By Will Grunewald
Photos by Noah Forbes
From our July 2025 issue
The hegemony of the lobster roll, the unassailable position of Maine’s most iconic food, has an unfortunate side effect: another classic seafood sandwich, the sort that’s graced with fried fish, is often an afterthought on menus (if it’s on them at all). The telltale sign is spiritless breading or batter: barely crispy upon arriving at the table and growing mushier by the minute, limply sloughing off the fish after each bite. Which isn’t to say fish sandwiches worthy of your order aren’t out there but only that, if you’re going in cold, you’re taking your chances. In Maine, finding a good lobster roll is about as difficult as finding a pine tree. A good fish sandwich is a different story.
Lately, though, a couple of restaurants have put fish sandwiches squarely in the foreground, fairly staking their reputations on them. Lil Chippy opened in Portland last year (the name comes from a slangy UK term for a fish-and-chips shop), offering big, unfailingly crispy fillets on buttery brioche buns. The sauce is remoulade, a slightly unconventional, sweeter twist for New England, where tartar usually prevails. For another excellent fish sandwich, but one that adheres more staunchly to regional custom, one need only make a quick drive down I-95, to Fish & Whistle, in Biddeford.
Clockwise from left: owners Kate Hamm and Jason Eckerson; soft-serve options, including a banana split with deep-fried banana; the back-corner bar and open kitchen.
The restaurant, opened in 2022, looks like it has some British ancestry, something of a cross between a pub and a chip shop: menu boards on the wall next to the register, with a half dozen or so tables up front and a little bar counter snugged into the back corner. The result is a welcome sense of adaptability, as fine a place to grab a takeout order as to sit for a quick lunch as to linger over dinner. The color palette and décor add some cheery, coastal New England accents, with light-blue hues, a wooden captain’s wheel, and historic maps overlaid with paintings of whales on the walls.
The fish sandwich is typical and, at the same time, exceptional. Typical as far as what it comprises: bun, fried fish, tartar sauce, lettuce. Exceptional because every detail is carefully attended to by husband-and-wife owners Jason Eckerson and Kate Hamm, who shared a semifinalist nod from the James Beard Awards earlier this year in the category of emerging chefs. The tender milk-bread bun, griddled before serving, is made in-house. So too is the tartar, which has a pleasantly bright streak of lemon and a savory undercurrent of shallot. The linchpin is the fish. It’s usually pollock or hake from the Gulf of Maine, instead of overfished cod or haddock, and it’s moist and flaky and encased in an airily crispy, almost crackly shell that brings to mind tempura (but whereas tempura batter uses soda water, Hamm and Eckerson’s yeast batter uses fermentation to achieve that light texture). It’s an ample sandwich, and napkins are utterly necessary, as is an Allagash White or a nice dry cider.
Return to Fish & Whistle time and again and it would be easy to keep ordering the fish sandwich. But the menu, although concise, covers a great deal of ground, showing off Eckerson and Hamm’s range (no surprise, seeing as how Eckerson worked for a long time at Portland’s estimable Eventide Oyster Co., and Hamm, a pastry chef, has done stints at several acclaimed Maine restaurants, including Tao Yuan and Leeward, earning a James Beard Award semifinalist selection for her pastry work at the latter). The squid sandwich gets similar treatment to the fish sandwich, but there’s also a version that comes with marinara and cherry peppers. The fish melt is made with house-smoked fish. The chowder, with poached fish, clam stock, bacon, and thyme, is an ever-popular order. And on a recent visit, specials included a fried-chicken sandwich topped with seaweed salad and roasted oysters with cherry-pepper-and-garlic butter. Purists, meanwhile, might just want to stick to the stalwart fish and chips.
Nothing on the menu isn’t hearty, but it would be a mistake not to hang around for some dessert. Hamm is usually rotating through at least a couple of pastry options, like an apple, persimmon, and almond-cream tart with a tamarind glaze and bourbon cream sauce, say, or a s’more (which is actually a house-made graham cracker with brown-sugar meringue and salted chocolate ganache). Soft-serve ice cream is always available too, in a shifting array of flavors. The salted caramel, topped with crunchy bits of caramelized bread crumbs, would be tough to beat.
“Fish and Whistle,” no coincidence, is the title of an old John Prine song — a vinyl copy of it is framed on a wall in the restaurant. The tune has some melancholy to it but also some of Prine’s familiar slyness and irrepressibility. And the singer wound up delivering a prescient bit of advice: “Fish and whistle, whistle and fish,” the lyrics go. “Eat everything that they put on your dish.”
