
If you want to reach the tiny Norimoto bakery, don’t reach for the telephone. Owner Atsuko Fujimoto, center. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald
Once, and not all that long ago, either, it would have been unthinkable for a restaurant or food business to go without a telephone number. Entire plays — OK, at least one play, “Fully Committed” — were written about the high-stakes game of landing a reservation by telephone at a hot restaurant. Tourists would enlist hotel concierges to phone for the same, tipping more, sometimes lavishly, the harder the reservation was to score. Even if all you needed was a pepperoni pizza from the neighborhood pizza joint or a chocolate birthday cake from the local bakery, you picked up the phone and talked to a real live human.
These days, that seems like ancient history, or, at the least, quaint. For a decade or two now, diners have turned to services like Resy and Open Table to reserve dinners out. Restaurants and other food businesses have been fast to adopt social media, posting specials and pop-up events on Instagram and are easily reachable through those channels, as well as email, websites and point of sales systems. Given all the communications alternatives, a handful of food businesses in Greater Portland have cut the (telephone) cord entirely.
In Portland, the Continental, Quanto Basta, Norimoto bakery and all-day cafe Smalls do not list phone numbers. The Palace Diner in Biddeford, while it has a listed phone number, notes on its website that “we no longer answer the phone or regularly check messages.” There was no number for the now-closed, once wildly popular Maples cafe-bakery in Yarmouth and later in New Gloucester. And for its first few months of operation, until its takeout business took off, Lil Chippy in Portland went without a number. It has one now, but don’t look for it on its website. It isn’t listed there.
These restaurants and food businesses have a few things in common. For the most part, they don’t take reservations. Nor do they take food orders. They’re casual spots, and typically successful ones; though they probably wouldn’t say so themselves, they may not need to answer the phone in order to get your business. Perhaps most to the point, these are small businesses, with few employees. And those employees — hustling to flip pancakes, fill coffee cups, roll out galettes, make sandwiches, and, most of all, provide courteous, efficient service to the customers who are actually right there in front of them — simply don’t have time to pick up the phone. As they see it, in these situations, true hospitality means not taking a call.
If it’s a trend locally, it’s an established trend elsewhere. As Pete Wells wrote in his last column as New York Times restaurant critic last August, “Now restaurants hardly ever pay someone to pick up the phone, if they have one; few newer places bother getting a number because so few calls come in. Eulalie, in TriBeCa, is one of the few that still takes reservations over the phone, a quirk so rare that it seems like a willfully perverse exercise in historical re-enactment.”
CUTTING THE CORD
The owners of these local restaurants, bakeries and cafes say that when customers used to call — inevitably just as every seat was occupied, all staff hands were on deck and the line of customers snaked out the door — they’d often ask exasperating questions, ones readily answered on websites and through social media: What days are you open? What are your winter hours? What’s on your menu? Or, as Norimoto owner and baker Atsuko Fujimoto summed it up in a kind of shorthand, “Do you have cannoli?” For the record, Norimoto does not have cannoli.

The staff at the tiny Palace Diner no longer answers the phone, says co-owner Chad Conley. At Rose Foods in Portland, a larger place with a sizable takeout business that is also owned by Conley, the phone is still in use. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Portland Press Herald
In the case of Palace Diner, co-owner Chad Conley remembers getting calls from would-be diners in their cars who would try to explain their location and then need directions. “I think, especially in the age of ubiquitous GPS, it’s a little frustrating to be asked that question,” he said politely. At Lil Chippy, co-owner Ashley Wolf said she was at first “skeptical about having a phone, just based on prior experience. You get a lot of spam calls so instead of helping a guest, the staff ends up talking to someone for three minutes about canceling the Comcast (account) that you don’t have.”
For these proprietors, the decision to go without a phone was in some cases deliberate and in others almost accidental. At Palace Diner, which has just 15 counter seats, Conley said that during the pandemic the phone was a critical way to take orders and communicate with customers. “But when we reopened the dining room, we decided that that was going to be the moment we turned it off.”
At the former Maples Bakery in its first location in Yarmouth, owner Robin Ray didn’t feel good about the telephone interactions she and her staff were often having with customers. The “frugal” staffing, Ray said, meant that everybody had to jump in and answer the phone when it rang. It rang a lot. “Most of those times if we could get to it, it was a question that would be answered with a ‘No, I’m sorry. We don’t do that. We don’t take pre-orders.’ So the phone became this very negative place and space, where the ringing would be annoying. It would just ring and ring because you couldn’t get to it. Or when you were able to, you would have to say no to somebody. Obviously no is negative, and it was really, truthfully, just such a morale drain.”
In early 2022, Maples got rid of its phone.

Remember the landline? Some restaurants and food businesses no longer list phone numbers for customers. Szasz Csilla/Shutterstock
The situation was a little different at Norimoto. On opening day in October 2021, Fujimoto was the only person on the premises, handling both all the baking and all the sales. She’d expected the bakery to grow gradually, giving her time to set up a phone system, figure out her staffing needs and slowly deal with the many other tasks a new business faces. In fact, “I was busy from the first day,” she said. “So there was no reason for me to list the phone because I cannot answer it.”
Fujimoto grew up in Japan, where, she said, there are many restaurants that don’t list phone numbers. Not only that, they don’t list addresses, either. These are old school places, she said, the sort with longstanding, devoted followings. “The thinking is,” she said, “you have to be in the know.” Was that her thinking at Norimoto? “Not really. I just kind of gradually… I ended up not listing,” she said. “At first, I had a plan to have a sign. I had a plan to have a (phone) line.
“You don’t have a sign?!”
“Not yet,” she laughed. “I had a plan.”
CALL AND RESPONSE
What has been the response? Have customers pushed back, frustrated if they can’t reach a business by phone? Have these businesses lost business? We can’t speak for The Continental and Smalls, as despite repeated attempts to reach them through many modes of communication, we never heard back. We did reach Quanto Basta owner/pizza baker Betsy English and speak with her briefly on a personal phone; she declined to be interviewed. But other phone-free restaurateurs said that by and large, complaints have been few and their businesses have not suffered.
In Yarmouth, Ray got scant pushback, though in New Gloucester, she said, a small cohort of vocal customers demanded to know how she thought she could possibly run a business without a phone. Her advice in retrospect: Food businesses in small towns probably should have a phone.
Conley said that on occasion he hears from a frustrated customer whose takeout order the restaurant got wrong. “Their only option is to come back to the restaurant or to email us. We can’t address that in the moment over the phone,” he said, “and that is something that’s a compromise for us. What we’ve decided is that on balance it’s better for the business and for the majority of our customers, if we accept that. We’ve got to let that one go.” If said customer sends an email about the bungled order, Palace Diner staff will respond “in a non-time sensitive manner,” Conley said, with a refund and an apology.
The no-phone policy, he added, has been good for the staff. “It’s something we can do for our service staff to communicate to them, ‘Hey, you just have to focus on the people that are right in front of you, and let us worry about the folks that are disgruntled and wanted to call us.'”
As Norimoto baker Lindsay Matranga was shaping focaccia and sprinkling loaves with seaweed on a January morning, she observed that online systems are actually much more convenient for the customer, who can reserve tables or place food orders at any hour; they needn’t wait until a business is open. She couldn’t imagine, she added, her own teenage kids, even when they reach adulthood, “ever having the skills or the inclination to call. They don’t know how to use the phone, and they don’t want to use the phone.”
Agreed fellow Norimoto baker Fern Thurston, who is 31, “I feel bad calling a place when they’re open. It feels like they are busy.”
That sentiment was echoed by Jessica Robb, 31, front-of-house coordinator at Fore Street restaurant, which is famous for its personal and personable reservations system; seven days a week, a reservationist is there to answer phone calls and book tables. But when Robb plans to eat out, she said she usually relies on Open Table or Resy.
“I think that most industry folks, at this point, do feel this sort of heightened sense of wanting to make themselves as easy to interact with as possible.” She laughed. “It just mortifies us to even begin to imagine that we could approach being even slightly complicated. I’ll look at the website and really follow the instructions. It tends to be my assumption that it’s easier for the restaurant for me to book online.”
EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN
Phones may not be necessary for some businesses, like bakeries or places without tables for dining in, but on the whole, Carla Tracy, of Carla Tracy Public Relations in Portland, is a believer. She numbers among her clients such well-regarded restaurants as Aragosta at Goose Cove in Deer Isle, the Alna Store, and Mr. Tuna and Ocotillo in Portland.
“I think you have to have a way to reach a human being because — this is something a favorite client of mine used to say — ‘The juice is worth the squeeze.’ You never know if that person is going to, you know, maybe they are booking a 150-person private event and they have very specific questions and it could be a very lucrative phone call.”
While up-to-date information about the restaurant or food business on its website and social media accounts is crucial, Tracy continued, and while new telephone systems that use AI technology can help field easy questions from customers and prevent disruption when a restaurant is especially busy, “People want human connection too. It’s a way to make a connection with a guest. Don’t miss it.”

Former Fore Street reservationist Joshua Dore is shown in this archive photo in 2016. To some it seems old-fashioned to answer the phone, but the restaurant strongly believes in the human connection from the start of a customer’s experience. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Portland Press Herald
That sentiment is front and center at Fore Street. “First and foremost, it’s something that Dana (Street, co-owner) really believes in. He really feels strongly that maintaining the human aspect is important,” Robb said. “Even before (Fore Street) was opened in 1996, it was meant to be this old school, comfort, true hospitality space.”
Though you can book a table at Fore Street online (for a seat at the bar, you must call), the option to telephone remains. Robb speaks very highly of the two reservationists — one full-time, one part-time — and said that when customers come in to dine, they often ask to say hello to the nice person they spoke with to make their reservation. “It certainly adds to the the warmth of hospitality,” she said. The reservationists, who use a landline with a cord (!), are stationed by the front door beginning at 9 a.m. Though Fore Street is not yet open for service (it opens at 4:30 p.m.), if tourists have heard about what may be Portland’s most famous restaurant and they want a peek inside, the door is always open.
Having a full-time reservationist is, of course, a serious financial commitment. Restaurateurs say the phone line itself is often not an added expense, as it’s usually bundled with other services. And Robb readily concedes that smaller restaurants, or those that are not part of a restaurant group, may not be able to afford it. That said, “This is something that the restaurant simply believes in,” she said, “and that’s part of the Fore Street ethos.”
Nationally, like handwritten notecards, home pickling, and LPs, though, the era of a human at the other end of the telephone could be returning, at least for restaurants of a certain type. Earlier in January, The Week listed “Reservations for traditionalists” — referencing landlines and “handwritten entries in custom-made leather-bound books kept at the greeter’s station” — in its Sunday Shortlist as trends that emerged in 2024.
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