With all of the changes that Duckfat, the Belgian frites window-inspired restaurant in Portland, Maine, has faced in its 20-year history — COVID-19 lockdowns, booming port tourism — it feels fair to say that its team knows how to not just weather a storm but hold on to a good thing.
The whole concept of the restaurant, which opened in 2005, “really started off with Maine potatoes,” says general manager Trevor Lilly of what became the concept’s cult favorite: duck fat-fried, Belgian-style fries. “They remain one of [the restaurant’s] signature ingredients.”
Duckfat founders Nancy Pugh and Rob Evans helped put Portland on the food tourism map with Hugo’s, a farm-to-table, tasting menu restaurant they opened in 1988. (It shuttered in 2023.) Duckfat represented a more casual approach: cones of hand-cut frites with a choice of dipping sauce (Heinz or truffle ketchup; garlic aioli; horseradish, spicy, or curry mayo), duck confit or meatloaf panini, and “$5 milkshakes” (actually $4). Pugh and Evans retired from the restaurant in 2024, but their ethos endures. “[They] were always committed to local ingredients,” says Lilly, who has been with the restaurant since 2008, “and I think that is part of why people keep coming back.”
Today the Duckfat empire includes the window-service Duckfat Frites Shack, which opened in 2018, and the newest addition, a food truck called Duckfat on the Fly. But pull up a chair at Duckfat’s intimate Middle Street flagship, and you’ll have your choice of fries with additional sauces (new to the menu since ’05 is a Thai chili mayo and a rotating special fry sauce). There’s now poutine with local Pineland Farms cheese curd, small plates of rabbit rillettes and house-cured labneh, craft sodas, braised chicken, and Oaxacan-style brisket panini. Most significantly, Lilly says, charcuterie is now all over the menu, “both in terms of the meat production we’re doing for the panini and the very consistent charcuterie menu we have been doing for a while now. Both were a big passion of Rob’s.” The bacon panini served in 2005 is now made with house-smoked tasso ham.
Lilly says what hasn’t changed over time is the restaurant’s community-minded outlook. “Pretty much every table at the Middle Street location, for example, is a communal table. And that also started out as a way to [optimize] space,” he says with a laugh, “but we know that people enjoy that [connection].”
Staff member Jarvis Witte, who grew up in the food scene in Portland, says that Duckfat’s accolades over the past two decades have created high expectations from both the community and growing throngs of tourists.
Both Lilly and Witte insist that besides the expansions, Duckfat hasn’t changed much, continuing to lean into a sense of playfulness and local-minded creativity. The Duckfat Frites Shack works with its neighbor Oxbow Brewing Company to take advantage of what Lilly calls “a lot of fun, communal outdoor space. You can order your beer from them and food from us.” Far from pigeonholing itself as a fries and panini shop, he says, the Duckfat of 2025 looks forward to showing customers — whether they come by cruise ship or from up the block — a taste of the Portland they love.
