Long Grain

The Restaurant

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.

The menu reads as authentic Thai street and regional cooking executed with a Maine pantry. The kitchen runs its own curry pastes, ferments its own fish sauce in season, and changes the printed menu about every three weeks to follow Maine's growing calendar. Signature plates include the khao soi — a Northern Thai egg-noodle curry with braised chicken thigh and house-made chili oil that has held its place since opening — a tom kha gai built around local mushrooms and Maine corn in late summer, a pad see ew with hand-rolled rice noodles and Knox-County beef, a grilled Maine octopus with green-papaya salad and roasted-peanut nam jim, and a rotating curry programme that draws on Penobscot Bay seafood (scallops, halibut, lobster) when the season delivers. The handmade Thai dumplings and the house-fermented hot sauces are the standing under-the-radar orders.

The bar is short and intentional: a deliberately tight cocktail list anchored by a house Thai basil gimlet, three local Maine beers on tap (Allagash, Oxbow, Bissell Brothers), and an under-thirty-label wine programme that biases toward off-dry German Riesling and Alsatian Pinot Gris — the wines that pair through chili heat without losing the food. The desserts are made in-house: a sticky rice with mango when the fruit is at peak, a coconut-pandan panna cotta, and a working program of seasonal fruit ices. For a Camden evening that wants the food itself to be the credential rather than the room, Long Grain is the address every working Maine chef and every visiting food writer puts at the top of the recommendation list.