How to Cook a Moose (19 page)

Back at the mill the next morning, I sat with Erin at a table in the sunlight, drinking coffee.

“I love that you have an all-female crew,” I said.

She laughed. “We call ourselves the Estrogen Café. In our medicine chest there's Aleve, tampons, and vitamin B-twelve. We all get our periods at the same time.”

“I saw one guy here last night,” I said.

“That's our dishwasher. He changed his name from something normal to Dirt. He's the most gentle, peaceful guy. I feel so bad when
diners overhear us going, ‘Hey, Dirt, can you do this?' Like a room full of women are abusing him.” We both laughed.

We talked about how she is entirely self-taught and, despite working in catering for many years, never went to culinary school.

“You'll find no fancy sauces, smoking guns, or sous vide here,” she said. “I'm not Noma! You should recognize every word on my menus.” And indeed, her instinctively pure palate comes through in her unfussy, astonishingly delicious cooking, her minimal, beautiful presentations. Her dishes are rooted in tradition; many of her recipes came from her mother and grandmother, which she then elevated and made her own. Her menus are unpretentious but sophisticated, using as few ingredients as possible in combinations both exciting and viscerally satisfying.

For Erin, the magic is all in the ingredients. “They're the stars,” she said. “I get the best produce. My friend will text me a photo of a cauliflower in her field and I'll say, ‘bring me twelve of those.' Later, she serves them herself.”

“So your staff are farmers?”

“They farm by day and cook here at night. They're my best friends. They love to get away from their husbands and kids. They teach me about food and pick out stuff for me, like bolted cilantro, which they know I love. We're curating each other's businesses. And they get to plate the salads made from the greens they grow.”

“So you're as farm-to-table as it gets,” I said. “And as local.”

“My mother even works here,” she said. “She's the front-of-house meet-and-greeter.”

Then she told me that she'd even made the tables herself, in classic Maine DIY fashion, out of barn boards and plumbing fixtures.

“They're spaced far apart because I want it to feel comfortable, like you're eating dinner in my house,” she said. “I want that homey feeling.”

I confess I fell a little in love with her at that moment.

Erin was born and raised in Freedom. By the time she was fourteen, she was flipping burgers on the line in her parents' diner, the Ridge Top, only a mile from the old mill. After college at Northeastern in Boston, she moved to California to become a doctor.

“Then I came home for Christmas, and there was my old high-school sweetheart . . . one night with him, I got pregnant. I moved back home to live with my parents at twenty-one. My ex-boyfriend wasn't at all interested in being a father at that point because our lives were going in totally different directions, so he's never been a part of my son's life at all, and I've always been fine with that.”

She smiled. “My mom was my Lamaze partner! I named my son Jaim for the French, ‘I love,'
j'aime
.” She pronounced it
Jaym
, like James without the “s.”

“As a single mother, I got to pick the name; I didn't have to consult with anyone else. After Jaim was born, I started baking at home, as a single mom. I delivered cakes and cookies.”

Erin got married at twenty-four and moved with her new husband to an apartment in an old bank building in Belfast.

“I worked for a local catering company for years and years. I started thinking, What am I doing? I had to create something. Turning thirty was a crisis for me. I struggled with that birthday. I needed direction, a stake in something creative. I didn't have the money for culinary school. Why would I go into debt to learn a trade that would never make enough money to pay it off? I did the math: I couldn't afford to move somewhere else, so I got creative and scrappy.”

In December 2010, she started an underground supper club out of the apartment in Belfast she shared with her husband, calling it the Lost Kitchen.

“Legally it was a fine line,” she said. “It was in my house, one dinner a week, BYOB; people made donations for ingredients instead of paying. I taught myself to cook on a four-burner 1987 GE stove. No recipes, no rules. I was obsessive about reading cookbooks and experimenting, and my customers were my guinea pigs. I'd serve a five-course meal once a week.”

This rigorous culinary autodidacticism paid off.

“By November, dinners were selling out in two minutes, every time I sent out an e-mail, with fifty people on the wait list. I'd look outside and not see a single person I knew. We'd turn on a light, like a brothel. People would ring the doorbell. As they came in, I checked their names off the list until they were all there. Then we turned off the light, locked the doors, and served dinner. They sat at four communal tables, family-style. It was so exciting, a real confidence boost. For all the years I'd been catering, I had to adhere strictly to preset recipes, proportions multiplied out to feed a hundred. It was so freeing to just cook. So exciting. But my hope was always to open a restaurant.”

In May 2011, she and her then-husband bought their Belfast building, an old bank. After a five-month renovation and build-out, Erin opened the Lost Kitchen as a bona fide restaurant downstairs.

“I put my heart and soul into that place and had crazy success,” she said. “I had a following. My career was taking off. Then I lost the place.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“My husband got it in the divorce,” she said. “He was so angry when I left, but I had to. I felt like he was threatened by my growing success. I wanted to grow and develop, and he didn't want that; he wanted his pretty little trophy wife. He's twenty years older than I am, and I was his second wife; he has grown kids not much younger than me. I married him at twenty-four, a single mother. He legally
adopted Jaim a couple of years later. In the divorce, he tried to get full custody and was awarded half. He changed the locks when I moved out. I took only what could fit in a suitcase. I lost my grandmother's china . . . so many things. But they're just things. I had to let go, to move on.”

Broke, homeless, and heartbroken, she moved back to Freedom with Jaim, in with her parents again (“Thank God for them!” she said). For a time, while Jaim stayed with her ex-husband, she lived in a cabin with no electricity or running water.

“I used a chamber pot, I was so broke. The funny thing was, I
did
have a pot to piss in! It made me realize that I hadn't lost quite everything.”

Erin's friends helped her raise the money to buy a 1965 Airstream. She gutted it with a sledgehammer, then built a kitchen in it and turned it into a mobile supper club, taking it to farms and destinations for pop-up dinners all over Maine.

“I knew that it takes a good eight months to a year to open a restaurant, to get all the licenses, etc., so this felt like a quick and dirty way to keep moving forward. I served a couple of meals at Eliot Coleman's Four Season Farm—dinners in the greenhouse, under the apple tree. I roasted pork chops over an open fire, served burgers and beer in barns. Every weekend, a different location. I'd go a day early to scout and forage local ingredients. It felt like I was going toward the cause.”

Then one of Erin's friends in Freedom, a farmer whose chickens are now served at the Lost Kitchen, told her to check out the town's old mill, which her father-in-law, Tony Grassi, was restoring.

The Mill at Freedom Falls was in operation for 133 years, from the time it was built as a gristmill in 1834. In 1894, it was converted to a woodturning mill, which ceased operations in 1967. From then on, the enormous old wood-frame mill on Sandy Stream, formerly the dominant feature of the community, sat dormant and abandoned and
falling down. Tony Grassi's renovation took eighteen months. The massive project resulted in a revitalized, meticulously restored building, bright and airy, refitted with clean, true boards and sturdy underpinnings. And in turn, the community of Freedom was itself revitalized. Grassi's daughter opened a school in the mill, and then Erin French opened the Lost Kitchen. Freedom's farmers and their children have now become the old mill's lifeblood, instead of the other way around, as it used to be in the olden days.

“Food and kids,” said Erin. “If you want life in a place, those are the things to bring to it.”

The first time she walked into the newly renovated mill's empty first story, still with sawdust on the floor, and saw the view, the raw wood, the possibilities, her jaw dropped. “I thought, this is it,” she said.

She presented a business plan to potential investors, mostly friends and family, used money her grandfather left to her family as collateral to get a bank loan, and signed a lease. Over the next few months, she built out a simple open kitchen behind a polished concrete island. Much of her old crew from Belfast came with her.

“I decided to have a regular menu with changes every night. Local, seasonal, all about this place: This is what's available now.”

With symbolic aptness, the Lost Kitchen opened on Independence Day of 2014. Less than six months later, Erin's cooking had become renowned far beyond Maine for its inventive, instinctive sublimity. Her old fans from her first restaurant as well as many new ones came every night from miles away.

That winter, she was planning to close the Lost Kitchen in order to write a cookbook for a major New York publisher. And she'd fallen in love again. She and her new beau had recently bought a 160-year-old farmhouse together, a mile from the Lost Kitchen.

“It was a real rebirth, coming home,” she said. “This is all a result of hard work. I give everything, every day; I have not an ounce left.
But I've never been healthier or happier. Every time I cross that bridge I'm grateful. And it feels so good to touch people—to give them memories, sustenance, community; it's the most wonderful thing in the world to be doing. I've come full circle.” She added, “As an homage to where I came from, there's always a burger on my menu.”

After we finished talking, I thanked her and hugged her good-bye and drove back to Belfast. As I drove, thinking back over our conversation, I was struck by the difference between Erin's delicate, petite blonde prettiness and her tough-minded moxie and grit. She's the physical embodiment of her food: lovely and sophisticated on the outside, authentic and down-to-earth on the inside.

At our hotel, I collected Brendan and Dingo and our luggage. On our way out of town, hungry again, we stopped for brunch at Erin's former restaurant, which is right in downtown Belfast, on a busy corner. Erin had told me that after she left, her ex-husband brought in Matthew Kenney, a nationally known restaurateur, to help him get the place back on its feet. Renamed the Gothic, the place was almost empty; the only customers were one other couple, who sat in the bar, and us. We had the dining room to ourselves. The two young chefs who'd been recently hired to revitalize the place cooked us a prix fixe, four-course vegetarian brunch.

After we had eaten, they came to our table to ask how everything was. I asked them where they were from; one was a transplant from Philly, the other from one of Kenney's other restaurants in Miami. They'd both been here only a few months.

“We're trying to get people to come back,” they told us. “The Gothic's reputation has suffered a blow in the past couple of years.”

I looked around at the sunny, spacious room. Our meal had been expertly made and nicely presented, but it was food you might find in Venice Beach or Miami Beach, not Maine: a smoothie, a quinoa and tofu scramble, gluten-free quinoa bread with a poached egg and
meatlike slab of mushroom, and for dessert, bananas Foster. The food was expert, but not exciting, especially in light of our dinner the night before, but beyond that, there was something off about it all, something wrong. This urbanely crafted vegetarian and vegan fare didn't feel organic to Maine, the way Erin's food had. It felt grafted on, overthought, more conceptual than delicious.

We left the Gothic crew a good tip and drove away, back down the coast, wishing we could go back to the Lost Kitchen for dinner that night. Of course, it was closed on Sundays, but we vowed to return as soon as we could, and as often.

Chapter Six