Less is more was not the case at 20 Milk Street last night when I went there for dinner with some friends.

Basically I like 20 Milk Street, Portland’s only posh--by Maine standards--dining room. The padded walls, the well spaced tables, the high ceilings and comfortable upholstered club chairs create a serene experience. The service is good and generally well paced.

And when you’re in the mood for a good steak, rack of lamb or roast duck, I’ve found that you won’t be disappointed here.

I made two mistakes in what I ordered for my dinner, while my dining companions had nothing to complain about whatsoever.

I began with the tuna tartar. Here it’s sushi grade that’s very good. However, gobs of accompanying wasabi were so overwhelming that it made the dish nearly inedible. No matter how much you pushed the tuna around you couldn’t avoid an encounter with the offending condiment.

I’ve had the tartar here before and each time it seems to be made differently. Usually it has a few appropriate dabs of wasabi, which is just enough to get a hit.

While my friends ordered the fillet of beef, which comes with a variety of sauces, from demi-glace to seasoned butter, I chose swordfish, the night’s special.

I was in the mood for grilled swordfish. To me the perfect preparation is to grill it fast over high heat and flavor it simply with salt, pepper, olive oil and lemon juice.

Instead it was suffocating under a heap of crab meat and a few other indiscernible toppings, rendering it senseless and tasteless.

Other dishes fared very well. I do love their creamed spinach. Their version is not an overwrought puree but rather baby spinach leaves that are gently sautéed and held together in a wonderfully creamy composition. The mushrooms and onions is another good side dish. Both allow you to devise a lean menu by having these well made and satisfying accompaniments instead of potatoes.

I think when you go to a steak house, it’s best to have what the category implies. And if grilled steaks of swordfish, salmon or tuna are offered they should be served plain, simple and relatively unadorned.

Still, I like 20 Milk Street. Keep it simple, fellas.

For that matter, many menus around town do need some tweaking in other ways. For someone like me who eats out often, going to restaurants whose menus change infrequently is challenging.

I understand the need for restaurants to have a set menu. It’s done for measures of economy and efficiency. It’s especially necessary because of the relatively small dining population in a modest-sized city like Portland, where the uncertainty of a good or bad night is happenstance.

But restaurants who offer a set list then need to present nightly specials. Even those eateries in town who tweak the printed list with variations on the same dish are not going far enough.

Consistently busy restaurants like Fore Street have a new menu daily--though some dishes are always offered, like the pork chop or the chicken. Still, one could go there seven nights a week and have a different meal each time.

Caiola’s changes its menu fairly regularly and offers one or two specials every night. Five Fifty-Five and Back Bay Grill fine tune their menus daily, though generally within the confines of a steady list of offerings. I’d love to see new dishes offered as specials each night. The chefs are so good I want to experience as much as I can of their vast abilities and talents.

We’re blessed to have such fine restaurants here, and I think our local chefs can take more chances by offering a revolving repertoire of novel dishes above and beyond the norm.

Five Fifty-Five, Cinque Terre and Back Bay are very creative with pairings and combinations, though I wouldn’t mind seeing radical departures at times.

Almost no one, for instance, serves sweet potatoes. And it’s hardly a strange ingredient. We have every guise of white potato, from the ubiquitous “garlic mashed” to endless slice and dice. For a while in New York and at many so-called new American cuisine establishments sweet potatoes were a staple. Often pureed and spiked with balsamic vinegar, they were served as the underpinnings to lamb, chicken and pork.

I prepare sweet potatoes at home all the time. It’s a good fibrous alternative to white potatoes, which will literally stick to your ribs more than the sweet potato.

Simply roast them in the oven until soft, peel off the skin and mash them with a potato masher or put through a food mill. Add generous amounts of butter and heavy cream and season liberally with salt and pepper and you’ll have a wonderful dish indeed. The secret ingredient is the cream, which imparts a sweet subtle taste and texture.

Speaking of food staples, local chefs should go beyond pork chops or rack of lamb. It’s everywhere. Give us something new. The other night I had a delicious dish of braised lamb shoulder at Caiola’s. I loved it. And wouldn’t it be nice to have roast loin of pork or lamb in new guises, stuffed with herbs or fruits? Perhaps some game dishes too? Fore Street’s and Five-Fifty Five’s pork chop offerings are sublime, but why not offer other cuts and other versions?

Breast of duck is another dish that you can have 10 times over at various Portland restaurants. Roast chicken fares pretty well in town. Back Bay Grill’s version is wonderful and they’re constantly changing the accompaniments.

Even first courses seem to follow the same road map. Without fail there’s the salad of baby greens, with goat cheese and other additions. There’s always a tartar of some sort. Back Bay’s is probably the best in town. Bang Island mussels are rampant. Maybe a dish of stuffed mussels instead might be fun for a change. I had an artichoke salad at a Boston restaurant recently that was novel and different.

Five Fifty-Five’s flat bread, which is really divine pizza, is a must have once in a while and I gobble it up like a starving maniac.

Back Bay’s and Five Fifty Five’s first course soups are often beautifully prepared and elegant. Fore Street’s, though, are uninspiring. Yet I did have a parsnip soup there recently which was brilliant.

It’s a nice twist to have prime rib occasionally, often a staple of private club dining rooms. But it’s served at the Front Room on Sunday, for their Sunday Night Dinners and very well done. In fact, they’re coming up with some pretty creative dishes, and I’m looking forward to going there more often.

Sunday Night in Portland, however, has few alternatives for dining out. I suppose many of us like to stay home. I particularly like to invite friends over for a hearty Sunday night meal. Last week I did that and prepared mushroom soup for a first course followed by a roast fresh ham, pureed sweet potatoes and cabbage braised with Meyer lemons. For dessert I served buttermilk cake with chocolate icing. The simplest icing is made by melting semi-sweet chocolate and mixing it with sour cream. The finished texture, much like a ganache, is basically sour cream flavored with chocolate. Leroux on Commercial Street has an excellent selection of high quality baking chocolate.

But if you want to go out there aren’t many choices on Sunday night. Katahdin would be one choice. It’s homey and funky and relaxed, just the sort of place for a simple a Sunday night dinner. But, alas, they’re closed on Sundays.

Thankfully, Cinque Terre is open on Sundays and I often go there, where the ever- changing menu has great appeal.

As it happens Sunday night supper is a topic getting a lot of play lately in newspaper food pages like the Times and the Boston Globe. It’s all due to the publication of a new cookbook called Sunday Suppers at Lucques, the ever trendy L.A. restaurant owned by chef Suzanne Goin. She started offering Sunday night suppers that an A-list crowd has flocked to for years.

It’s really not a bad idea and one that would go over well in Portland. Harding Smith at the Front Room does it and his have become quite popular.

In any case I have the cookbook and have tried several recipes. Be warned: these are monumental preparations best left to the restaurant chef who has help. One of the dishes that I prepared took several days to make. In the end it wasn’t really worth it.

It was Tunisian lamb and eggplant stew. It’s served with farro, which is not an easy ingredient to find but is available at Miccuci’s and the Portland Spice Company.

I am grateful to the book, however, for making me re-discover farro, a wonderful, extremely healthy and flavorful grain. It used to be served often in New York restaurants with Mediterranean-inspired menus.

But Goin’s preparations are not matter-of-fact. They are painstaking, though not unremarkable. The recipes are a challenge and you’ll need the entire weekend to make most dishes ready for a Sunday supper.

Restaurant or celebrity chef cookbooks are hit and miss anyway. The most reliable that I’ve encountered have been those by Daniel Boulud, Patricia Wells, Thomas Keller (of The French Laundry and Bouchon) and a few others.

After all is said and done, good, bad or best it’s not hard to encounter great eating in Portland. Our reputable dining scene is gets better and more varied all the time.

E-mail this entry to a friend