Arborvine, Blue Hill, ME

Arborvine, Blue Hill, ME
After much debate, Marci and I decided on Arborvine for dinner. It is within walking distance of the inn and seemed to have an interesting menu. It’s an older home nestled in the trees. When you enter, the bar is on your left and there are several rooms for diners. Outside is a small garden where people can have a drink while they wait. We didn’t have a reservation and the hostess told us it would be about 15 minutes, so we looked at the wine list to pick out a bottle. It’s a diverse wine list with a selection of Italian, South American, French and California wines priced between $30-100.
We tried a Malbec but it was too heavy on the fruit and not very complex so we talked with the bar tender, explaining we’d like something a bit more earthy, medium bodied but with some fruit. She recommended a Sicilian wine which immediately made me happy because I love most southern Italian wines, Furat 2005. It was exactly as we’d asked for.
The menu includes about 7 appetizers and 7 entrees with a list of an additional 4 or 5 entrees on the back as specials for the night. It took us a long time to decide, but finally we selected a crab and mango salad, a leek and potato soup, a pappardelle pasta with clams and shrimp in a cream sauce and a halibut with lemon butter and polenta.
The crab and mango salad is served stacked with a hearty serving of peekytoe crab on the top. It needed salt, but once we added that it was excellent except for the cantaloupe which I hate and would have asked to not be included had I known. Marci’s soup, on the other hand, was pretty tasteless. We added salt to that but it didn’t perk it up much and that remained uneaten. My pasta was a large portion with lots of perfectly cooked shrimp and two clam shells and then some clams (I think) in the actual sauce. I don’t know clams well, so I wasn’t sure exactly what the little brown things were in the pasta. It tasted very good and flavorful but very rich.
Marci’s halibut was nicely cooked, moist and flaky. The small serving of saffron sauce surrounding the fish was tasty but there wasn’t enough, and I just didn’t think the halibut had enough flavor on its own. The polenta was a rather odd preparation. It was shaped like a triangle and seemed to have been fried or baked so the outside was crisp and the inside was very soft and airy but it almost seemed like an egg preparation rather than polenta.
We didn’t finish all of the entrees, but we did get through the halibut. Our waiter was very helpful but almost too ingratiating or something. The hostess was very helpful and everyone was very nice.