The Palace Diner in Biddeford has been named to Eater’s list of America’s 38 Essential Restaurants.
The guide is compiled each year by Bill Addison, restaurant critic for the national website, after 34 weeks of travel around the country. This year, Addison ate almost 600 meals in 36 cities.
This is the Palace Diner’s first time on the list. Addison wrote of the restaurant: “Eating here haunts me: I can’t find better light, lemony, buttery pancakes, or a more precisely engineered egg sandwich, and theirs is the only tuna melt I ever hunger after.”
The 15-seat restaurant, located in a 1927 Pollard train car parked at 18 Franklin St., was purchased in 2014 by Chad Conley (who also owns Rose Foods in Portland) and Greg Mitchell. The pair, Addison wrote, “turned it into the ideal realization of a daytime Americana diner.”
Bon Appetit named Palace Diner one of America’s 50 Best New restaurants the year it opened. Over the summer, when the magazine named Portland its Restaurant City of the Year, it called Palace “the Single. Best. Diner. On. The. Planet,” commenting “The flapjacks are towering, the burger is smashed and crunchy, and the tuna salad sandwich is quickly becoming a Maine icon.”
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