Every single time my friends and I go out, we hit the same problem. It gets late, we’ve been walking all over Portland, and eventually someone asks if we can get food somewhere. Usually that person is me.

I’m not much of a drinker, but I am absolutely an eater. My dream would be a 24-hour version of Palace Diner down in Biddeford, with a few seats permanently reserved for me and my friends and unlimited fries and pancakes. But honestly, I’d happily settle for a late-night greasy slice of pizza. Instead, I’ve ended way too many nights back at home eating dry granola because we waited just a little too long and suddenly nowhere seems to be serving food anymore.

For a city this obsessed with food, Portland is surprisingly bad at feeding you after 10 p.m.

I’ve complained about this before, but this week I was reading the Portland subreddit and stumbled on a post asking a pretty simple question: What’s missing in Portland?

A lot of the answers were totally different, but people kept coming back to the same late-night problem. Apparently I’m not the only one who ends up hungry and annoyed after 10.

It also made me wonder why Portland shuts down so early in the first place.

At first I thought maybe Portland had another weird rule I didn’t know about, something like that old 100-foot entertainment rule. But there isn’t a citywide 9 or 10 p.m. kitchen curfew. Maine cuts off alcohol sales at 1 a.m., but for most restaurants, closing the kitchen earlier just comes down to whether staying open makes sense.

Portland has always been a little sleepy, but we used to have more late-night food. In 2017, Eater found 14 places serving late, including Bill’s Pizza until 2 a.m., Boda until 12:45, and LFK until 1.

COVID seems to have made an already thin late-night scene even thinner. Restaurants lost staff, shortened hours, and had to pay more to keep kitchens running late. If there aren’t enough hungry people wandering around Portland at midnight, staying open another two hours just doesn’t make much sense.

Then I think the rest of us got used to it. I think restaurants close earlier because fewer people go out late, and then people stop trying to eat late because they assume everything is already closed. I know I do it. Once it gets past a certain hour, I basically start preparing myself for the granola.

Which made me wonder what was actually still open.

So I went looking, and I was honestly surprised by how much I found.

The problem wasn’t that there was nowhere to go. It was figuring out where you could actually get food. A bar might be open until 1, but the kitchen could have closed hours earlier. Google might say one thing, the restaurant’s website another, and sometimes figuring out whether you can still get food at 11:30 takes way more work than it should.

Silver Street by Taj surprised me. I knew they were open late, but I had no idea you could still be sitting there eating curry at 12:30 in the morning.

And Silver Street wasn’t the only one. I kept finding places serving food later than I realized. There were more options than I thought, they were just weirdly hard to find.

So I’m trying to put it all in one place. I’m calling it The Portland After Hours. It’s a working list of places serving food late, with the kitchen hours when I could actually confirm them.

I’ll keep adding to it as I find more, so if you know somewhere I missed, please send it my way.

Every good knife I own was given to me by someone I love.

My first one came from my mom, then one from my dad, one from my partner, and one from my best friend. I never really set out to collect knives that way, but now every time I pull one out of the drawer, I know exactly who it came from, and I love that something I use almost every day can still remind me of them.

Somewhere along the way, a good kitchen knife became one of my favorite things to give someone too.

Before I moved to Portland, I was working in kitchens around Manhattan as a food stylist, and one of my favorite places to stop into was Korin, a world-renowned Japanese knife shop.

Korin was basically a candy store for cooks. Rows of Japanese knives, beautiful tableware, and plenty of things I had absolutely no business convincing myself I needed.

When I left New York, I was genuinely sad to leave behind one of my favorite places in the world.

Then I moved to Portland and stumbled upon Strata. The first time I walked in, I remember thinking, wait, how the hell do we have this here? Beautiful Japanese knives, little kitchen tools I immediately wanted, and people who could explain why two knives that looked almost identical could feel completely different in your hand.

It has been one of my favorite shops in Portland ever since.

So when one of my closest friends had a birthday, Strata was where I went to buy her gift. Knives had already become such meaningful objects in my own life that giving one to someone else felt a little different from just buying them something nice. A good knife can stay in someone’s kitchen for decades, getting used over and over again until it becomes part of their life too.

They’ve even started making their own knives now, right here in Portland.

I think that is why I love the place so much. Portland has a handful of shops that are way better than you’d expect for a city this size, run by people who care deeply about one very specific thing.

Strata is one of them.

And maybe thirty years from now, my friend will pull that knife out of a drawer and remember who gave it to her.

An Evening with Rick Riordan and Annabelle Oh @ Westbrook Performing Arts Center | 7 pm | 🎟️ $33

Great Lake Swimmers @ Oxbow Blending & Bottling | 7 pm | 🎟️ $25

Oh Kee Pa Orchestra: A Phish Tribute, Celebrating 30 Years of Billy Breathes @ Portland House of Music | 8 pm | 🎟️ $12

Author Talk with Richard Cass @ South Portland Public Library | 6 pm | Free

Until next week,
— Jake Newman