GETAWAYS • Maine Report
Islesford Dock Restaurant & Gallery is accessible only by boat, unless you happen to live on Maine’s Little Cranberry Island, which only a couple hundred people do. This past August, we shared the 20-minute ride from Northeast Harbor (via Cadillac water taxi) with one of those residents, Elaine, who had missed an earlier ferry and needed a lift home.
She returned the favor when we docked by taking us on a quick tour of the island on her golf cart, parked just up the road. The kids hung off the back as she pointed out her friends’ houses, mostly modest affairs with windows pointing towards the sea.
Back at the restaurant with some time to spare before our reservation, we sipped drinks on the dock, our elbows on the wooden rail pointed west toward the mountains of Acadia. Multi-generational parties came and went — regulars, mostly. Eventually, the sky and harbor blended into a color we’d never seen before, and the Mainers and interlopers all took turns trading phones and posing.
When the show ended, we sat inside at a table beside one of the walls of windows framing the bright dining room. There’s a sturdy bar in the center, wood beams and white clapboard walls throughout. Art lines the passageway to the gallery in the back, where local works are for sale.
What’s the Maine slogan — the way life should be?
The menu is a mix of Downeast vacation comfort and farm-to-table ambition (there’s a greenhouse behind the restaurant and a fisherman’s co-op next door). A season later, the particulars of the dishes have mostly faded into the glow of that sunset and the buzz of the room. But the food just needed to be hot to clinch the meal of the summer, and it was much more than that. The desserts, particularly, are still rendering in color: five spoons at once in a chocolate trifle and a too-hot-to-touch berry crumble.
On its website, the restaurant warns that it’s not responsible for your ride home or finding lodging in the event you’re stranded. Honestly, it would’ve been fine. Elaine told us to stop by; she was carrying a bag of groceries from the mainland. The sun would be up in nine hours. –Josh Albertson
→ Islesford Dock Restaurant & Gallery (Little Cranberry Island) • 1 Main St., Islesford, ME • Open mid-June through late-September.