Portland named the best small city in America ‘to spend the weekend’

The food, travel and culture website Thrillist.com has been kind to Maine.

Last year, it named the Old Port one of the country’s best drinking neighborhoods, it put Portland on its list of the most underrated food cities in the U.S., it placed the century-old Simones’ World Famous Hot Dogs in Lewiston among America’s best hot dog joints, and even went so far as to rank Maine the second best overall in its “definitive and final rankings” of all the states.

Now the website is back with its list of the 25 best small cities to spend a weekend, and wouldn’t you know it? Portland is sitting at the top.

Thrillist researchers looked at all the cities in the U.S. with less than 90,000 residents, then dug through numbers of bars, restaurants, museums, parks and outdoor activities, among other things, to determine which ones were the best places to string together three days of fun.

The website highlighted Portland’s vibrant restaurant scene — giving shoutouts to J’s Oyster Bar, Pai Men Miyake and Street & Co., among many others — as well as its proximity to landmark lighthouses and beaches.

To read the full writeup, click here.

Portland was one of four New England communities to make the list, along with Burlington, Vermont (No. 8); Newport, Rhode Island (No. 16); Northampton, Massachusetts (No. 23).

Coming in at No. 2 on the list was tiny little 3,800-person Carmel, California, followed by Bozeman, Montana.

Seth Koenig

About Seth Koenig

Seth has nearly a decade of professional journalism experience and writes about the greater Portland region.