Improbable though it seems to this correspondent, Memorial Day Weekend is upon us. This is one of the two times (the other being just before the 4th of July) when certain thematic metaphors appear in this missive: Evel Knievel launching himself across some impossible expanse; a roller coaster clanking itself to the crest of its initial climb; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid on the cliff above the river; Wile E. Coyote looking down to realize he’s overrun the road and is high, high above the canyon floor . . . . Along about Columbus Day there will be a thud, and a splash of dust, and perhaps a “beep beep!” from some more sensible business. Heck of a ride though!

Courtesy of local food writer Michael Sanders, of Fresh From Maine fame, we recently focused on two initiatives the Gulf of Maine Research Institute is taking with restaurants in Maine to promote underutilized fish species. One of them, called Out of the Blue we will definitely participate in next month, promoting Atlantic mackerel. Chef Ray Franklyn is already working on ideas, and we’re eagerly awaiting the results. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, the 3 course $17.99 Wednesday Special keeps it interesting at a great price, and tomorrow is no exception!

Wednesday Special

This week’s $17.99 Wednesday Special starts out with a sweet pea soup – nothing to do with the warm, humid air masses that are starting to drift into our area where they condense into pea soup of an altogether different sort! The main course will be a fillet of pan seared hake with basil tomato bruschetta, potato croquettes and spicy greens. And for dessert there’ll be coffee ice cream sandwiched between 2 cardamom cookies. Yum!

Friday Night Jazz

This Friday we will be without live jazz as it is graduation weekend for Bowdoin, Bates and Hyde. We will, however, be open for dinner this Sunday, and closed on Monday, Memorial Day.!

As always, we look forward to seeing you on Front Street in downtown Bath, where summer may sneak up on you, but it is no less welcome for its sly arrival!

Pia & Will Neilson, Owners

Over the weekend the maple behind the restaurant has suddenly leafed out. The leaves have gone from indistinct lint balls on the limbs to fully formed leaves 3 inches across, and already a late-spring look is taking hold, especially as one moves away from the ocean. The difference is noticeable even between Arrowsic and Bath, but at the speed green things are growing now, the differential will not last – spring is rolling up from the southwest like the tide up the Bay of Fundy – smoothly, rapidly and inexorably covering the naked bones of the bottom in a uniform sea of green. In a space of hours it will cover all, then deepen. It is a fabulous time to be on the coast of Maine!

When it comes to food though, regardless of the season, Wednesday’s are pretty fabulous in this little slice of the coast, for the obvious reason that that’s the day for the three course $17.99 Wednesday Special at Solo Bistro!

Wednesday Special

This week’s $17.99 Wednesday Special starts out by blending the zing of Tarbox Farm spicy greens with delicious bits of applewood-smoked bacon, all drizzled with a sweet balsamic vinaigrette. That will be followed by chicken sautéed with asparagus, grape tomatoes, and Kalamata olives in a shallot wine butter over torchio pasta (so called because it resembles the base of a torch) with feta cheese and toasted bread crumbs! For dessert we’ll enjoy a strawberry panna cotta with a wild Maine blueberry sauce.

Friday Night Jazz May 17

This week the donna of the double bass, Ms. Xar Adelberg, returns to the New Space in the company of newcomer Tom Luther at the keyboard. The eclectic Ms. Adelberg is well known to devotees of Friday Night Jazz. Her skills on the bass dependably delight and dazzle. Composer and pianist Tom Luther has lately been pursuing improvisational jazz with his acoustic quintet, which recently released its first CD, “Everything Is Blue.” Doubling down on double bass and piano jazz this Friday, May 17 from 6:30 – 9:30 PM!

As always, we look forward to seeing you on Front Street in downtown Bath, where though we may be captive on a carousel of time, you never get the run-around!

Pia & Will Neilson, Owners

A second week of beautiful weather is about to come to a necessary end, as things are noticeably drying out. Coincident with the beautiful weather, various viral vectors seem to have been exceptionally busy in Bath of late, but hey, at least it’s not raining frogs!

In such circumstances, I have always liked to quote the brief speech of a rheumy Bilbo Baggins in Lake Town: “Thag you very buch.” Just yesterday I happened to read — in a copy of The Hobbit retrieved last December upon the opening of the first of the overstuffed installments of the cinematic version — the last words of a dying and repentant Thorin Oakenshield, which I had not remembered: “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it.”

Feeling (and sounding) not unlike Mr. Baggins during his Lake Town sojourn, I shall attempt to emulate his example and rein in my proclivity to be prolix, merely noting the wisdom of Thorin’s valedictory sentiment in connection with this Sunday’s Mothers’ Day brunch and dinner, tomorrow’s $17.99 Wednesday Special, and Friday Night Jazz.

Wednesday Special

This week’s $17.99 Wednesday Special commences with a simple salad of Tarbox Farm spicy greens dressed in a sweet balsamic vinaigrette. The main course will be a ragu of mushrooms, roasted red bell peppers, shallots over toasted focaccia bread, topped with a poached egg and fresh parsley, comfort food for a foggy spring evening! Dessert will be a peach cobbler with a shortcake topping. A king could do no better!

Friday Night Jazz May 10

This week Ralph Norris, tenor sax supremo, returns to the New Space accompanied by Mickey Felder at the keyboard. They’ll be playing from 6:30 – 9:30 PM this Friday. May 10. Be there or be square!

As always, we look forward to seeing you on Front Street in downtown Bath, where an occasional “code in de nose” doesn’t mean we’re stuffy!

Pia & Will Neilson, Owners

For reasons unrelated to the food biz, we found ourselves in a snowy south central Minnesota this weekend — a byproduct of which is a certain constriction of current time constraints. Of course we sought out interesting dining options during our brief stay and found two standouts, at opposite ends of the restaurant spectrum.

At the high end, in Minneapolis (pop. 387K), we enjoyed 112 Eatery, the second restaurant of 2011 Beard Foundation Best Chef – Midwest, Isaac Becker. Like Solo Bistro, it is informal, reasonably priced, and serves food pretty much as good as you can get at any price, anywhere.

The other exceptional place was an unprepossessing deli in the little town of Northfield (pop. 22K), home to Malt-o-Meal cereals and two colleges, called Hogan Brothers Acoustic Café with knockout hoagies (“Italians” in Maine parlance). They had a house vinaigrette sauce that made an otherwise unremarkable sandwich into a very remarkable one indeed!

Meanwhile back in Bath (pop. 8.5K), Solo Bistro is carrying its own torch for great food at a great price, and it doesn’t get any greater than the three course $17.99 Wednesday Special!

Wednesday Special

The $17.99 Wednesday Special this week begins with a salad of butter lettuce and radishes, cucumber, parsley and a citrus vinaigrette. The principal course will be a spring risotto: asparagus, peas and tomatoes with crème fraiche and parmesan. For dessert, a sandwich – a cranberry spice ice cream oatmeal cookie one, that is!

Friday Night Jazz April 19

This Friday Sue & Blue will again take the corner stage in the New Space at Solo Bistro. Jazz siren Sue Sheriff sings up a storm while Peter Blue plays perfect piano. Sue & Blue at Solo Bistro from 6:30 to 9:30!

As always, we look forward to seeing you on Front Street in downtown Bath, where the per capita culinary quality ratio is way, way above average!

Pia & Will Neilson, Owners

I have lately noted in the media several references to Wordsworth’s famous poem “Daffodils,” that hymn to the joyful riot of spring, “ . . . a host of golden daffodils/ beside the lake, beneath the trees/, fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” One can only conclude the people making such references are based somewhere well to the south of Bath, Maine!

Here, where it seems one beautiful spring day gets followed by five cold wet ones, we’re more in the T. S. Eliot School of Spring Appreciation , living in an extended state of frustrated anticipation. To Wordsworth’s ten thousand daffodils stretched along the margin of a bay, likened to stars in Milky Way, I’ve got a little clutch of ten, huddling by the foundation. Visible (between snowstorms) for a good six or eight weeks, they still awaiting a long enough stretch of warmth to blossom, though on a day like yesterday, one could practically note their growth in the course of a casual glance!

By the time we get to a Wordsworthian state of grace on the margins of the Kennebec, the summer is upon us and the press of practical matters – planting gardens, getting out boats and docks, mowing the lawn-turned-hayfield overnight, and so on – is such that wandering “lonely like a cloud” to gaze and gaze upon the plenteous pulchritude of spring in daylight hours is not an option!

The good news is that if one takes the time to sit and sup, not all is necessarily lost in the the cause of aesthetic appreciation! A substitution of lingual for ocular perception can open vistas too – just ask Proust. And if it’s gustatory vistas you want, you won’t find any with more bang for the buck than with the Solo Bistro three course $17.99 Wednesday Special, guaranteed!

Wednesday Special

For the $17.99 Wednesday Special this week we start out with a salad of spring greens dressed in a saba vinaigrette. (Saba is cooked grape must, and thus a sort of cousin to wine vinegar.) That will be followed—appropriately enough for this particular pathway of perception – by a main course of linguini and shrimp, yellow pear tomato, white beans and escarole in a fermented garlic sauce. For dessert, Chef Franklyn’s sunny nature will again shine through in a yellow cake with a coconut and sour cream frosting.

Wordsworth may have had the Lake District, but we’ve got the Kennebec, its forests, farmland and estuaries . . . and Solo Bistro to compose their produce into a scene to please not just the eye, but the palate too, and that’ll bring out the poet in just about anyone!

Friday Night Jazz April 12

This Friday a Solo favorite returns to the New Space with a perfect prescription for pleasure, particularly aural, provided in part in plaintive tones purposefully pumped from the long slide horn of Dr. Barney Balch, the nearly beatific bio-oceanographer from Bigelow who’ll blow you away with the breadth and brilliance of his talent on the trombone. The good doctor will be accompanied the masterful Mr. Mickey Felder at the keyboard. Great jazz this Friday at Solo Bistro from 6:30 to 9:30!

As always, we look forward to seeing you on Front Street in downtown Bath, where romanticism and modernism meet to eat in justly jocund company.

Pia & Will Neilson, Owners

Relativism is often disparaged in American public discourse, and though as a point of philosophical principle I would find myself among the disparagers, as a practical matter I find context is king in issues great and small. For example, a snow flurry blowing through the environs of Bath on April 2 feels rather different than one on December 2; or a brisk northwesterly airflow on April 2 versus one on August 2. Scaling up, one might similarly observe that the effects of fiscal and monetary stimulus in an economic winter differ from those in an economic summer, at least in the absence of an a priori judgment to the contrary.

Be that as it may, here at Solo Bistro we are dedicated (if sometimes frustrated) absolutists when it comes to food and service, at a price that will absolutely thrill even the most dyed-in-the-wool relativist. If you’re dubious, but cast your eyes upon the $17.99 Wednesday Special that follows!

Wednesday Special

For the $17.99 Wednesday Special this week, Chef Franklyn establishes a culinary north-south axis in the first two courses. A tortilla soup with cilantro begins the menu, and its northern pole is in the “‘Burg,” in the form of Hahn’s End Eleanor Buttercup cheese. The main course’s northern terminal is sustainably planted in the Gulf of Maine, in the form of native hake, pan roasted and nestled on a bed of basmati rice beneath a green tomato salsa verde with chayote squash, black olives and frisée. Having set a piton in the Mediterranean littoral with the black olives, the Chef whips off to the east and around and up into Paris for dessert, where an exquisite little almond cake, a brown butter financier, accompanied by an almost-indecently demure dollop of lavender whipped cream, will be to your tongue what gold might be to David Stockman’s febrile financial fantasies: really, really good!

Friday Night Jazz April 5

This Friday we welcome back the melodious mistress of the keyboard, Miss Molly Ridley, along with frequent collaborator Jason St. Pierre on the saxophone. Molly is a Westbrook native and Bowdoin junior with a jumbo-jet load of jazz talent who plays throughout the area with Jason and others. Jason leads his own jazz trio and plays with several other well-reputed combos.

If you’re not at the Hot Chocolate Jubilee (they’ve got Thursday, Saturday and Sunday shows too!), then swing on by the Bistro for the second best show in town this Friday night, Ridley and St. Pierre, from 6:30 to 9:30 PM. And if you are headed for the Chocolate Church, come early for an decidedly delicious dinner before the Mid-coast’s favorite biennial bash!

As always, we look forward to seeing you on Front Street, in downtown Bath, where a cool breeze can give rise to a lot of hot air . . . .

Pia & Will Neilson, Owners

Sugaring time! If you’re not stuck up but want to be, this is your opportunity . . . . Nights in the teens and twenties, days in the 40s and the sap is running. Maine Maple Sunday was quite successful this year, in contrast to last year when temps in the upper 70s stopped the sap run almost before it started.

More generally, mud season continues both literally and figuratively, of which Tuesday morning’s news reports gave a neatly symmetrical illustration. On the literal side, Maine officials called on “mudders” to use “caution and common sense,” begging the question of whether such a thing is logically possible. On the figurative side, the less carefully scripted environment of Maine politics provided a nice example of metaphorical mudding. Following several weeks of loud and antiphonal rhetoric, often redolent of sanctimony, about focusing educational spending on kids, not administrators, it seems the Education Department budget proposes to transfer $1 million of the state’s $895 million general purpose aid account for K-12 education to a “charter school defense fund.” Now if you’re looking for a soft, wet field to churn into muck with turbo-charged agenda trucks, it just doesn’t get much better than that!.

On the other hand, if it’s a sweet deal you’re looking for, you know the three course $17.99 Wednesday Special is as sweet as it comes, week in and week out, but never more so than in maple syrup season!

Wednesday Special

This week we start with a soup of white beans and that hardiest of greens, kale. The main course gets topical: roast pork loin with a seasonally appropriate maple sherry glaze, accompanied by savory spinach and mushroom bread pudding. The dessert will be a chocolate and sour cherry brownie with whipped cream. Some seriously good eating there!

Friday Night Jazz March 29

This Friday another newcomer will grace the [New] Space at Solo: Michael Beling, pianist, composer, teacher and student. Youthful, energetic and passionate about music, he’s an up and coming talent that we’re delighted to bring to Bath for the first time. Come check out the new kid on the block from 6:30 to 9:30 PM this Friday at Solo Bistro. You won’t regret it!

As always, we look forward to seeing you on Front Street, in downtown Bath, where life is sweet, and the sapient and the sap sit down to sup side by side!

Pia & Will Neilson, Owners

Barely a day from the vernal equinox, but winter is not going quietly! It feels almost like the fiery whip of the Balrog of Morgoth lashing out of the chasm at Khazad Dum (see it here). The metaphor is mismatched in its particulars, but it has a certain emotional equivalency – indeed it sprang to mind immediately upon hearing the forecast for over a foot of snow today, the epitome of the “just when you thought it was safe ” meme that cinema expresses so well! Intellectually one knows that given our location, this type of thing happens regularly, but the loss of a snow-free vista from one’s door in March is unavoidably poignant!

With the snow (and freezing fog at the moment) we will be closed this evening, but we most certainly will be open tomorrow, when Chef Raymond will again ply people with plates of palliative pleasure at the implausibly petite price of $17.99 for three courses with the $17.99 Wednesday Special, to wit . . . .

Wednesday Special

This week we start with a roasted carrot soup with a swirl of parsnip cream. The main course will be baked pollock, stuffed with fennel and herbs and accompanied by roasted fingerling potatoes and a lemon caper beurre blanc. The dessert will be profiteroles with sea salt caramel ice cream and chocolate sauce. Goooooood!!

Friday Night Jazz March 22

This Friday we’ll meet Lorna Prescott, a vocalist and pianist, and Wayne Delano, a pianist and saxman, for the first time at Solo Bistro. Lorna is a Mid-Coast resident who has performed at the Four Seasons in Toronto, the Caribe Hilton in San Juan, and more or less everywhere in between. Wayne has toured internationally with Maynard Ferguson, Woody Herman and Joe McBride and has performed with many other jazz greats like Phil Woods and Freddie Hubbard, among others. These days he plays around New England with his own quartet, and in addition to playing and occasionally singing, Wayne is composer and arranger as well. There’ll be talent galore in the New Space this Friday evening with Lorna Prescott and Wayne Delano from 6:30 to 9:30 PM!

As always, we look forward to seeing you on Front Street, in downtown Bath, where Old Man Winter may overstay his welcome, but you will not!

Pia & Will Neilson, Owners