How to Find a Five Star Meal in Norway

With a bit of big city backhandedness, Portland Press Herald critic James Schwartz gushingly awards five stars for the "thoroughly unexpected" pleasures of a meal at 76 Pleasant Street in Norway, way off "Maine's well-beaten restaurant path." Co-owner and front of house lead Amy Baker — whose husband, Bret, runs the "modest four-burner stove" in the kitchen — tells the Dine Out Maine columnist, "If we had opened in Portland we'd be one restaurant among a million. Here, we're one of a kind."

There's not a single negative impression in Schwartz's review of the 24-seat restaurant, which bowls the critic over with its "outrageously crisp" and "luxuriously fatty" pork belly; its "surprising" escargots with Sambuca, the Italian liqueur; its "impeccably cooked" roasted cod; and its "entirely delicious" pink-peppered filet of beef. To cap off the smorgasbord, Schwartz recommends the "shatteringly crisp" profiterole with vanilla ice cream and espresso-chocolate ganache or, perhaps "the best of all," the limoncello cake.