Good food

It can come as a rude shock when you walk into a favorite restaurant around here and find total change. Instead of paper place mats, with advertisements or lobster-picking instructions on them, there’s a spotless tablecloth. Instead of paper napkins, you find fancy cloth napkins, maybe stuck into a fancy napkin ring.

The menu has gone highfalutin, too: New York-style food, and New York prices. When the server recites the specials, you hear about “reduction” of the sauces, which are drizzled over the entrees. For a first course, gazpacho or vichyssoise. Maybe a little saucer of olive oil and some Italian bread to dip into it. Then stylish items like rack of lamb. For dessert, none of your bread pudding or lemon chiffon pie, but a chocolate mousse or creme br?l?e.

Don’t count on finding an honest bowl of chowder. And when they say they don’t serve coleslaw, that’s the last straw.

Still, there are some places where you can get good plain food. One of them is in Winter Harbor where Susie Bickford, one of the waitresses there, says she serves chowder and slaw every day. And the standard breakfast special is “two, two and two” – two eggs, two pancakes and two sausages…

At a good fish place in Stonington, Tony Bray, the manager, says they serve all the same stuff that his parents served when they started the restaurant 25 years ago. The chowder is Northern New England style, not thick like they make it in Portland.

And a Rockland establishment we know of sticks to the old and true. Judy Royce, a waitress, thinks she knows why some restaurants go fancy. “In some respects, they’re trying to be more of a resort – more for tourists. They are trying to get to be more like Camden.”

Of course, there are people who like the fancy menu and the fancy food. Let them have them. As long as the rest of us get to keep the chowder and slaw.