By Brian Kevin
Photos by Hannah Hoggatt
From our December 2024 issue
What makes a neighborhood restaurant click? Well, for starters, it ought to be filled with neighbors. That sure seemed to be the case when my wife and I stopped into Linden + Front, in Bath, on a recent Saturday night. Both the bifurcated restaurant’s dining rooms were thrumming: the front room, with its long bar and view of the kitchen, and the quieter annex, where Elsa and I nabbed a table beneath one of the big, boisterous botanical prints that characterize the whole place’s décor.
Khristine Leeman, who opened Linden + Front last February with her husband, executive chef Zac Leeman, suspects that even during peak tourist season, the crowd splits 60/40 for locals. It’s a different scene than at Sundrenched, the seasonal seafood shack the Leemans have run since 2022, on Zac’s native Bailey Island — and so is Linden’s menu of updated comfort food.
Clockwise from top left: apricot-glazed pork porterhouse with delicata squash; a crab-cake starter with saffron aioli and bouillabaisse; house-made ice cream; a botanical triptych dominates the barroom; the fruity-floral Pom Is Your Color cocktail.
The mod little bistro fills a niche for diners in the City of Ships, where downtown turnover has sometimes stymied folks looking for a non-pubby night out. Solo Bistro, which closed in 2017, was once the spot for date night or a special-but-not-too-special occasion. No Coward Soul, the vibey Portuguese joint that replaced it, lasted about a year.
Around the same time, Salt Pine Social, in the space that’s now Linden, was hitting its stride. Its owners had renovated a rambling former antique shop into a lively and colorful eatery. But after opening in 2016, it became a Covid casualty, briefly reimagined as a bakery and carry-out cantina but shuttered by spring of 2022.
Linden + Front has recaptured much of Salt Pine’s polished playfulness. And it nails another crucial element of a great neighborhood restaurant: a peppy and welcoming bar. Running the length of the front room, Linden’s is beneath the same rainbow of jewel-like lanterns that once hung at Salt Pine. Khristine’s cocktail menu is as splashy as the lighting. Hits on our visit included the Pom Is Your Color, a magenta elixir of vodka, elderflower liqueur, orange bitters, and pomegranate and lemon juices. Also, the unconventional house negroni, which swaps out the traditional Campari for bergamot liqueur, giving the drink a citrus bite and Sprite-like clarity.
Creating (and recreating) the drink menu, Khristine says, is “a little like playing mad scientist.” The draft list, meanwhile, has a half dozen Maine beers, and the wine list is generous, spanning regions and price points. Khristine, who grew up loitering in her dad’s wine shop, says she privileges drinkability over complexity.
A diner can easily make a meal off the small-plates side of the menu, which landed a bit better at our table than the entrées. The yummy “five-layer dip” was like meze turned into a football snack — a ganoush-esque eggplant spread (confusingly billed as “eggplant caviar”) with fried artichokes, olive tapenade, sweet red peppers, and whipped goat cheese (and a crusty wheat bread to spread it on). Also delicious were the crab cakes, their outsides crispy despite being half submerged in a fragrant bouillabaisse. Chef Zac, who ran kitchens in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, the Virgin Islands, and elsewhere before returning to Maine, calls the dish “a cross between a traditional crab cake, she-crab soup, and seafood stew.”
The entrées skew more traditional: roasted chicken, stuffed haddock, steak frites. A roasted butternut squash accompanying the pork porterhouse was on the dry side, but we loved the meat — tender and rich, one of several cuts on the menu from Kennebec Meat Company, the whole-animal butcher down the road.
For dessert: A raspberry panna cotta that was tasty but surprisingly dense — dairy-free, turns out, which the server hadn’t mentioned. Also, some of the best ice cream I’ve ever had, banana-pudding–flavored and so very creamy. Zac and chef Joe Arena handle desserts, including the rotating flavors of house-churned scoops.
Heading out, we surveyed our fellow diners: starry-eyed couples, families with kids, a cackling crew of older ladies perhaps a couple of negronis deep. “We’ve filled our bar with fishermen and had suits in the dining room,” Zac told me later. A sure sign of a neighborhood restaurant clicking.
