A working kitchen and a full tank of gas
Food Dine Harbor is a small, independent American food publication run out of a third-floor apartment in Portland, Maine.
What we do
Two things. We write recipes that work in a normal kitchen, and we write about restaurants we have actually eaten in. That is the whole scope. We do not cover kitchen gadget launches, we do not run twenty-item shopping roundups, and we do not publish anything we have not made or eaten ourselves.
The name comes from the working waterfront a few blocks from where this started. Portland is a fishing town with a restaurant scene far larger than its population should support, which turned out to be a good place to learn to cook and a better place to learn to eat.
How a recipe gets published
A recipe goes up only after it has been cooked at least three times, at least once by someone who did not develop it. We test on a standard 30-inch gas range and a conventional electric oven, not on professional equipment, because that is what most people have.
Ingredients are written the way you will find them in an American grocery store, with weights given where volume measurement would cause real problems. If a step is the one that usually goes wrong, the recipe says so instead of assuming you already know.
How we choose restaurants
We visit at least twice, always unannounced, and we pay the full bill every time. We do not accept comped meals, hosted travel, or payment in exchange for coverage. If our relationship to a place ever changes, the page will say so before you read a word of the review.
We write about what a restaurant does well rather than issuing a verdict. A tamale window and a tasting menu are not competing in the same event, and pretending otherwise helps nobody decide where to eat on a Tuesday.
How the site pays for itself
Display advertising, a small number of affiliate links on equipment we already own and use, and nothing else. Affiliate links never change what we recommend, and any page carrying them says so. The full detail is in the disclaimer.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we want to know. Recipe errors get fixed the same day and the page carries a note about what changed. Restaurant entries get pulled when a place closes or changes hands rather than quietly updated. Write to [email protected].