About Maine Eats

Who makes Maine Eats, and how

Maine Eats is an independent app and website by Nicholas Soderstrom: a free guide to 4,216 Maine restaurants, with hand-checked lists of lobster shacks and rolls, clam shacks, red snappers and Italians, whoopie pies, diners, oyster bars and dairy bars. No account, no ads, no tracking.

Who makes it

Nicholas Soderstrom makes the Maine Eats app and this site. Maine Eats is not affiliated with, endorsed by or operated by the State of Maine, Maine CDC or its Health Inspection Program, the Bureau of Alcoholic Beverages and Lottery Operations, the City of Lewiston, the James Beard Foundation, Michelin, Apple, or any restaurant, brand, team or chain.

How the lists are built

Lobster shacks, clam shacks, red snappers and Italians, whoopie pies and donuts, Franco-American food, diners, oyster bars, dairy bars and the icons are hand-checked: each was checked in October 2026 against a 2025 or 2026 source (the place's own website or menu, local news, or a town or chamber listing), with the address checked. Research records facts only, with a source for each place: no review text and no ratings from anyone. Many coastal places are seasonal, and a winter closing isn't a closure; places the research finds closed come off the lists.

The rest of the 4,216 places come from Overture Maps' open place data, the State of Maine's liquor license list (current as of Oct 1, 2026) and the City of Lewiston's inspection list. Map listings are kept only at high confidence, and each place says how sure we are: statewide, the most confident listings matched an on-premises liquor license 44% of the time (only places that serve alcohol hold one, so a coffee shop can't match). Website links are checked, and any that no longer belong to the place are left out.

Health inspections

Maine's official inspection result is Pass or Fail, with no score or grade: under the state's food code rules (10-144 CMR Ch. 201), a place fails with more than 3 critical or more than 10 non-critical violations. The state's results are a one-at-a-time search, so Maine Eats shows a result only where the City of Lewiston posts it: on that place's own page and in its panel in the web search, with the date and a link to the city's report, never as a list. The city's page was read on Oct 8, 2026; its newest posted inspection is from Mar 30, 2026. For anywhere in Maine, look a place up in the state's health inspection search.

Ratings, reviews, hours and photos in the app are Apple Maps' own, shown live in Apple's place card; Maine Eats doesn't store or rank by them.

Updates

This build's restaurant data is from October 8, 2026; the hand checks were done in October 2026. The data is rebuilt when the research or the open data changes, and corrections go into the next update. Places open and close, so check before you go.

Sources and licenses

  • Overture Maps Foundation (overturemaps.org), release 2026-09-23.1: restaurant listings and websites, filtered and reformatted for Maine Eats. Data from Meta, Microsoft, DAC and BrightQuery, available under the Community Data License Agreement – Permissive 2.0. Data from Foursquare, © Foursquare Labs, Inc., available under the Apache License 2.0; see the notice below. Data from AllThePlaces, available under CC0 1.0. The same licenses cover the web search's data files.
  • Maine Bureau of Alcoholic Beverages and Lottery Operations: liquor license data, published monthly as public information; this build uses the list current as of Oct 1, 2026, for each premises' trade name, address and license class only, never the license holder. The State of Maine makes no warranty as to the data and does not endorse Maine Eats.
  • City of Lewiston: Restaurant Inspection Reports, shown as posted with their dates and linked to the city's reports. The City of Lewiston does not endorse Maine Eats.
  • Maine CDC Health Inspection Program: licenses and inspects Maine's eating places; its health inspection search is where to look a place up.
  • Town outlines: U.S. Census Bureau cartographic boundary files, 2025 (public domain): the outlines of Maine's 529 towns, cities, plantations and unorganized territories, used to place each restaurant in its town, and the county lines the web map draws.
  • Honors: James Beard Foundation awards, nominees, semifinalists and America's Classics, reported as facts and checked by hand against the foundation's own announcements. James Beard Foundation and James Beard Award are trademarks of the James Beard Foundation. There is no MICHELIN Guide for Maine. MICHELIN is a trademark of Michelin.
  • Maps: in the app, maps, place cards and directions are by Apple Maps.
  • Research: lobster shacks, clam shacks, red snappers and Italians, whoopie pies, Franco-American food, diners, oyster bars, dairy bars and years at an address are our own research, with a source recorded for each place.

Foursquare NOTICE

Foursquare OS Places Notice

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The Foursquare OS Places dataset (the “Data”) is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the “License”). You may not use, modify, or distribute the Data except in compliance with the License.

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We also encourage you to join our Placemaker community where you can contribute and provide suggestions to improve the accuracy of the Data for future releases for yourself and others.

Notice of changes: Maine Eats filtered the Data to eating and drinking places in Maine, removed duplicates and closed, adult or unverifiable listings, and reformatted it for this app and website (2026).

Contact

Corrections, a missing or closed place, or anything else: nick@eatsranked.com. See also the privacy policy and terms of use.