Transcription of Leslie Oster for the show Celebrating Love #125
Guest Interview with Leslie Oster
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show number 125, Celebrating Love, airing for the first time on Sunday, February 2nd, 2014. Today’s guests include Leslie Oster, general manager with Aurora Provisions and Kate Martin, owner and creative director with Beautiful Days.
Over the years, many couples from here and from away have celebrated their love by being married in Maine. Each February, Maine Magazine celebrates love with its wedding issue, which tells the stories of these special couples. Leslie Oster and Kate Martin who have been a part of countless special wedding days, today, share their perspective about what it means to celebrate love in Maine. Thank you for joining us.
I love it when I have the chance to bring friends of mine into the studio and have conversations and I’m not just bringing them into the studio to have conversations because they’re my friends. I’m bringing them in for other reasons. Today, I’m speaking with Leslie Oster who has been a friend of mine for a while. She’s also the general manager at Aurora Provisions and works quite a lot with the contemporaries group at the Portland Museum of Art and she’s everywhere, doing everything, connected with everyone so anybody who doesn’t know Leslie Oster, you will soon know her. Today, we’re going to talk to her so thanks for coming in, Leslie.
Leslie: Thank you, sweetie. That was a lovely introduction.
Dr. Lisa: It’s kind of appropriate because we’re now in the month of February. We’re talking about celebrating love. We know that you’ve been a big part of the Maine Magazine wedding issue for many years and the work that you do brings you in contact with people who are, themselves, celebrating love through weddings and other events. Why do you do the work that you do?
Leslie: I don’t know that we set out to be this kind of wedding machine that we are when Marika first bought Aurora but the women who owned it previously, you may know Cheryl and Noreen that have El Rayo who did a great job of setting up Aurora and then Marika’s owned it for 14 years now and I came with her to sort of build the catering and event and it just kind of happened that we kind of fell into this wedding world, weddings and funerals.
We never turned funerals down. It’s just it’s kind of … I think it partly because it’s a place where artistry really can make magic. You can work with people and realize their dreams. Every story is a different story and every couple has a different vibe and what they want it to be about and how it has to really be reflective of them and we’re in a unique situation because we don’t have set menus. We don’t have set ideas. We don’t have set venues that we go to.
As you know, we’ve catered out of closets before and so it’s really a lovely process to sit down with a couple at the beginning when they’re just so excited and then watch the process through and really hone their ideas and then be able to complement who they are with what we do. It was kind of like theatre for me and I was a theatre major back in the day and a filmmaker and worked as a painter so this artistry is really important to us and through food to be able to paint a pallet that really reflects who those people are and what they’re about so at the end of the day, we’re like, “Oh, that was a great caterer. That was great floors. That was a great wedding.” Everything came together and represented those people, the two people getting married and whoever they may be.
It’s really interesting how many couples I’ve maintained friendships with. I think one of the couples that Kate and I worked together is going to be in the issue, Linda Kraus and her husband Evan Meinbergen. Every time they come to me, they come in and we have lunch together and we visit together and pretty sure as soon as they get pregnant, I’ll be one of the people who are the first to know. I mean you create these bonds with people that’s pretty special.
Dr. Lisa: The name Aurora, it was lyrical. I believe Aurora was the goddess of the dawn.
Leslie: She is the goddess of dawn.
Dr. Lisa: Is, right. I don’t think she’s gone anywhere.
Leslie: Hopefully not.
Dr. Lisa: But even that, it does speak to some bigger theme. It’s not just, “Here’s a sandwich. Eat this sandwich and have fun at your wedding.” It really is this idea that it’s the sensuality and the taste and really incorporating all of these things into the celebration.
Leslie: It’s funny when I ask the girls sort of how they came up with the name, they have a story that is different from how we perceived it so when Marika first came, we had this and it’s still on our old logo. I don’t know if it’s still there but it’s a beautiful … I went and saw the painting in Florence, this water carrier from the painting of the Head of John the Baptist so that was how we sort of rebranded of this idea of this woman bringing water and fruits. She’s got this beautiful head of fruits and she’s sort of bringing this offering into the painting and into the scene.
I think that we just sort of tried to kind of hold on to that through the years. The original tagline was beautiful food for busy people and I think we sort of moved over, 13 years moved away from that. We still want to make beautiful food but it’s more about bringing beauty into food and sort of bringing emotion into food and so that when you dine, you’re not just eating. You’re actually having an experience.
I think when I first came to the wedding world, nobody really cared about the meal. It was all about, “Well, we have to do the first dance and we have to do the toast and we have to do and then we have to take them to dancing and then there’s the after party.” I’m like, but what about the meal? Isn’t that sort of what you’re here for? Isn’t that the celebratory dining together, breaking bread together? One of the first things I ask people is like slow down and let’s think about that meal. Let’s not rush through everything.
I think in retrospect, some of the nicest weddings are the smaller ones that have the long tables of 25 people and they’re just so happy to just share and they’re so happy to share the experience and the food becomes sort of the vessel for that.
Dr. Lisa: As you’re describing it, it does strike me that there’s something very sacramental about it. There’s something very … it is the communion, it is the breaking of the bread and you’re right. I’ve been to a number of weddings and event halls where you’re served a rubber chicken and the hard rolls and you’re kind of forced to sit around with people that you may or you may not really know and there’s sort of a discomfort but the opposite side of that is really opening yourself up to the tastes of the food that you’re eating and the smells and the beautiful arrangement.
Leslie: And also bringing as much of the couple into the food. Some of these we’ve done … I mean God, we’ve done an Indian wedding. We’ve done Chinese. We’ve done Polish so it’s kind of that’s really fun too because it’s not … what did you grow up with? What did you grow up with? The interview I put the brides and grooms through, it’s like “what do you like?”
It’s almost more of what you dislike is what guides us when we’re readying menus because that’s so much easier to pin. What are your favorite restaurants or what is your family culture? Is there something special? Do you have to have fin and haddy, do you have to have lobster? Do you have to have pierogi? I mean whatever it is that your grandma that will really appreciate that you took the time to remember that part of your culture or South end Italian cook or North end Italian cookies, something that’s just bringing memory into it and history and connecting all the dots.
I mean you’re marrying two families together. You’re bringing two families together, hopefully, and why not share a meal and get to know each other and celebrate the couple but also celebrate the joining of families.
Dr. Lisa: It’s also nice that you’re able to offer something to people that they don’t always have time to do for themselves. This last Christmas, the significant man in my life, he and I wanted to host Christmas Eve dinner for my family. My family is very large. It’s French and Irish Catholic. There’s many of them and many small children and I work in … the way that my life works, we all have a lot going on and you were able to step in and create these amazing vegetable dishes and the main course that I actually eat which is not always the case because I don’t eat meat and it was exactly what we would have wanted to be able to do for ourselves which is huge.
Leslie: I think that that is sort of the beauty in Aurora and the amazing team that is there. I mean we just … we can’t say no like yes is the answer, what’s the question? Sort of, that’s one of the abiding rules and Marika certainly instilled that in all of us since she’s the first one to, at 62, to be in the kitchen working at nine hour a day, which is pretty impressive. Sorry, I didn’t mean to give your age out loud, but it is. I mean for a woman, she was one of the first women to ever have a restaurant in Maine in Belfast back in the ‘70s and I’m so inspired by her and I think everybody that works with us is inspired.
Our head chef is almost 50. I’m almost 50. We’re bringing up the young kids but we’re still at it because we love it. We don’t want to stop. We got a good thing going.
Dr. Lisa: That’s evident even when sitting on the Aurora Provisions store on the West end. I’ve had many meetings there. I’ve had my cup of soup. I’ve had my tea and lots of great brainpower you can see kind of percolating around the people who sit there and the people who work there. They’re very friendly. They’re very connected.
Leslie: They all have other aspirations. For most of the people who aren’t professional cooks or chef, this is a stopping point on their way and they’ve just finished college or they’re in graduate programs or they’re a jewelry maker. We have a jewelry maker. We have a couple of artists, an actress, a singer so it makes … again, that’s the theatrical part of it. We tend to draw in people that have similar interest or used food as a way to express it.
Dr. Lisa: What role did food play in your own life growing up?
Leslie: That’s a good question. I’ve thought about that often. Two very separate cultures. My father’s a Ukranian Jew so I had a lot of cool times when I was really younger watching my grandmother make traditional Eastern European food and it’s interesting because Marika’s Ukranian too so she have way very similar … we grew up with similar dishes just served different ways because they weren’t Jewish like applesauce and latkes is not something that would ever happen in the traditional Ukrainian family but in the Jewish family, you have applesauce and latkes.
Then, on the other side, my family was complete Wasps like Lincolns and my grandfather was the cook. He would put a roast out. I lived with them the summers on Cape Cod and he would cook a meal every night, solid American meal sort of something you’d see in Fanny Farmer or traditional cookbooks and then I inherited his mother’s recipes and it’s interesting how much you go back to them. It’s sort of interesting fun like lockover and traditional American recipe so it’s a real mixed mashed.
I don’t know that my mother actually cooked a lot. She worked and then I in the summers, worked in the restaurant business on Cape Cod because that’s what you did when you’re in school in college and found myself in kitchens and found myself in front of the house and back of the house and ended up just sort of learning and then opened a bar restaurant, well that wasn’t a bar really, in college with friends.
The drinking age went from 19 to 20, 20 to 21 while we were in college in New York and there was a real need to look at drinking in dorms and it was a real problem and at one point, someone fell out of the dorm window so I was a peer counselor and another friend of mine who was very recognized said, “What if we proposed a non-drinking fun dance club like a non-alcoholic club?” which is still going on today at Vassar which is pretty cool.
The administration gave us money and an adviser and the Culinary Institute is right up the road so we had an adviser from them as well and we created this really cool open at 9:00 place to come and have mocktails and burgers and fries and dance yourself silly as a way to sort of combat the underage drinking that was going on so it was kind of cool so that was my first running of a restaurant. It kind of stuck I guess.
Dr. Lisa: What’s your Maine connection?
Leslie: My great, great grandparents were from Rockland. They’re buried up at Samoset and then my mom summered here in Owl’s Head when she was younger and then she, 25 years ago, decided to move to Camden and work for one of the Schooners who are good friends of ours and my sister followed and opened a business in Rockland and then this came about and I kind of fell in love with Portland but Marika took me to Hugo’s when I would just sort of change cans and the person who I’m speaking of knows who they are.
I had this fabulous meal and this amazingly handsome server. I’m like, “Oh, this is nice” I looked at condos and looked at what was available and I’m like, “I think I could live here.” He’s very happily married to one of my dear friends with children but at the time, I was like, “This is what it’s like, really good food and handsome men and affordable housing. I’ll move to Portland,” and also the business. I was really inspired by what I saw going on at Aurora and what we could build. They didn’t have really a catering department. They did a couple things a year. We did 22 weddings last year plus the museum because we have a café at the museum as you know and all the museum events and another little business out at Prout’s Neck and how many people that get employed, I mean it’s amazing.
We just put an addition on this past summer. We didn’t mean to do it in the summer but that’s okay and really grateful. I think everybody this year is surely grateful to have good work year round and that the community still supports us so much.
Dr. Lisa: You do have a very strong connection to the arts community. As you mentioned, Aurora has the café at the Portland Museum of Art and you yourself have done a lot of work with the contemporaries group at the Portland Museum of Art and I think now, the Director’s Circle, I think you’re moving into that.
Leslie: Yeah. You know it. Moving on up right?
Dr. Lisa: Right and these are both groups that are supportive of the museum but also are very social and the connections there are important as well. The events that the Contemporaries put on, one of which is coming up this week, the first week in February, they always sell out. People always enjoy the food, the dancing, the music, the connection and I think this goes back to the same thing you’re talking about, the joy of a wedding is the same as the joy of a Contemporaries event that’s being with other people and having the chance to celebrate love as we talked about.
Leslie: Yeah and celebrate our community. I mean I think when people come to me, the connection that I see is people come to Maine to get married, it’s very specific. They want that connection to Maine. I mean I can’t tell you how many Brooklyn couples we’ve married in Maine. They all say someday we’re going to move here and a lot of them has.
There’s this real romance around a Maine wedding as testified by every magazine including our wonderful Maine Magazine. Whether it’s on a farm or whether it’s at the ocean, there’s something magical. I think in general, that’s something magical about Maine. We have the shortest growing season of probably any state in the union and we worship it. As a result, we worship what we have.
I always laugh when my couples want to have tastings in January. I’m like, “Well, I don’t know what you want to taste but it’s not going to taste anything like your menu in August.” As you know, I work with a lot of local farms and I’m on the board of cultivating communities so food issues are very, very, very close to my heart. For us, it’s having the beauty of these products whether it’s from our oceans or from our fields and then using that as sort of our help to the bride and groom to show up where they’ve decided to get married so this is really about place. It’s about place and it’s about Maine, which we are very lucky to live in.
Dr. Lisa: Leslie, another group that you have found very important to support is the Slow Food Maine Group. You’re on the steering committee for that organization so it’s not just about the food being from Maine. It’s how the food is prepared and how we approach it and how we incorporate it into our lives.
Leslie: Absolutely. I think I wish Marika was here. There’s some respects that she could tell the story but when she moved here in the ‘70s, she said she would have killed her best friend for a head of fresh lettuce, that it was before we started which is that was just horrible. You couldn’t get fresh food and this generation now, we’re so used to it. We’re so lucky to have the farmers’ markets that we have and the indoor farmers’ market on winter and we have to actually remember that 35 years ago, that actually wasn’t here in Maine and that now, we have a lot of barren potato fields and a lot of places that are still in need of some help.
Luckily, I can’t believe I’m saying this, our governor did something good. He actually signed the GMO labeling bill which we’re hoping that will pass … I think four more states have to pass to make it happen and that’s going to be huge especially counteracting what’s happened in congress yesterday. I was with the farmers not being able to sue Monsanto for compromised crops. It’s just crazy and I’m not on the policy end of it which is good because it makes my head spin so we really try to make an effort to support our local producers. They’re not all organic but they’re all local because sometimes that’s entirely more important because they know what’s in their fields. They know what they’re bringing to you and for the most part, they are organic without paying gazillion dollars for the certification, not a gazillion dollars, but paying for the certification.
Then you create connections with your farmers. Then you then take that to your menu so oftentimes, well, any restaurant in Portland you’ll actually where it’s sourced from but it even has now now come into recipes like we have Floppie White who the White family is very aware, you know Hildreth White. Floppie has this wonderful tomato recipe that we made for her 10 years ago. It is now on every summer menu and people are like, “Who’s Floppie?”
Then you tell this wonderful story about the coast of Maine and this woman who created this … probably it was her grandmother’s recipe so for me, it’s the storytelling too about the food, where it comes from, the love that it was grown or harvested with, I mean our fishing industry, unbelievable people of what they’re doing and how they’re helping to maintain our culture of fish and aquaculture in Maine. I’ve been following Abigail Carroll on Facebook, Nonesuch Oysters and they were really worried with the freeze that they’re going to lose all their babies, their babies which are two years old.
It takes a significant time to grow an oyster and she posted the other day after the frost like oh, they’re all fine. They’re on the bottom. They’re good. The babies are good and you’re like, you’re actually invested in a baby oyster because you know that that is going to be your product in three or four years and you get to tell that story so I don’t know. It’s about storytelling. It’s about storytelling and good food and love and love of what you do and not resting on your laurels like waking up every day and saying it’s going to be a good day. We’re going to make something good. We’re going to … and you’re not going to get every job. We’re not going to be for everyone.
I’ve had a number of … I always as much as you’re interviewing me for your wedding, I’m interviewing you to do your wedding because the bond that’s created is like you have my cellphone number pretty early on. You can call me at 2:00 in the morning if you’re freaking out so I have to have that trust in you the same way you have to have that trust in me that we’re going to make this work.
I have an assistant for the first time this year. She’s fabulous. I think you met her actually. She’s gorgeous and smart and young and there was more at her age than I could have ever imagined to know it back then but just watching her watching me train her and then watching her deal with people, I’m like wow. We can actually teach people how to do this. That’s what I’m hoping. That’s what I’m hoping that we’ll have a whole new generation of just kind of … I don’t know. You have to have a little psychiatry in there. You got to have a little … you have to have a lot of patience and you have to be really understanding of this couple and who they are, these people for whatever reason, especially if it’s funeral.
How many people you take that you walk their hand through that? You become like another clergy person because you’re inevitably providing the comfort. I think that that’s … at the end of the day, I want people, me personally, I want people to be fed and nourished and feel really good about what they’ve eaten.
Dr. Lisa: You end up being part of their story.
Leslie: Oftentimes. There are some funny, funny stories when that book comes out. Kate and I, we’re starting it. At first, we thought it would be really fun to just do just sort of parody like the craziest things that ever happened to weddings but I don’t know. There’s something in the works someday.
Dr. Lisa: I look forward to reading it. I’m sure everybody who’s listening is going to look forward to reading it as well.
Leslie: It’s a long way off but …
Dr. Lisa: No. It will happen. It’ll happen. Leslie, how do people find out about Aurora Provisions?
Leslie: Wow. Well, Maine Magazine is really a good place to start. I have to say it’s probably been one of our most successful ad campaigns. We always do really funny ads but we’re on the web. We’re working on the website actually currently which will be much easier for people to use and then we’re on the West End at 64 Pine Street and we have the café at the Portland Museum of Art and we’re pretty accessible. Just come on in and say hi and have like the best cappuccino in town pretty much. Sorry, bragging a little bit but … and one Bob’s scores Yeah, and just come and experience us. It’s very different. It’s nice because we’re many different businesses under one roof.
Dr. Lisa: I can attest to that and I can attest that you’re many different people in one body and a joy to know and I’m so grateful that you were able to take the time out of your very busy schedule and come talk to us today about celebrating love. We’ve been speaking with Leslie Oster who is the general manager of Aurora Provisions and a friend of mine and so many more things to so many different people. Thank you for coming in today.
Leslie: Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.