Camden House of Pizza
Small pizzeria, primarily for take out, but they have a few booths.
Address: 12 mechanic Street Camden ME Tel:
- Walkable in Village: Yes
- Cost: $
- Seasonal: high and shoulder seasons
Village Restaurant
Restaurant in downtown Camden.
Address: 5 Main Street Camden ME Tel:
- Walkable in Village: Yes
- Cost: Moderate
- Seasonal: all
Camden Deli
Great deli for lunch or light dinner. big windows and deck right over the Camden waterfall. This deli is a best kept secret: it has a world class view, upstairs outside deck with comfiy chairs and wonderful beers on tap. Great home baked goods too! Happy Hour is every day this summer in the upstairs dining area and on the rooftop decks from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. with FREE Appetizers and $3 drafts.
Address: 37 Main Street Camden ME Tel:
- Walkable in Village: Yes
- Cost: moderate
- Seasonal: June-October
Cappy's Chowder House
Pub right in the center of town. The slogan is "sooner or later everyone ends up at Cappy's". Pub food and Local ales. Family owned corporation. Established in 1979.Great location. Also has a greta bakery attached to it. Grab a cup of Coffee, muffin and sit by the dock. Cappy's has been at the main intersection in downtown Camden, Maine, for more than 20 years. The goal at Cappy's is to ensure the customer has an enjoyable dining experience and will come back to visit us again and again.
Address: 1 Main Street Camden ME Tel:
- Walkable in Village: Yes
- Cost: Moderate
- Seasonal: all
Zaddik's restaurant
Restaurant in downtown Camden. Mexican and Italian meals. a little expensive for what they serve, but the beer is very cold.
Address: 20 Washington Street Camden ME Tel:
- Walkable in Village: Yes
- Cost: Moderate
- Seasonal: all
Natalies
Elegant and sophisticated very refined menus. The owners pride themselves on decor, and this grand old hotel has a wonderful large porch and views of the harbor.The dining room has just been completely renovated and restyled to create the look of an elegant old French restaurant with contemporary casual accents. Dinner is also offered on the wrap-around porch, which is heated for those crisp spring and autumn evenings. The bar is the place for an after-work cocktail or a more casual meal from the bar menu.
Address: 83 Bayview Street Camden ME Tel:
- Walkable in Village: Yes
- Cost: Pricey
- Seasonal: all
Off the Boat (Bar and Grill?) formerly known as Quarterdeck Bar & Grill
Formerly known for its active night life, now under new management, this restaurant has a two floors, with a small outside deck in the backyard, a bar on both floors, and televisions viewable from all the bars and some of the tables. It is in town across from Gilberts and Peter Otts. Locals go here to watch the Red Soxs or the Patriot Games. Not Chef owned so food is not consistant. Two stories, bar on both, windows looking over the street; live music in the summers.
Address: 21 Bayview Street Camden ME Tel:
- Walkable in Village: Yes
- Cost: Moderate
- Seasonal: all
Camden Cone
A very popular ice cream shop wedged in the corner of a building on Bayview street next to Off the Boat restaurant. Owned by a local legislator who sometimes mans the counter, it features many interesting flavors of Round Top hard ice cream, floats, shakes, sundays and splits, waffle cones, sugar cones It's a real treat. A lot of great flavors. They only have hard ice cream. If you want soft ice cream you have to go to Riverhouse Ice Cream.
Address: 33 Bayview Street Camden ME Tel:
- Walkable in Village: Yes
- Cost: Low End
- Seasonal: June-October
Gilbert's Publick House
Pub in town that has live music during the Summer and pool tables. The even have there own money for the locals. Gilbert dollars. Fun to hang out and talk to the real fisherman and lobsterman. We learned they had pizza when a group of the Portland Pirate's hockey players brought some back to the house for a late night snack. -good to know.
Address: 1 Bayview Landing Camden ME Tel:
- Walkable in Village: Yes
- Cost: $
- Seasonal: all
Elm Street Grill
Don't let the outside of this grill fool you, it is not the Motel, but its own place and a good one for Pizza. The Grill is a little outside the village but worth a trip for the pizza if you're in the mood. Live music on the weekends frequently jazz standards.
Address: 115 Elm Street Camden ME Tel:
- Walkable in Village: No
- Cost: reasonable
- Seasonal: all
Peter Ott's
Nice restaurant in the downtown. Bar and dinner menu available. Large picture windows looking out onto the street. The decor is very fine art. They have a great comfortable bar and sometimes live music.
Address: 16 Bayview Street Camden ME Tel:
- Walkable in Village: Yes
- Cost: Moderate
- Seasonal: all
French & Braun Market
This place like Cappy's, everyone ends up in. It is the town grocery store. Has great meat and wine. The store is on the corner of Mechanic Street and Rout 1. They always have banannas in the window. I recently learned that they actually sell cigaretts in this store - but you will never see them. The keep them behind the counter. So unless you know, there is no way to tell they sell them.
Address: 1 Elm Street Camden ME Tel:
- Walkable in Village: Yes
- Cost: Moderate
- Seasonal: all
Camden Bagel Cafe
Bagels, Bagels, Bagels and coffee. Local favorite for an early morning breakfast. Not open for lunch or dinner
Address: 25 Mechanic Street Camden ME Tel:
- Walkable in Village: Yes
- Cost: Low End
- Seasonal: all
Primo Restaurant
A world-class restaurant inside a restored Victorian home in coastal Maine…the freshest possible ingredients put to imaginative use in dazzling recipes…a kitchen producing rustic favorites and back-to-basics treasures.
Address: 2 South Maine Street Rockland ME Tel:
- Walkable in Village: no
- Cost: $$$
- Seasonal: all
Waterfront Restaurant
This restaurant is always fun. Right on the harbor, you can watch for harbor seals as you drink a cocktail. Great for large groups. Dinner, lunch and bar menu are available. In the summer they have two different menus for the outside deck, a formal dinner menu, as well as a bar menu. You may also simply order cocktails on the huge deck. You feel like your on the deck of one of the ships right in the harbor. The inside decor is exposed beams, nautical prints and carvings of fish and birds, open gas fireplaces and lots of windows.
Address: 44 Bayview Street Camden ME Tel:
- Walkable in Village: Yes
- Cost: 8-35pp
- Seasonal: all
Francine's Bistro
This is a local favorite. This restaurant is chef owned by Brian Hill. Brian is a very accomplished Chef and former punk rock star, and has made his little reaturant a destination in itself. If you can get a reservation in the summer, you are one of the lucky few. Make reservations the minute you decide to come to Camden. A little secret trick is to try and get a place at the bar to eat if you can't get reservations they allow this. Boston Globe Article date May 30th 2008: HEADLINE: From cooking on the sideto a Maine event BYLINE: Jonathan Levitt Globe Correspondent Food & Travel CAMDEN, Maine - The chef and owner of Francine Bistro here doesn't just cook the best birds he can find, he also goes to a farm to pick them up himself. At Maine-ly Poultry, a patched together, hillside chicken and egg farm in neighboring Warren, Brian Hill loads his butch new Toyota FJ Cruiser with 16 whole birds, and another 120 pounds of feet and bones for making stock. "These birds were killed this morning," explains the chef. "It's crazy, but at the restaurant we roast them to order - stuffed with thyme, sprinkled with Maine sea salt, and cooked in the hottest oven for 20 minutes." At Francine Bistro, a whimsical 29-seat restaurant close to the harbor here, Hill can do things like that. His small, personal establishment is the type of place many good cooks dream about opening. From seats at the bar, you can watch Hill in the kitchen. He is clean and precise, moving around like a tai chi master, assembling delicate herb salads alongside big, bloody, local dry-aged rib eyes - "like James Bond would eat," says the chef. He fries potatoes in olive oil with Provencal herbs, smokes lamb riblets, and pan roasts mussels on a bed of pine needles. The menu changes every day. "It's luxurious comfort food," he says. "I cook for the weather and with the seasons." This is a second career for Hill, 42, a Camden native. For almost two decades, he made a living as a nomadic musician who cooked on the side. He returned to his hometown 4 1/2 years ago. The restaurant is small but doesn't skimp on the good stuff. There's a liquor license at the bar along with an espresso machine, and enough forsythia and tulips for a wedding party. After service, Hill mixes hearty bread dough to proof overnight. In the morning he bakes big gnarly rounds until they're charred and smell like good coffee. "I've been baking bread since I was a little kid," says the chef. "I do it because I love to do it." Hill grew up on a back-to-the-land goat dairy his parents ran in Warren. At 10, his first job was clubbing dogfish on a gillnet boat off Monhegan Island. After high school, Island Records signed his rock 'n' roll band, Heretix. "We sounded like Nirvana before Nirvana," he says. For 10 years Hill wrote songs and played lead guitar, touring the country and playing with big names like Aerosmith and Joe Strummer of the Clash. "On tour I ate at the best barbecue joints and seafood shacks," he says. "I tasted everything, simple food that was unbelievably good. I ate and I cataloged Page 1 away all those tastes for someday - for now." Between tours Hill worked part time in restaurants. His first gig was baking bread for Figs in Charlestown when Todd English was in the kitchen. The band broke up in the mid-'90s and Hill turned to cooking full time. He worked in fine dining kitchens around the country. By 2001 he was ready for his own place. "I got in my truck and I drove around looking for the perfect spot to open this kind of restaurant," he says. That tour took him to Key West, Fla., and deep into the mountains of North Carolina. He settled on Maine. Francine already existed as a groovy coffee shop. For a year Hill cooked tasting menus on a hot plate until he got the feel of the place. Then he bought the business. There's been a line out the door ever since. Next week Hill plans to knock down a wall to expand the kitchen and make room for 10 seats. "It will be bigger and more civilized but I won't mess with the place too much," says Hill. "Francine is a bistro, people come here by themselves, and they come here every day. It's what I always wanted." At midnight Camden is salty and quiet. The bell buoys ring outside the harbor. At Francine, Hill shapes the last loaf of bread. The music is loud and the lights are low. He's by himself now, offstage, but still rocking.
Address: 55 Chestnut Street Camden ME Tel:
- Walkable in Village: Yes
- Cost: $$$$
- Seasonal: all
Bayview Lobster
Picnic style lobster house. Great selection of imported and local beers. This place has a great view, rustic dining. Fun restaurant right on the dock. Choose your lobster from the outside tank and watch them cook it for you. Picnic benches and lobster bibs.
Address: 1 Public Landing Camden ME Tel:
- Walkable in Village: Yes
- Cost: Moderate
- Seasonal: June-October
Mikado Restaurant
This is a great restaurant. The Sushi is world class, and the setting is comfortable. The people are very friendly, and the bar is casual and comfortable for cocktails. It's right across from the village green. Now you know where to get your sushi fix when you're in the MidCoast!
Address: 31 Elm St Camden ME Tel:207-236-4477
- Walkable in Village: Yes
- Cost:
- Seasonal:
Scott's Place
This place is a secret of Camden Locals. Outside Renys there is a little wood schack that sells hamburgers, soup and hot dogs. It is easy simple food on the go. Fun to sit in the parking lot and watch the world go by.
Address: 85 Elm Street Camden ME Tel:
- Walkable in Village: No
- Cost: Low
- Seasonal: all
Atlantica Seafood Bistro
Great restaurant right on the Camden dock. Great outdoor deck, for dinners only. Reservations are taken, and suggested for the Summer and October. They have propane heaters on the deck for chilly nights. The menu is consistently fresh and new, but not intimidating.Atlantica is a chef owned and operated upscale bistro nestled in a large historic clapboard building located on Bayview Landing in Camden, Maine. Stylish yet comfortable dining rooms are professionally decorated and furnished, while the open kitchen creates a lively yet intimate bistro.
Address: 1 Bayview Landing Camden ME Tel:
- Walkable in Village: Yes
- Cost: $$$
- Seasonal: June-October