Bread & Friends on an evening in September. The bakery/cafe serves dinner several days a week. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer Over the past eight years, I’ve watched two very different stories of wasted potential play out at 505 Fore St.
Success chased both restaurants, but they were always faster. First, the boisterous, occasionally inspired Zapoteca, followed quickly by Pizzarino, with its oddly dogmatic menu restrictions. Portlanders seemed eager to embrace both businesses, warts and all, but something (legal troubles, indifferent cooking, respectively) kept getting in the way.
Spend five minutes chatting with Bread & Friends’ co-owner and Director of Operations and Business, Maggie Rubin, and it becomes obvious that she and her fellow “double-husband-and-wife” partners intend to write a very different ending to their own 505 Fore St. story. “We’ve taken this slowly, from when Tanner (Rubin) started his micro-bakery at a farmers market in the Bay Area, to all of us pitching in to help when we were all out of work because of COVID, to moving out here and starting business the same way, at the Cumberland and Falmouth farmers market,” she told me.
“We rented space from Forage on Washington Avenue and baked at night. We worked that market, then Brunswick-Topsham as well as the Brunswick Night Market for two years. It’s been a slow build.
” This might be the biggest understatement of the year. During 2021, the quartet’s first year in Maine, market customers.