That's a wrap: Longtime Press Herald food reporter Meredith Goad says goodbye - pressherald.com

I started working the food beat at the Portland Press Herald sometime between 2004 and 2005, just after Sam Hayward won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Northeast, a first for Maine. I didn’t know it at the time, but the food scene in Portland was like a rocket smoking on the launch pad, ready to take off. For me? Lucky timing.

As my full-time food writing career here comes to a close – by the time you read this, I will have packed up my grandmother’s set of cast-iron skillets and we’ll both be back with family in Tennessee – I have been inundated with memories. One of my first big features, if not the first, was coverage of a wine dinner at Cinque Terre, which opened in Portland in 2001. Chef Lee Skawinski and his staff had been invited to cook at the James Beard House in New York City, and were planning a dry run. I turned down the restaurant’s invitation for a seat at a table; instead, I asked if I could hang out in the kitchen.

I described the scene in my story like this: “In the kitchen, white soup bowls rattle. … Scott Paquette, a line chef, is at the blisteringly hot grill, watching shrimp sizzle in a pan drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil. Skawinski spoons a taste of the tomato base from a steaming pot before ladling it into bowls.”

Occasionally one of the cooks slipped me a small plate here, a bite of something there, so I could taste what the customers in the dining room were being served – and the cooks knew I was probably hungry. It wasn’t the full dining...

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