Ribollita Restaurant, (41 Middle Street, Portland, Maine) has been praised by my friends as one of the best restaurants in the Old Port.  The restaurant is renowned for high quality, fresh, Italian food.   This past Friday I made a decision to leave the main cluster of Old Port restaurants and cross Franklin Street to eat at Ribollita.  I am not looking forward to going back.

Food, service, and atmosphere are the three pillars of a successful restaurant – with the first being most important.   Ribollita’s authentic Italian cuisine proved to be a bland, under-seasoned, and boring.   In my own kitchen I use very little salt; surprisingly I was scouring each table looking for a shaker that could potentially save the evening, but none could be found.  Even the bowl overflowing with incomprehensible amounts of olive oil came with a side of pepper but no salt.

The evening consisted of a Ribollita appetizer, polenta crusted calamari, the fish special of the day, a side of linguini pomodoro, and gnocchi.   All of the food, with no exception, was bland and under-seasoned.   The fresh but greasy fish chunk was placed on a glob of mashed potatoes – food fitting for a diner more than a high-end restaurant.  The gnocchi were pan-fried and unappetizingly dense, deriving most of their flavor from the generous serving of prosciutto. To add insult to injury, the jug of house wine was served warm to the touch.

The menu has a variety of dishes including some made with fresh pasta and some that appear to be dried.  There is nothing wrong with dried pasta, in fact many restaurants in Italy specialize in that.  In my opinion, a restaurant should choose one and do it well.

In hindsight, I should have sent most of the food back, but the service was so disoriented that I doubt things would have ended well.  They were accommodating and friendly, but dishes were mis-timed and we received the wrong plates. 
I’ll revisit Ribollita in a few weeks to see if things change, but at the present I am not looking forward to it.