Maine's must-try, locally sourced fish tacos
The scene:In recent years Portland, Maine has become a hot food city, expanding way beyond its traditional lobster rolls and whoopie pies to embrace a wide variety of ethnicities and cuisines, especially in its bustling waterfront Old Port neighborhood, the main destination of most visitors, and home to the biggest attractions and best hotels. Whatever's being served, from sushi to house cured charcuterie to gourmet burgers, local sourcing is a big trend in Maine these days, and El Rayo has become extremely popular with locals and visitors alike by combining tasty cooking with high-quality, well-sourced ingredients, and fun riffs on traditional Mexican fare. The menu and website lists all the local farms and suppliers El Rayo works with, and its focus is on sustainable, wholesome ingredients, such as Maine Pollock for fish tacos — some 200 pounds of it each week.
The original location opened in 2009 in an old gas station on the edge of the Old Port, very close to the Casco Bay Bridge. The building was painted in bright, festive colors and featured a good amount of outdoor seating in the form of picnic tables covered by Mexican beer umbrellas out front, where gas pumps once stood. But it closed last fall to make way for a big parking garage project, and El Rayo Portland reopens this month a few blocks inland, still in the Old Port, on Free Street. A second location in a strip mall in suburban Scarborough, Maine opened in 2014, remains unchanged, and is often easier to get into. The new Old Port space is larger, with a bigger bar area and high ceilings, and will still offer ample outdoor eating on its deck. The menu is largely unchanged. Both locations feature a hip, casual and fun atmosphere with bar seating, lots of Hawaiian shirt-style floral patterns, food served on colorful Fiestaware plates, and homemade hot sauce in old-school narrow Coke bottles.
Reason to visit: Yucatan fish tacos and burritos, chile fritas, Mexican street corn, queso fundido, plantains
The food: El Rayo serves very homemade, fresh, creative Mexican fare in a lively setting where everyone in the place, a mix of devoted regulars and first timers, is clearly having fun. While the atmosphere is causal, the food is taken very seriously and the service is both friendly and excellent. Not only do they go to great lengths to source meat, seafood and produce regionally, but they make most things carefully from scratch, including a half dozen salsas, house hot sauce (with arbol peppers roasted on-site, vinegar and ground pumpkin seeds), and they preserve their own jalapeños each summer for year-round use. Almost nothing here comes out of a can. Pork and beef are naturally raised, black beans organic, and the quality of ingredients is surprisingly high for a very reasonably priced taco joint. And while almost everything is sourced from Maine, including lots of local microbrews, notable exceptions are mostly beverages: imported Mexican sodas, craft beer from Mexico’s Day of the Dead Brewing, which is very cutting edge, and every one of the many tequilas in the bar, even the cheapest, is 100% agave, which is decidedly not the norm.
The menu is broad, and while it is ostensibly a taqueria, they also offer a big selection of burritos, quesadillas, and rice and bean bowls, essentially burritos minus the wrapper. There are numerous house specialties spanning every category, but they are best known for their fish tacos using local Pollack. The fish is seasoned with aciote, a ground seed popular in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula which has an earthy flavor, then grilled and served with sliced avocado, crunchy veggie slaw and house-made spicy chipotle aioli. As with all the tacos, the fish is double wrapped in natural tortillas, and while many fish tacos get their contrasting crunch from fried breading, here it comes from the slaw, while the grilled fish is lighter and packs in more seafood flavor. These are excellent and more substantial than most two-bite “street tacos.” This specialty also comes in less common burrito and bowl versions.
“Our fish tacos have always been super popular, but we don’t know of anyone else who is doing a fish burrito,” said Katherine Poze, general manager of the Portland location. It’s essentially the same ingredients plus rice and cheese, and like the other burritos (chicken, steak, pork carnitas, veggie, mushroom and bean), oversized and hard to finish. There is a big assortment of tacos and burritos, and while the fish is very good, my personal favorite was the tacos al pastor, succulent slow braised pork topped with a salsa of grilled pineapple, offering a sweet, smoky and fruity flavor that permeates every bite.
Many of the standouts here are appetizers: the Mexican street corn, fried plantains, queso fundido and chile fritas are all top sellers — and all excellent. The corn is grilled enough to begin caramelizing the sugar in the kernels, smeared with chipotle aioli, which is not typical, then dusted in high-quality cojita cheese and lime, and it all comes together perfectly — smoky, sweet, creamy and just a touch hot. The fried plantains are not the usual soft sweet ripe style, but more like Caribbean tostones, green slices pounded very thin then fried, more like a riff on chips, very crispy, sprinkled with sea salt, really good and addictive, especially with a cold beer and house hot sauce. The chile fritas is actually the quintessential tapas dish of Spain, not Mexico, flash fried shishito peppers with sea salt makes for great bar food, and the menu includes another Spanish tapas staple, papas fritas (aka potatoes bravas), fried Maine potatoes with garlic aioli. The queso fundido is a melted cheese dip, and a meal in itself, thick and rich and heavy on sausage, chorizo that is made in-house from scratch from natural pork, brandy and spices. This rich dip is heavier than it looks, but illustrates the key to El Rayo’s success: just about every dish here is more nuanced, layered and built up from scratch than you’d expect, and the result in just about every dish is flavor, flavor and more flavor.
Even the desserts get creative here, and nothing personifies the hipster meets great flavor model of El Rayo like the Rice Krispies treats with pepitas (toasted pumpkin seeds) layered with cajeta, a caramel crème like Dulce de Leche, which is a really smart take on a classic low brow desert. There is also fresh Key Lime pie, pudding made with Mexican chocolate and an endless list of tempting drinks – I suggest a michelada, a very traditional Mexican cocktail rarely seen in the Northeast, a mix of beer with lime juice and hot sauce over ice, which tastes refreshing like beer but more complex. El Rayo runs a wide variety of special nights and happy hours, such as Oyster Mondays, Tamale Thursdays and so on.
Pilgrimage-worthy?: No, but a must for taco lovers — some of the best in the Northeast.
Rating: Yum-plus! (Scale: Blah, OK, Mmmm, Yum!, OMG!)
Price: $ ($ cheap, $$ moderate, $$$ expensive)
Details: 26 Free Street, Portland, ME and 245 U.S. Route 1, Scarborough; 207-494-1000; http://elrayotaqueria.com/
Larry Olmsted has been writing about food and travel for more than 15 years. An avid eater and cook, he has attended cooking classes in Italy, judged a barbecue contest and once dined with Julia Child. Follow him on Twitter, @TravelFoodGuy, and if there's a unique American eatery you think he should visit, send him an email at travel@usatoday.com. Some of the venues reviewed by this column provided complimentary services.