Northeast

Dame is quaint and intimate. A meal here feels like having dinner at a friend’s (a friend who has an extensive natural wine collection). Jane Smith opened the restaurant several years ago with the intention of providing warm, impeccable service and food and wine that honor natural ingredients. Portland chef Patrick McKee (who’s also the chef at Estes) prepares comfort dishes, including an outstanding cacio e pepe. Enjoying a plate of the creamy, peppery pasta classic with a glass of red in Dame’s cozy, dark-blue dining room is the most comforting way to spend a rainy Portland night.

Mae should be high on the list for any trip to Portland. Southern chef Maya Lovelace turned her pop-up supper club into a permanent location in the city’s northeast. Tucked behind Lovelace’s popular restaurant Yonder (a gem of a spot that serves a modern twist on the South’s classic meat and three), Mae is the place to slow down and indulge in prix fixe seasonal feasts and natural wines. The interiors read like a dining room at an old estate, and the menu of zucchini and buttermilk soup and Appalachian lavender grits with pickled cherry chicken jus and roasted peppers had us wanting to book our return flight to Portland before we’d even left.

This restaurant is named for a salumi made from backfat, which is an appropriate name, as the entire menu is really an ode to pork from the meatball banh mi to the pastrami cheeseburger to the french fries (which are made with pork fat). Part of the charm of the place, too, is that it’s such a Portland story: started as a food cart, check, adventurous foodie menu, check, enormous craft beer list, check. There are locations on both sides of the river—they're also Downtown and in Hawthorne.

There's a good chance you already know about Townshend's Tea from the shelves at your local Whole Foods or Vitamin Cottage. Their flagship teahouse on Alberta Street (there are also outposts in Southeast and on Mississippi) stocks every variety of their tea and an endless supply of their game-changing Brew Dr. Kombucha in a homey space that's ideal for seeking refuge from the rain and cranking out a few hours of work. All of the locations have a mix of couches, cozy chairs, and classic tables, with plenty of space to spread out for the afternoon.