Kittery Food Mart + Fort McClary: the inexpensive Maine lunch with a view

Some favorite places announce themselves with hydrangeas and shingled inns. Some are a food mart off the road where you can get lunch without turning lunch into a project. We are devoted to both kinds.

Kittery Food Mart works for us because it solves the least romantic part of a Maine drive quickly: everybody needs something to eat, not everybody wants the same thing, and nobody particularly needs table service. We can go in, gather sandwiches or snacks and drinks, and get back out with the day still intact. Then, instead of eating beside the highway, we take the food somewhere that feels like Maine.

Fort McClary is the trick. Water, grass, old stone and timber, a view across the river, and enough history to make the stop interesting without requiring anyone to absorb a museum’s worth of information. You can walk a little. You can look. You can sit and eat. You can decide the weather is doing too much and go back to the car. The visit can expand or contract without becoming a failure.

That pairing—practical first, beautiful second—is one of our most reliable family formulas. We are not asking a picturesque restaurant to solve hunger, waiting, noise, unfamiliar menus and a long meal all at once. We handle lunch simply, then spend our energy on the part we actually came to Maine for: the air, the water, the old fort, the feeling that you have crossed into somewhere else.

It is also wonderfully repeatable. On a northbound trip, this can be the first little Maine chapter. On the way home, it can be the last. No reservations. No performance. Just food in a bag and a good view waiting a few minutes away. We have learned that those are often the stops that become family lore.

We would never have put this combination on a glossy “best of Maine” list, which is precisely why it belongs on ours. It is inexpensive, flexible, local and beautiful in the order that matters. We can take care of the practical problem, then enjoy the view. There is a great deal of freedom in not making every good day prove that it was special.

Family story, lightly edited from our notes, memory and camera roll. The practical details below are kept separate and checked as their own field notes.