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Best restaurants
Pentagoet Inn, Main Street,
Castine.
International accents prevail at
this venerable inn, acquired in 2000 by Jack Burke.
who had worked with the United Nations in Africa for
twenty years, and his wife, Julie Van de Graaf, who
founded a leading pastry shop and café in
Philadelphia. Her culinary background inspired the
reopening of the inn’s restaurant. Dinner is served in
two dining rooms with floral paintings on deep rose
walls and on the wraparound veranda furnished in
wicker and enveloped in flowers spilling from window
boxes. Julie’s autumn menu opened with onion soup
gratinée, mussels
steamed in wine and garlic, and sautéed crab cakes
with rémoulade sauce. Entrées ranged from
calvados-flavored lobster and scallop pie to sautéed
filet mignon in a cognac-mustard cream sauce.
Bouillabaisse, grilled salmon in a dill véloute sauce
and roasted pork tenderloin with porcini mushroom
sauce were other options. Desserts were delicate and
refreshing: plum crisp with vanilla ice cream, double
chocolate torte with espresso cream and berry tarts
with mascarpone cream. Guests like to adjourn for an
after-dinner drink in the old-world Passports Pub,
which Jack converted from the Victorian library. It’s
full of
foreign memorabilia and conversation pieces.
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