won’t sell anything they won’t bring home themselves,”172 and in doing so, they have garnered legions of loyal customers.

Customers’ trust in the Alfiero family’s products comes from the business’s mission to serve fresh, high-quality seafood.

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