How Erin French made a tiny Maine town a dining destination
FREEDOM, Maine — Right in the middle of dinner service at her restaurant, the Lost Kitchen, chef Erin French likes to step out and talk to the crowd, as if she’s giving a toast at a party.
Erin French, the chef of the Lost Kitchen in Freedom, Maine, where she grew up flipping burgers at her family’s diner.
“It’s July in Maine,” she said on a recent night, raising a sweaty glass of rosé. “How lucky are we?”
Locals in the dining room cheered; July meant long sunlit days with cherries and elderflowers, sweet snap peas and creamy new potatoes, small and misshapen as freshwater pearls.
French talked through her menu, annotating it like a memoirist. The main course today was lamb, not because it was part of her plan, she explained cheerfully, but because the swordfish she had ordered never arrived, and the angry phone calls she made got her nowhere. So French did what she always did: She vaulted off the disaster toward something else, something she hadn’t planned for.
Dinner at the Lost Kitchen is an occasion, and most restaurants of its caliber work to maintain an illusion of effortless perfection. French, 36, has built a cult following with her own approach — open, intimate and personal.
Inside a hydropowered grist mill in Freedom, a town about halfway between Augusta and Bangor, she cooks a set dinner for 40 people, four nights a week, editing the menu each day to keep up with subtle changes in season and supply.
When reservations opened in April, French received thousands of phone calls requesting tables, clogging up the phone line and answering machine. The restaurant is open eight months of the year, and she filled the books from May right through to New Year’s Eve in just one day.
“People told me I was crazy, that this restaurant would never work,” she said.
Despite its success, they still do. Smiling politely, French brushes off inquiries and advice from those who think her small restaurant in rural Maine should operate in a certain way.
Has she considered staying open longer, on more days of the week, and serving breakfast, lunch and dinner? Couldn’t the dining room squeeze in at least a dozen more seats? And wouldn’t online confirmations be more efficient than a phone call from her mother?
One man mailed French what he considered to be a better business plan, perhaps not realizing that she was already running her business exactly the way she liked.
“You reach a max-out point if you do too much,” said French, who published her first cookbook, “The Lost Kitchen: Recipes and a Good Life Found in Freedom, Maine,” in May. She said she doesn’t keep the business small for a sense of exclusivity but rather for a sense of warmth: “It’s the way I’d want it to feel at someone’s house.”
On a night in July, French served pork sliders with homemade burger buns as a snack before the main course.
Most of French’s cooks and servers are close friends, and all are women, something of a rarity in the industry. Rarer still, many are also farmers, growers of heirloom tomatoes and organic blueberries, who are working second jobs at the restaurant.
The team thrives without the stereotypes associated with high-pressure kitchens, and important decisions are made as a group, like the one to pay cooks and servers more equally, and pool tips.
“Everything about the way this place is set up is made to be low-stress,” said Ashley Savage, a server who runs the flower farm in Knox that grew the sweet pea blossoms in the dining room. Another server, Maia Campoamor, has a solar-powered organic farm in West Montville, with fruit orchards and greenhouses full of vegetables. A third, Meghan Flynn, is a ceramist; she made the restaurant’s eggshell-colored plates and bowls at her studio in Lincolnville.
Freedom has Prohibition-era laws that ban alcohol sales in restaurants, so French’s mother, Deanna Richardson, manages a wine shop downstairs where people can buy bottles on their way to the dining room. She also greets people as they come in, wearing a slate gray linen apron, her hair in a low crown roll.
French plates with her cooks Carey Dubé, far left, and Lauren Crichton, right. Her mother Deanna Richardson, who also runs the wine shop downstairs, picks cilantro blossoms to use as garnish.
In the open kitchen upstairs, French says a quick hello before sliding into the rhythm of service with her two cooks, plating fried green tomatoes with buttermilk and flowering herbs, pouring chilled squash soup over lemony garlic scape pesto, searing dozens of steaks on cast-iron spitting with hot fat.
A giddy diner approaches with a copy of French’s cookbook. “Erin, would you sign it?”
French grew up in Freedom and never expected her hometown of fewer than 1,000 to become a food destination. As a teenager, she played soccer, listened to Björk and flipped burgers at her family’s diner.
Most evenings include raw oysters from the Damariscotta River, seasoned simply with shallots that have macerated in rice vinegar, served on a bed of rocks and moss.
She worked in catering later on, and in bars, and in her early 20s, she got into baking. With her newborn son, Jaim, strapped in the carrier on her chest, French rolled dough for pecan pies and creamed butter for carrot cakes. She delivered the orders as he slept in the car seat.
French looked into culinary school but was put off by the expense. Instead, she cooked more at home, and more ambitiously. She married and started a supper club out of her apartment in nearby Belfast.
She called it the Lost Kitchen, and tinkered there with the earliest drafts of her precise, straightforward cooking, often embellished with edible flowers and shallots macerated in vinegar. French reconfigured a classic salade niçoise into a dish that made sense in Maine, serving halibut browned in butter with a runny poached egg and a warm vegetable salad. And she puréed local vegetables with fresh buttermilk and lemon juice to make soups with beautifully controlled acidity.
She used few ingredients to build each dish, and worked simply, without special equipment, taking service cues from both fine dining and dinner parties at friends’ homes.
French writes a new menu each day, according to what her network of local farmers provide. Many of the Lost Kitchen’s cooks and servers are also farmers, working second jobs at the restaurant.
French soon opened a restaurant of the same name downstairs. But just as she was finding success, her marriage was coming apart.
“If you want to find where all the cracks are in your relationship, open a restaurant,” she said, “then watch it implode.”
The stress took a toll on her mental health. Suffering from anxiety and depression, she became addicted to the pills prescribed to help her manage. French went to rehab to get clean, and she did. Two weeks later, when she returned home to Belfast, the fallout from her divorce took her by surprise: The locks were changed, her staff was fired and her restaurant was closed. It was no longer hers.
“Just like that,” she said, “I lost everything.”
French moved into an Airstream trailer, which she still occasionally refers to as the divorcemobile, and parked it for a while in her parents’ yard. She was paralyzed by a sense of failure, misery and rage, but only temporarily.
When French was a little girl, she had been warned to stay away from the grist mill in Freedom. It was dilapidated, streaked with spray paint, littered with decades of bloated trash. It seemed as if it might fall apart at any moment.
But the mill was restored to splendor by a new owner, just as French was ready for her own second chance. She built the Lost Kitchen inside it, and when she opened, in the summer of 2014, many of the cooks and servers who had worked with her in Belfast were ready to come back, too.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” French said, “but this place is our fuel.”
The dining room is a mix of locals and tourists who have traveled for a taste of French’s cooking.
One of French’s defining qualities as a chef is the immediacy with which she responds to change — an immediacy she brings to her menus each day.
The elder tree behind the mill is in full, fierce bloom for just one week in July. The moment French spots the elderflowers from the dining room window, she hops the fence by the footbridge, climbs down the rocks and snips as many as she can carry.
She batters and fries the blossoms into sweet, spindly fritters, dusted with powdered sugar. Or she infuses them in syrup to pour over warm lemon cakes. She serves the cake in thick slices with softly whipped cream, semifreddo and cherries from Flynn’s trees, drizzled with honey. After dessert, people totter out, and a few stop by to hug French as they say good night.
On a recent night, French served fried chicken with sour cherry sweet-and-sour sauce; the cherries came from Meghan Flynn’s garden.
When all the tables are clear, French heads home to an old farmhouse a mile from the mill, where she lives along with 14 chickens and a dog named Penny. Her son, Jaim, now a teenager, splits his time between his parents, and when he’s staying with French, they hike together behind the house to swim in the trout pond, and build fires in a stone-lined pit on the lawn, where they chat until they’re dry.
On her way back to work in the morning, French usually lets the chickens out to feast on the buffet of insects. But on the next day, she spotted a hawk in the sky. Although French couldn’t be sure it was hunting, she’d already lost a few birds to predators and thought about keeping them inside, safe from danger.
She quickly reconsidered. There was no such thing as being safe from danger, not really. And staying inside? That was no way to live.
“Good morning, girls,” said French, pushing the cover off the coop door. “Be careful out there, OK? Be careful, but go, go, go!”
French does not have a pastry chef, and makes her own desserts, such as lemon drizzle cake served with fresh custard, local berries and whipped cream.
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Yield: 4 servings
Time: 1 hour 15 minutes
Ingredients:
Salt, as needed
1/2 pound green beans, trimmed
1 pound baby or new potatoes
1/2 cup mixed kalamata and green olives, pitted and finely chopped
1 anchovy fillet, finely chopped
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
2 tablespoons finely chopped shallots
2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar
4 tablespoons olive oil
Ground black pepper, as needed
1 large ripe heirloom tomato, cut into 8 wedges
4 eggs
4 halibut fillets (about 1/2 pound each)
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 head bibb lettuce, leaves separated, washed and torn into bite-size pieces
1 lemon, halved
Preparation:
1. Fill a large pot with water, season generously with salt, and bring to a boil. In the sink, prepare a bowl full of cold water and ice. Add green beans to the pot and cook for 45 seconds to 1 minute, then scoop out with a slotted spoon and transfer to ice water.
2. Add potatoes to the pot of hot water and simmer for 20 to 25 minutes, or until they are fork tender. Drain and set aside until cool enough to handle. Leave the smaller potatoes whole, and halve or quarter any larger ones so they’re bite-size.
3. Meanwhile, in a small bowl, mix olives, anchovy and garlic, and set aside. In a large bowl, mix shallots and rice wine vinegar, and let stand for 20 minutes. Add 2 tablespoons olive oil and a few turns of ground black pepper. Drain and add green beans, along with potatoes and tomato wedges, and toss gently to coat. Season with salt and pepper, and set aside.
4. Fill a 12-inch skillet with 2 inches of water and bring to a boil. Crack each egg into a small bowl and fish out any pieces of shell. Slide eggs into the water and poach until white is set and yolk is still soft, about 3 minutes. Remove eggs with a slotted spoon to a bowl of warm water until ready to plate.
5. Heat oven to 425 degrees. Heat a large ovenproof skillet, ideally cast iron, over high heat. Add remaining 2 tablespoons olive oil and swirl to coat the pan. Pat the halibut dry with a paper towel and season all over with salt and pepper. Add fillets to hot pan, skin-side down, leaving at least 2 inches between each. (Cook fish in 2 pans or in 2 batches if needed.)
6. Let fish cook until it releases easily from the pan, about 2 to 3 minutes. Flip fillets, add butter to pan and transfer to the oven. After 2 minutes, baste fish with melted butter, then return to oven until it’s just cooked through, slightly firm and golden brown, 2 to 3 minutes more.
7. Divide lettuce among four plates, and top with dressed beans, potatoes and tomato. Add fish and top each fillet with a poached egg. Drizzle over any extra pan juice from the fish, along with a spoonful of the olive-anchovy mixture. Squeeze lemon juice over each plate and eat immediately.
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Chilled Golden Beet and Buttermilk Soup
Yield: 4 to 6 servings
Ingredients:
1 tablespoon finely chopped shallots
1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar
2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for serving
Ground black pepper
2 1/2 pounds golden beets (about 8 to 10 medium-size beets)
1 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste
2 cups buttermilk
1/2 lemon, juiced (about 1 tablespoon)
Small handful of basil leaves, for serving
Small handful of dill fronds, for serving
1/3 to 1/2 cup sour cream, for serving
Preparation:
1. In a small bowl, combine chopped shallots and vinegar and let macerate for 20 minutes. Whisk in 2 tablespoons olive oil and season with a few grinds of black pepper. Set aside.
2. Put beets in a large pot over medium heat and add 1 teaspoon salt and enough water to cover. Boil for 25 to 40 minutes, depending on size, until tender when poked with the tip of a knife. Drain beets and let cool, then peel off the skins with your fingers.
3. Cut 1 beet into a small, even dice, then add to the shallot mixture, season with a pinch of salt (or to taste) and set aside. Cut the remaining beets into large chunks and purée in a blender with buttermilk and lemon juice until smooth. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Refrigerate for 1 hour, or until completely cool.
4. Ladle the soup into bowls and drizzle with a teaspoon of olive oil. Serve with marinated beets, herbs and sour cream on the side, so people can garnish their own bowls as they like.
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And to drink …
The dominant flavor of this niçoise variation is not the fish itself. It comes from the surrounding Mediterranean chorus of olive, lemon, anchovy, garlic and tomato; the potatoes, halibut, lettuce and egg are just a mellow backdrop. Those Mediterranean flavors suggest the classic Provençal solution: a good dry rosé, of which moderately priced examples abound. For a little more money, the rosés from Bandol or Cassis, or darker, more singular examples like Château Simone or Clos Cibonne, would be delicious. You could try a rosé from anywhere, really, so long as it is dry and relatively light-bodied. Other alternatives? Dry, brisk whites would be fine unless oak flavors are evident. Bone-dry sparklers, too. But I would steer clear of reds. — Eric Asimov
