HIDDEN BEAUTY: The patio at Novare Res. |
Novare Res Beer Café | 4 Canal Plaza/188 Middle Street, Portland | Open Monday through Thursday from 4 pm to 1 am, and from 3 pm on Friday. Open weekends from noon to 1 am | 207.761.2437 Prost! International Tap House | 446 Fore Street, Portland | Call For Hours | 207.772.6241 |
Of all the methods humans have devised to deploy alcohol in hope of temporarily deadening us to the stultifying burdens of life, beer-drinking is among the oldest and perhaps the best. Good beer, like the best approach to life, embraces the bitter, which makes the notes of sweetness that emerge all the more satisfying. Eventually beer will kill you in the most appropriate way. Liquor unimaginatively goes straight after the liver, and wine actually prolongs life (not counting heightened exposure to STD’s). Beer takes your flesh and bloats it until the effort of pumping blood through its lumpy shapeless mass convinces your heart to simply give up. That is the way to go.This summer, Portland saw the opening of two notable spots to sip our way towards an obesity-induced infarction. While Canal Plaza’s Novare Res is the nicer place to do so, it is also going to cost you more. Serving mostly bottles of imported beers you have never heard of, most over $10, you pay a premium to find something you like. The spirit at Fore Street’s Prost’s is truer to the nature of the beverage they serve. With a selection almost entirely on tap and in the $5 range, they are generous with samples so you can find an affordable pint you like.
That said, Novare Res is better on the intangibles. Tucked away on the courtyard behind the corner of Exchange and Middle streets, Novare Res feels hidden in the middle of everything. Their leafy patio is big without being Porthole-capacious, and the picnic-style tables are spread out enough to keep the bustle reasonable. Inside, with its low ceiling, brick columns, and long semi-communal tables, feels like an especially nice European beer hall. It’s a great space.
But Novare Res makes you work to find the right beer for you. The many-pages-long menu is bereft of descriptions and the busy wait staff don’t appear to be experts. But most of what you order will come in an interesting bottle and in attractive glassware. The Hansens Oude Kriek, a Belgian lambic, was a deep, opaque amber in its medium-stemmed goblet. It was so cherry-tart that it was more like juice than beer. An Allagash Fluxus was available on draft and one of the bar’s few Maine beers. Served small in a tulip glass, it’s a refreshing wheat beer dominated by flavors of citrus and ginger. A pint of Delaware’s Dogsfish Head IPA 60 was just a touch bitter and had a bit of apple in its aroma.
Though not nearly as elegant as Novare Res, Prost looks a lot better than the space used to look when it was Diggers. The fine-looking bar is concrete over plywood and juts out sharply in the back of the room to accommodate the 100 or so taps. (Full list of options available at erentertainment.net/prost/biers.html.) The rest of the room has a generic sports-bar feel. Unfortunately, a wood barrier obscures the view of the beers being poured. Customers focused their eyes instead on several channels of Olympics and sipped a Roman lager on special to celebrate some Italian victory in Bejing. That Peroni lager was a light and refreshing pilsner style — just a touch sour and bitter. A Canadian Unibroue Ephemere Apple had a hint of hops and a fruity sparkling quality that placed it somewhere between cider, champagne, and beer. Rogue Dead Guy Ale from Oregon was sweet for an IPA, and the Wolaver Organic from Vermont was light and bitter. While Prost had a good 30 foreign beers on tap, they had the local covered too with 11 beers from Maine. Samples are easy to come by.
Food is a bit of an afterthought at both spots, but Novare Res does a better job with less. None of their small plates involve any cooking, but they do offer some good cheeses, fat olives, cold sausage, oily almonds and pickled vegetables. Prost plans to make its menu “a little less German” soon. But they said they would keep the sausage, which came fat, juicy and a bit bland — in the German style — on a big pile of good mild sauerkraut. Since fat and bland looms in all of our futures, lets embrace it: Prost and Novare Res offer fine if distinctive ways to drink our way there.
Brian Duff can be reached atbduff@une.edu.
