By Brian Kevin
Photos by Kody Theriault
From our November 2024 issue
When I first moved to Maine, nearly 15 years ago, The Good Table was one of the first places my in-laws took me to eat. They’d settled in Cape Elizabeth in 1980, four years before father-daughter restaurateurs Tony and Lisa Kostopoulos opened the eclectic but unassuming little restaurant on Ocean House Road. The Good Table was the kind of place a family could go for fried scallops or a chowder lunch, but where the chalkboard menu might also surprise diners with an exotic-for-Maine-in-the-’80s sort of dish — quiche Lorraine, say, or moussaka. The place became something of a community dining room, particularly during Sunday brunches, and even after it was rebuilt, following a 2001 fire, as a gray-shingled dame with a wraparound porch, The Good Table remained, above all, approachable.
So when Lisa opted to sell her restaurant last year, some folks raised eyebrows when the buyer was revealed as the Prentice Hospitality Group, known for Portland’s sleek Evo Kitchen + Bar (“Portland’s prettiest people are all here,” Condé Nast Traveler says) and prix-fixe destination restaurant Twelve (one of the New York Times’s “Best Restaurants in America” in 2022).
But the eyebrow raisers needn’t have worried, Prentice executive chef Matt Ginn says. Ginn oversees the kitchens at Evo and the seasonal Chebeague Island Inn, but he’s also a Cape Elizabeth native whose first restaurant gig was down the road in Scarborough (at the much-loved former Spurwink Country Kitchen) and who moved back to his hometown in 2017.
“When we started discussing what this restaurant would look like, I kept saying I’d love to see kids walk in wearing shin guards and not be out of place,” Ginn says. “I don’t think you could walk into Twelve or Evo in a soccer uniform, but I want families in the area to know that on a busy night, you can stop in and grab a burger and a salad and a roast chicken and, you know, be under a hundred bucks and go home.”
Nobody was wearing shin guards when my wife, my in-laws, and I stopped in to The Good Table on a recent Saturday night. But neither was the place full of Portland’s prettiest people, as far as I could tell. The space has been updated — blonde hardwood where once was wall-to-wall carpet, pale neutral walls, an airy farmhouse vibe — but it’s hardly imposing. The host who sat us wore a plain white T-shirt. There’s a kids’ menu. The walls of the eat-in sunporch are covered with early-20th-century black-and-white group portraits that Lisa Kostopoulos collected (if you’re sitting at the bar, ask to flip through a pair of Cape Elizabeth yearbooks from the 1940s).
The menu: still approachable, with high culinary technique at work, certainly, but nothing too cheffy. Ginn characterizes it as brasserie fare — simple, hearty, and wholesome — and the dishes that most wowed our table sure fit that description. A starter billed as brown bread was, in fact, a basket of cloudlike, pull-apart milk-bread rolls, not so much resembling the dense, molasses-y, bean-supper staple, but with the perfect touch of sweetness to recall it. We shared a kale salad — with gorgeous greens from Green Spark Farm, just around corner — that was delightfully crunchy and liberally sprinkled with brown-butter–toasted breadcrumbs.
From left: Chef Matt Ginn has thrice won Food Network’s Chopped competition; entrées include roast half chicken with green-garlic farro and charred onion and halibut on a bed of charred zucchini, squash, and eggplant; peach pie with vanilla custard.
Entrée standouts included half a roast chicken, from Tide Mill Organic Farm, in Edmunds, over green-garlic farro risotto, and a perfectly flaky halibut from Portland’s Harbor Fish Market, with a mélange of lightly charred zucchini, squash, and eggplant. Standards like these — along with a schnitzel, a sturdy pub burger, and others — anchor the small menu, their recipes tweaked a bit with the season. Portions were impressive — we took home chicken and part of a nicely cooked flank steak. “If you came in and spent over $30 on an entrée, and you told me you went home hungry, that would be a fail,” Ginn says. “You’ve got to leave full — the whole strategy is to feel like you’re over at someone’s house for dinner.”
And that is what it felt like, as we lingered over coffee and a slice of vanilla-custard-and-blueberry pie in a rye puff pastry. We were the night’s last table, but that didn’t keep the front-of-house staff from languidly gabbing with us about The Good Table’s history as we took our time calling it a night. Downright neighborly.
