The start of a new year is a good time to reflect.

It’s remarkable that such a compact city as Portland can support so many good restaurants. While the best are often the most popular and the most expensive, what’s left is a hodgepodge of good, fair and indifferent.

I’m thrilled, though, that we have so many special-occasion places in our midst. No urgent need to travel to New York or Boston when we have the likes of Bandol, Hugo’s, Fore Street, Back Bay Grill, Cinque Terre and Five Fifty Five right here.

Café Uffa, manned by Chef James Tranchemontagne, is another one of my favorites. It’s probably the most underrated restaurant in the city. His handling of rustic French country cooking is often sublime. Where else can you order pork rillettes or beef Wellington and other rustic dishes?

I love the food at Street & Company but don’t go there very often. I find the two dining rooms cramped and stuffy, a jumble of closely spaced tables. For me it detracts from the otherwise fine dining experience. I love the “small plates” and ingenious first-court specials. I only wish I could spread out with elbow room.

Beyond that is a vast template of lesser mortals. Besides the three Norm’s and Dogfish Cafe, moderately priced restaurants with good food in nice surroundings are hit and miss.

I’ll often go out to eat spur of the moment. Sometimes we’ll go to a Chinese restaurant (usually Panda Gardens on Brighton Ave.), or choose from the horde of Thai restaurants, which ultimately seem the same, like a dance of musical chairs and chefs. I like Siam, on Fore Street, for its refined Asian cooking. But the rest are marginally satisfying, as if to quell a fleeting urge for exotic flavors.

I enjoy the food at Walter’s on Exchange Street when I go there for lunch. But it doesn’t excite me at dinnertime. I have no qualms about the food, but I don’t feel like I’ve had an evening out. The same with Dave’s. I like it for lunch. At dinnertime, the scene is dull. I find restaurants along a downtown streetscape depressing.

The food at Natasha’s, though good, is not my taste. But I love Mim’s. If only it weren’t so small. On a busy night getting a table is difficult without having to twist and turn through the small space to wait for one.

Therein lays the crux of my dilemma. The Portland restaurant scene is a stage of charming, precious, pocket-sized spaces. Can a place be any smaller, for instance, than the Blue Spoon on Munjoy Hill? The food is very appealing if you happen to catch one of its 4 or 5 tables.

City life needs spontaneity. Sometimes I want to look up in the sky and see something taller than a 4 story building. Indeed, Portland is a very manageable, livable city. But balance is a delicate essential. Dining out contributes to a city’s vitality. Room to roam is in our nature.

On my wish list is space: a good sized dining hall, in an architecturally compelling room, that can serve the breezy American bistro fare that is so easy to like--steak frites, roast chicken, grill fare, meatloaf, lamb stew, pan-seared fish, a great hamburger and plentiful pastas. Even without reservations, it would be nice to walk into such a place, with enough space to offer a comfortable area to wait, if necessary. In a metropolitan area of 250,000, there’s room for such growth to be sustained.

All this, and heaven, too, I suppose. And we can eat, sleep and work in a city surrounded by some of the most beautiful waterways in the world.

One of these days, when Portland finds out what it wants to be when it grows up, larger restaurants might be part of a more vibrant city scenario. The rejuvenation of Bayside, or the development of the waterfront (if the city doesn’t make a mess of it) along Oceangate territory should create new opportunities for many such concerns to flourish. The privilege, after all, of a manageable lifestyle won’t go away so easily.

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