Drive Forest Avenue between Woodfords Corner and Morrill's Corner right now and you will pass three restaurant openings in about a two week span. Drive Commercial Street, the part of Portland that shows up on every "what's new" list, and the headline openings you will find already happened weeks or months ago. The waterfront had its moment this spring and early summer. This August, the corridor doing the most is the 1.4 mile stretch of Forest Avenue that most residents treat as a way to get to 295, not a destination.
That is worth sitting with for a second, because it runs against how most people mentally map their own city. If you asked a Portland resident where to find the newest restaurant in town this week, most would guess Commercial Street or the Old Port before they'd guess the stretch past the car washes and nail salons on Forest Ave. The data on actual openings this month says otherwise.
What just opened on Forest Ave
Zaitun opened August 1st in the space that used to house Loco Taco. It is a Somali restaurant run by Abdulrahman Idow, serving breakfast, lunch and dinner six days a week, closed Sundays. The menu runs from hummus oodkac, which is hummus topped with Somali spiced beef jerky, to injera-based dishes with chicken, lamb or vegetables, to sambusas and shawarma wraps. Idow described the goal simply:
"We look forward to bringing our community together and introducing more of Maine to the rich culture of Somalia."
A few doors down the corridor, Pho Viet opened on August 14th at 865 Forest Ave in the space that used to be Mekong Asian Bistro. Owner Chau Dang and his team are open daily from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., serving ten different types of pho alongside noodle salads and stir fries, with a dining room that looks out over the avenue and a second upper level seating area.
Then on August 15th, Himalayas on the Bay held its grand opening, bringing Nepali and Tibetan cuisine to the same general stretch.
Line those up and you get a corridor that added three distinct new restaurants representing three different regional cuisines inside two weeks, with the pace actually accelerating as the month goes on:
- August 1: Zaitun (Somali) opens in the former Loco Taco space
- August 14: Pho Viet (Vietnamese) opens at 865 Forest Ave
- August 15: Himalayas on the Bay (Nepali/Tibetan) holds its grand opening
That is not a coincidence of timing so much as a pattern that has been building for years. This is the same stretch that already holds Bogusha's Polish Restaurant & Deli, Mini Mogadishu, Ameera Bread, Thanh Thanh 2 and Thai Esaan, a run of businesses serving dishes that show up on few other menus in the state. Forest Avenue has cheap rent by Portland standards and a steady flow of commuter traffic, which is exactly the combination that lets immigrant-owned restaurants get a foothold without needing tourist dollars to survive. It is also why the corridor keeps adding without much fanfare. Nobody writes a glossy feature about a strip mall next to a Dunkin' Donuts and a McDonald's. But that is where three new kitchens just opened their doors.
Meanwhile, the waterfront's news is already old news
Compare that to Commercial Street and the Old Port, where the big openings that people are still talking about actually landed earlier in the season. Milly's Market opened on the ground floor of the Casco Building in the heart of the Old Port, stocking fresh produce from Maine farms alongside locally made goods and craft beer. Dry Dock reopened in July after a significant renovation, restoring a two story waterfront space on Commercial Street that had sat closed since 2018 after originally opening back in 1983. It is worth noting Dry Dock is not a Luke's Lobster location, even though the concept reads similarly casual and seafood-forward. Luke's Lobster's own Portland Pier spot is unchanged and still doing its own thing a few blocks away.
Ladyfish, the seasonal pop-up from the team behind the beloved and now-closed Bar Futo, took over the former Bar Futo space on Fore Street and is running from May through October, headlined by chef Christine Lau. And The Hut by Twin Tide Kitchen opened on Commercial Street across from Brickyard Hollow Brewing, serving sandwiches, salads, baked goods and ice cream out of a small storefront.
Those are all real, all good, and all worth a visit. But by mid-August, they are old news in restaurant time. The Old Port had its opening cycle. Forest Avenue is having its opening cycle right now, this week, while you're reading this.
The corridor most people drive through, not to
There's a reason this keeps happening on Forest Ave specifically and not, say, India Street or Munjoy Hill. The businesses along outer Forest Ave sit among hair salons, halal markets, tattoo parlors and auto shops, the kind of commercial mix that doesn't attract speculative retail rents. That combination of affordability and visibility from daily commuter traffic has made the corridor a natural landing spot for first-generation restaurant owners who don't have the capital or connections to open on Fore Street or Exchange Street. A recent piece on the corridor called it Portland's own version of an international restaurant row, and the description holds. It's also why the closures on the strip barely make news the way an Old Port closing would. Kung Fu Tea and TKK Fried Chicken quietly shut down their shared spot in the former Vivian's Drive-in space a few months back, and most residents who don't drive that stretch regularly never noticed.
If you live in Portland and your mental map of "new" only includes downtown and the waterfront, you are missing the part of the city that is actually turning over the fastest.
The same week, a different kind of new
Food isn't the only thing stacking up this month. Thompson's Point had back to back weekends of outdoor shows: Guster On The Ocean brought its annual gathering to the venue on August 8th and 9th, and Lake Street Dive followed with two nights, August 15th and 16th, expanding from the single-night stop the band has done in past years. That second Lake Street Dive date landed the same weekend as the Himalayas on the Bay opening a few miles up Forest Ave, which is a small detail but a telling one. Mid-August in Portland this year isn't one thing happening. It's several unrelated things happening in parallel, in different parts of the city, and noticing all of them requires actually crossing the corridors rather than sticking to whichever one is closest to home.
What this actually means if you live here
None of this is really about which restaurant is objectively better. It's about where your attention naturally goes versus where the city is actually changing. If your routine keeps you on the peninsula or along the water, you're seeing a version of Portland that had its opening news months ago. If you haven't driven the Woodfords to Morrill's Corner stretch of Forest Ave lately, you're behind on what's actually new in your own city this month.
The easiest fix is the obvious one. Take a night this week and go to whichever restaurant on that stretch you haven't tried, whether that's Zaitun, Pho Viet, or Himalayas on the Bay. Then catch whatever's left of the Thompson's Point calendar before the outdoor concert season winds down for the year. Portland in August is bigger than the postcard version of it, and most of what's new isn't where the guidebooks point.
If you're the kind of person who likes knowing what's actually happening in a neighborhood before everyone else catches on, that instinct tends to carry over into bigger decisions too, like when it's time to buy, sell, or figure out what a property in one of these corridors is actually worth. That's the kind of local read Shivam Kumar brings to Southern and Central Maine real estate. Let's Connect.
