Camden’s Greatest Tables
5 restaurants listedGet the complete Camden dining guide.
New openings, reservation tips, and editor picks — updated quarterly. Free to join.
$ under $40 · $$ $40–$80 · $$$ $80–$150 · $$$$ $150+ per person
Best for First Date in Camden
Best for Business Dinner in Camden
The Top 5 Camden Restaurants
Natalie's at Camden Harbour Inn
Natalie's occupies the ground floor of the Camden Harbour Inn — an 1874 Victorian on the high ground above Camden Harbor, now a Small Luxury Hotels of the World property under Dutch owners Raymond Brunyanszki and Oscar Verest. The dining room seats fifty across two parlor-style spaces and an enclosed harbor-view porch, with a separate fireplace lounge for cocktails. Service is white-cloth, captain-led, and run at a tempo that treats a four-hour dinner as the format rather than the exception. The property holds the AAA Four-Diamond rating continuously and was the first Maine restaurant named to OpenTable's Top 100 Best Restaurants in America — a distinction it has now defended for multiple years.
Hartstone Inn
The Hartstone Inn occupies a Mansard-style Victorian built in 1835 on Elm Street — four blocks west of the harbor, set behind a small front garden and a pair of original cast-iron gas lamps. The property has been a Camden inn since the 1970s and holds the AAA Four-Diamond rating for both lodging and dining. The dining room seats forty across two linked parlor-style spaces, with original wide-plank floors, three working fireplaces, and a window line that frames the inn's English-style perennial garden. The room is run by chef-proprietor Michael Salmon, a Brussels-trained chef and ACF certified executive chef whose career includes Boca Raton's Bonaventure Country Club and a culinary residency in Burgundy.
40 Paper
40 Paper occupies the ground floor of a restored 19th-century commercial building at 40 Washington Street — one block north of Main Street, in the quieter dining quadrant of downtown Camden. The room reads deliberately as a European bistro: exposed brick, original Maine pine floors, low pendant lighting over a long bar, an open kitchen window line, and a series of two-tops along the front window that gives the room its evening character. The dining floor seats about seventy, with a small private back room for groups of ten to fourteen. The format is unhurried — the kitchen opens at 4:00pm sharp, holds a 4-to-6pm aperitivo hour, and runs dinner service through 8:00pm.
Long Grain
Long Grain occupies a small storefront at 20 Washington Street — a twenty-foot frontage two doors south of 40 Paper, with a single dining room that seats about forty across a row of two-tops, a pair of four-tops, and a small bar at the back wall. The room is deliberately spare: white walls, polished concrete floor, a single line of pendant lights, and an open kitchen pass that gives the dining floor visual access to every plate. The format is intentional: no reservations on most nights, a wait list at the door that runs forty-five minutes deep on summer weekends, and a kitchen that closes when the food is gone. Chef-owner Ravin Nakjaroen — born and raised in Bangkok, trained in Thailand and across the US — has been a James Beard Foundation semi-finalist for Best Chef Northeast on multiple occasions, and the room has held its place at the centre of Maine's regional food conversation for over a decade.
Peter Ott's on the Water
Peter Ott's has been a Camden institution for over forty years — the original room was a Bayview Street tavern that the late Peter Ott opened in 1974, and in 2019 the restaurant moved a hundred yards down to 16 Bayview Landing, a purpose-built waterfront dining room on the southern edge of Camden Harbor. The new floor is a long, low-ceilinged space with a window line that runs the full length of the dining room and opens onto the harbor's small-boat moorings; in summer the wraparound dock seats another twenty-four covers within twenty feet of the schooners returning from their day charters. The room reads as a working harbor-side restaurant rather than a tourist concession — the staff is largely a multi-year veteran group, the wine list is deeper than the format usually allows, and the kitchen has held its menu through three owners with conviction.