Palace Diner | Local Flavor

It is the hope of every down-at-the-heels New England mill town that its boom-and-bust story will see a second boom, or at the very least a boomlet. City planners dream of mill buildings blinking back to life with tech companies, manufacturers, artist lofts, and cafés, and begetting condo developers, Thai takeout, and a new wave of families. They look to Manchester, New Hampshire’s tech economy and to Lowell, Massachusetts’s arts district. And, now, to Biddeford, Maine, where the last textile mill closed in 2009 but where a group of food entrepreneurs, brewers, and designers has put down stakes and where the former Pepperell Mill complex is home to Banded Horn Brewing Co. and Sweetcream Dairy and more than 100 other businesses in all.

Greg Mitchell and Chad Conley had heard rumors of a revival in Biddeford before they drove to town on a whim in 2013. The two friends, who met working at an organic farm in Maine and had cooked in professional kitchens in Maine and New York, had been working on a concept in Portland—a dive bar with great food—but couldn’t get any traction. “We started to feel like Portland was a difficult climate,” Conley says (he has since decided to open a deli and bagel shop in Portland called Rose Foods). In Biddeford, they stopped at Elements, a coffee shop/bookstore/bar, and almost immediately began meeting people who knew other people who would ultimately convince them they had found their spot. “Within an hour, we had made more progress than we had in months in Portland,” Conley says. Three blocks away, they peeked in the window of the Palace Diner, a 15-seat 1927 Pollard dining car, and saw that it was up for lease. “The light bulb turned on,” Conley says. “A month later we had signed a lease, and we started working on developing our concept.”

In his book The Table Comes First, Adam Gopnik identifies all the necessary ingredients in the creation of a proper “scene”—that self-sustaining culture that turns towns and cities into magnets, whether for food, sports, or cinema. It requires, he writes, “a crowd of critics, commentators, loyal fans. There can be good basketball players in a city and no basketball ‘culture,’ no scene.” When it comes to food, Biddeford now has the fans and the critics. The commentary flows on social media. And the Palace’s concept—diner classics, perfectly prepared—is fine-tuned to both locals and out-of-towners. Each dish is reworked until it achieves the Platonic ideal of, say, the tuna melt or the buttermilk pancake. Because the kitchen is tiny (just a few feet across), the menu is built around its architecture like a jacket on a suit form. Nothing extraneous to slow things down or hinder quality.

“Everything comes down to me and Greg looking at every element and saying, OK, what is it doing for the dish?” Conley says. So the fried egg in the Deluxe sandwich is 3⁄8-inch thick because that played best against the sliced cheddar, bacon, and jalapeños. The iceburg lettuce in the tuna melt is cut crosswise into a ¾-inch-thick slab to balance the buttery griddled challah bread and rich tuna salad (the pickles are house-made). And those aforementioned pancakes get their tang from not just buttermilk but also lemon juice and zest (they’re served with real maple syrup, too).

On the diner’s facade, an old hand-lettered sign reads “Ladies Invited,” a reminder that these eateries once drew a heavily male clientele of factory workers. Pay a visit in the off-season, and you should be able to walk past the sign with a little chuckle and settle onto a stool at a counter that ripples with elbow grooves worn down by generations of regulars. Come on a summer weekend, though, and expect to contemplate those words at length—the national press has long since discovered the Palace and sung its praises. But come anyway, even in June. You can put your name on the list and wander around downtown for a bit. There is so much to see.

18 Franklin St., Biddeford, ME. 207-284-0015; palacedinerme.com