Tool
Where in Maine Can You Eat at 8pm?
Maine kitchens close earlier than visitors expect. Across 631 restaurants in 24 towns, Portland still has 93 percent serving at eight in the evening. Cape Elizabeth has 29 percent.
When the kitchens close
The eight o’clock figure is the one people argue about, but the shape is what explains the problem. Service holds up until seven, falls off a cliff between eight and nine, and is over by ten. An hour’s delay on the road costs you far more dinner than it would anywhere else.
- All 24 towns combined
- Portland
- Cape Elizabeth
Share still serving on a Friday or Saturday, the most forgiving night of the week. Statewide, more than half the kitchens have stopped serving by 9pm. Portland is the state’s latest town and Cape Elizabeth its earliest, drawn here for scale.
How late you can leave it, town by town
The same counts turned into a deadline: how late you can turn up somewhere without a booking and still have real choice. Half of Brewer is still serving at 9:30pm; in Cape Elizabeth that point has passed by 7:30pm.
Measured on a Friday or Saturday, so these are the latest hours a town keeps all week. Times land on the half hour because that is the resolution of the published hours underneath.
By town, worst last
Towns with at least six restaurants in our data. The 8pm column is the share still serving at eight on a Friday or Saturday, which is the most forgiving test there is.
| Town | Serving at 8pm | Open Sunday | Open Monday | Restaurants |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Portland | 93% | 80% | 70% | 61 |
| Hallowell | 88% | 75% | 75% | 8 |
| Bangor | 81% | 77% | 85% | 47 |
| Augusta | 69% | 82% | 74% | 39 |
| Old Orchard Beach | 69% | 100% | 72% | 29 |
| Brunswick | 66% | 68% | 63% | 38 |
| Ogunquit | 65% | 97% | 70% | 37 |
| Kennebunk | 65% | 69% | 50% | 26 |
| Bar Harbor | 61% | 84% | 78% | 51 |
| York | 60% | 86% | 66% | 35 |
| Kennebunkport | 53% | 100% | 79% | 19 |
| Scarborough | 50% | 83% | 17% | 6 |
| Brewer | 50% | 83% | 67% | 6 |
| Camden | 48% | 72% | 68% | 25 |
| Ellsworth | 46% | 82% | 79% | 28 |
| Bethel | 46% | 73% | 46% | 26 |
| Wells | 45% | 85% | 70% | 20 |
| Rockland | 44% | 50% | 50% | 36 |
| Freeport | 44% | 92% | 80% | 25 |
| Damariscotta | 44% | 56% | 33% | 9 |
| Saco | 38% | 100% | 38% | 8 |
| Boothbay Harbor | 34% | 74% | 57% | 35 |
| Millinocket | 30% | 90% | 60% | 10 |
| Cape Elizabeth | 29% | 71% | 86% | 7 |
Common questions
Do restaurants in Maine close early?
Outside Portland and Bangor, often yes. In several well-known coastal towns fewer than half the kitchens are still serving at eight in the evening, even at the height of summer. If you are arriving late, eat on the way rather than after you check in.
What is open on a Monday in Maine?
Monday is the standard closing day for independent kitchens, and in some towns a third of them shut. Bangor and Ellsworth hold up best; Rockland and Kennebunk are the ones to plan around.
Is anything open on Sunday?
Sunday is better than Monday almost everywhere. The resort towns are strongest, because Sunday is a trading day for them: Old Orchard Beach and Ogunquit are effectively fully open.
Does this account for winter closures?
No, and that matters. These are the weekly hours businesses publish, which do not track seasonal closing. A lobster shack that shuts from Columbus Day to Memorial Day usually keeps its summer hours listed all winter, so this describes a normal trading week rather than a live answer for tonight — and that makes these figures optimistic between Columbus Day and Memorial Day, not pessimistic.
Where do these numbers come from?
The weekly hours the businesses themselves publish, parsed for 721 restaurants across the state. Nothing here is an estimate: a town at 50 percent has half its kitchens closing before eight on its busiest night of the week. Towns with fewer than six restaurants are left out, because one early closer would swing a percentage far enough to mislead. A town means the town and the places immediately around it, which is how the underlying corpus groups them — the Rockland figure includes a handful of kitchens in Thomaston and Owls Head, and Boothbay Harbor takes in Boothbay and Georgetown.
