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Porte Rouge

144 College Avenue (Rte.201)
Waterville, Maine
872-0550

Open year-round, Tues-Sat, 5pm-close.

Although Maine abounds in humble eateries, it is rare to find a restaurant both unpretentious yet ambitious at the same time, particularly off the beaten track in Waterville. Porte Rouge, which takes up the ground floor of an old house off College Avenue, began a year and a half ago as chef Wes Johnston’s culinary school final project, one that has drawn in the whole family and looks to keep them busy for some time to come.

Stepping through the red door – Porte Rouge, in French -- on a cold winter’s night, the first thing that draws the eye is the crackling fire in one corner, a comfortable sofa to its side. The waitress, who turns out to be Wes’ mom, Marilyn, invites you to have a seat and warm up before showing you to your table, one of only eight in a space that could easily hold more. The room is cozy, intimate, with simple touches – rich plum brocade under the white linen tablecloths, muted light from old-fashioned chandeliers and wall lamps, heavy swagged curtains to keep out the cold– that bring to mind Grandma’s house in its unprepossessing comforts.

That simplicity extends to the à la carte menu: a soup, three or four choices of first and second courses and desserts, a modest range of wines presented on a cart rolled to your table with no folderol and less ceremony. “It’s unusual.” Wes explained charmingly. “But most of our customers want their wine by the glass. I’m trying to catch up on the wine list, but I only just turned twenty-one. My dad and I are working on it together.”

Dark-haired, baby-faced, and filled with earnest, genuine enthusiasm for his craft, Wes is prepared to go at his own pace, and to adapt his food to his clientele. “I don’t have a huge urge to do more than twenty-five dinners a night. Then the quality goes down.” He said. “This is a meat and potatoes community, and people expect certain things” when they go out to eat, he continued, explaining his generous servings and interesting side dishes. Indeed, the vegetarian main dish (there is also always a vegetarian entrée), a phyllo-wrapped cheese, oat, and vegetable strudel, came with, yes, a few roasted potatoes, but they were tiny, purple-fleshed, and accompanied by a ragout of daikon radish, shiitake mushrooms, and baby corn. Meat and potatoes with a twist – and without the meat, although so robust was the dish that its absence was not noticeable.

Catering to a community of simpler tastes, however, certainly does not prevent him from slipping a little elegance onto every plate. A pan-roasted shrimp cake, nicely crunchy on the outside and packed with Maine shrimp on the inside, came garnished with a half-dozen plump fries, but it was the accompanying corn and tarragon relish that made the dish. Squash soup seems to crop up on restaurant menus with the first frost (and is often greeted with as much enthusiasm), but Wes’ rich maple-pumpkin velouté, served in an oversized plain china coffee cup with no floating bits of this or that to distract from its intense flavors, reminds you what this simple soup can be.

While this chef’s classical French training may be muted in what he puts on the menu –pork and lamb loin, filet mignon, and herb-crusted salmon being the other main dishes on offer that night, you only have to look under his meats to find that pillar of Gaullic cuisine, the sauce, in decadent abundance. Happily for us, no one seems to have told him that such rich essences are out of fashion, and, even better, he makes them as they should be made-- using the pan your meat was cooked in so all those lovely cooking juices end up in the final product, along with lots of butter! You will find your fork returning, as if of its own volition, to that dark pool for just one more taste long after the last bite of meat has disappeared from the plate.

That love of sauce continues on into the desserts, which can be either quite simple or downright complex. The tropically-colored five-flavored sorbet sits in a pool of caramel, the cheesecake (whose crust manages to re-create the crunch of an Oreo but with about ten times more chocolate flavor).

Two notes that Porte Rouge hits just right were things noticeable in their absence. How refreshing to find a menu whose every ingredient is not endlessly pedigreed with provenance and weighty place names from half way across the country. Most of Wes’ meat comes from Joe’s Meat Market, of which he says, “If you live in Waterville, well, it’s been around forever and you just know it’s got the best.”

He also has a light touch with the use of seasonal ingredients, which are there in abundance on his late fall/early winter menu but not in a way that hits you over the head. “I just try to make a menu that, yes, is seasonal,” he said, “but that isn’t a fad, that won’t lose its style that quickly. I draw from colors and textures. For this menu, I concentrated on color. I wanted you to recognize that the leaves are changing color and so is the food on the plate.”

It’s hard not to like such a refreshingly simple approach, particularly when the result is a very accomplished, satisfying meal for which you haven’t paid a king’s ransom and which is served with a great deal of charm—by Mom.

Posted by Michael at July 28, 2005