Cure

The Restaurant

Cure opened in 2014 on State Street, four blocks west of Market Square, and has been quietly run as a chef-driven New American room by chef-owner Julie Cutting-Garand and her husband Sam ever since. The dining room is small at forty-two covers - a main banquette along one wall, a row of two-tops along the opposite, and a low eleven-seat bar in front of an open pass that gives every counter guest direct visual access to the kitchen. The wood floors, soft warm lighting, and white-painted brick walls read as a contemporary Brooklyn bistro rather than a Seacoast room.

The cuisine is chef-driven New American with French and Asian influences rather than a strict regional approach: a tuna crudo with yuzu and Asian pear, a hand-cut tagliatelle with brown-butter morels in spring, a duck breast with cherry agrodolce and shallot confit, a slow-braised short rib with celeriac puree. The menu changes about once a month and the kitchen lets the seasons do most of the structural work. The handmade pasta programme is a particular strength - Cutting-Garand trained at Daniel in New York under chef Daniel Boulud and brings that French-Italian foundation to the Seacoast produce.

The bar programme has a serious cocktail kitchen - about twenty-two house drinks rotating seasonally, a focused mezcal-and-agave section, and a non-alcoholic programme of house shrubs and fermented juices that is unusual for the region. The wine list runs about 110 references with a French-leaning curation - Loire, Beaujolais, Burgundy village wines, Alsace whites - plus a small but well-chosen Oregon Pinot Noir section. Service is owner-led: Sam Cutting-Garand runs the floor on most services and the level of attention to a table is what you would expect from a chef-couple room.