Transcription of Taste of Maine #239
Speaker 1: Your are listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Brunswick Maine. Show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com. Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Harding: That’s why I like sailing so much, because you’re always going forward, you always know that you have to keep going somewhere. In the restaurant business you have to keep growing.
John: I think that ability to really explore and really use my imagination has helped me create businesses here in Maine around Maine. I think that that whole upbringing is a big catalyst to why I’m doing what I’m doing now.
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 239, “Taste of Maine”, airing for the first time on Sunday April 17th 2016. Maine is not just a place to live, it is a place to make a life. Today we speak with 4 people who are creating successful businesses that feature the tastes of Maine. Our first guest is chef and restaurateur Harding Lee Smith, owner of The Rooms in Portland, who is expanding his presence to one of Maine’s favorite ski mountains this year. Our other guest Chris Avantaggio, John Turner and Nathan O’Leary are co-founders of CrateFull of Maine, a company that is sending the taste of Maine around the world. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is brought to you by Berlin City Honda, where the car buying experience is all about easy. After all, life is complicated enough and buying a car shouldn’t be. That’s why the Berlin City Honda team goes the extra mile by pre-discounting all their vehicles and focus their efforts on being open, honest and all about getting you on the road. In fact Berlin City recently won the 2015 Women’s Choice Award, a strong testimony to their ability to deliver a different kind of car buying experience. Berlin City Honda of Portland, easy, it’s how buying a car should be. Go to berlincityhondame.com for more information.
Lisa: Today it is my great pleasure to bring back into the studio Harding Lee Smith, who is a chef and restauranteur who own The Rooms in Portland. The Rooms include The Grill Room, The Corner Room and The Front Room, as well as Boone’s Fish House and Oyster Room. It’s great to see you again.
Harding: Well done.
Lisa: Yes, I know.
Harding: It’s a mouthful. Good to see you too.
Lisa: It is a mouthful. I’m impressed because the last time you can in I think that you had only 3 rooms but you had the fourth, that was what was going to happen next.
Harding: Yes, I believe that’s accurate.
Lisa: Yeah, and now you actually have in mind the fifth room.
Harding: The fifth room, The Mountain Room.
Lisa: The Mountain Room.
Harding: A seasonal place up at Sunday River.
Lisa: You’ve actually had a lot of going on since 2014, not the least of which is something that people who are listening won’t be able to see, and that is that you are only two thirds of your former self.
Harding: That is true, yes.
Lisa: You’ve lost a lot of weight, you’ve become more fit.
Harding: About 90 pounds, yes. More fit, more well. Wellness is definitely a big part of my life now.
Lisa: I want to hear about that because I think a lot of people would say, “He has a restaurant and he likes to cook healthy food, so how did he get to this place in his life where he wasn’t so fit?”
Harding: I think that not paying attention to yourself and working a lot and concentrating on one things, and not realizing that’s even happening, slowly gaining weight, gaining weight, working 7 days a week, just being focused on that one thing and not worrying about yourself. It’s one of the things, you give us a sheet to fill out and I talked about what I would say to myself 10 years ago is, “Take time for yourself.” I’m starting to do much more of that now, for the last couple of years.
Lisa: How do you think that stress actually impacted your weight? Because I have patients who say, “I eat fine, but I have a very stressful life and I can’t lose weight.”
Harding: I’ve always dealt with stress pretty well. I don’t think … I know it’s part of being chef and being a restauranteur, that stress is going to be there. I don’t know if that really did, I think really eating fried rice at 2:00am really did it more than anything else.
Lisa: It’s the food and the schedule that was getting to you.
Harding: It’s really the food and the schedule. It kind of speaks to … Because when you take time off you’re going eating and so forth, and you don’t get much time for yourself so when you get it you just indulge and really all the bad things that you can do, rather than eating less fried food say, or eat smaller portions, or something like that.
Lisa: It’s interesting that you’re talking about taking more time for yourself. You like to sail.
Harding: Mm-hmm.
Lisa: Anywhere on your boat you like, that that’s your place?
Harding: Anywhere.
Lisa: Anywhere.
Harding: Somebody asked me the other day, “What’s your favorite thing to do?” I said, “Sail.” “More than skiing?” I’m like, “Sail.” “Where?” “Anywhere is fine.”
Lisa: But you also like skiing.
Harding: Mm-hmm.
Lisa: On this questionnaire that we gave you you said being at Sunday River on a blue bird day.
Harding: Yeah. That is the best thing. If it has to be winter time and it has to be snowy, you might as well be outside enjoying it. A perfect day, 32 degree day with no cloud in the sky, it’s what we call blue bird, with nice soft snow, is a fantastic time.
Lisa: I think many people worry that they need to stay busy in order to be successful. They need to actually grab onto those reins, really tightly and then the weight piles on and then they aren’t taking care of themselves. You’re kind of describing the opposite, you’re saying since 2014 you’ve gotten more fit, you’ve gotten more well, but your businesses are doing fine.
Harding: Mm-hmm. Yeah I think letting go a little bit and letting people do their jobs, obviously paying attention but letting go, hiring good people. If you don’t let them the jobs and you’re on top of them the whole time they don’t feel free to create and do things. I think that goes a long way, but also having a baby, he’s now 2.5 years old. When you’re 290 pounds it’s difficult to get off the floor, so you realize you need to start doing something. A big different in how I can run and play with him. He still beats me every time but it helps a lot, it really does.
Lisa: Did you also find that you wanted to make sure you were I guess modeling good behavior for him? I know he’s only 2.5.
Harding: That’s definitely true. I think I wanted to model good behavior, eating well, we sit down at the table and we have our lunch and our dinner. We sit down properly at a table, I think that’s important, and not just gorging ourselves, or going through fast food or something like that. But also knowing that taking the time, when I say take time for myself I mean time for my son and myself to be, to do things. I think that’s really important. I think it’s really important.
Lisa: I know you had a life transition of a personal nature but, what was the point where you said, “This can’t keep going on. I can’t keep having the body that forces me to bring my foot up to my hand in order to tie my shoe?”
Harding: Yeah. I think if you think about how much I’ve lost, approximately about 90 pounds, that’s 2 sacks of potatoes, commercial sized sacks of potatoes or cases of potatoes. I have a hard time lifting that above my waist onto a higher shelf, I can’t imagine that I carried that around. I think that I sort of came to that conclusion that it was difficult to get around, my legs were tired, squatting down the floor, kneeling down on the floor with Griffin, I had bad knees, my knees developed problems because of it. It really was important to … I was always active, I still stayed active. I was still sailing and doing things but I wasn’t able to do them with as much vivaciousness or as much power as I’d like to do. Because I really like to go, when I do things I do it. When I sail I sail, when I ski I ski, I open a restaurant I open a restaurant. I wasn’t able to do that, I was slowing down and didn’t really care about my body and so forth, just didn’t matter.
Lisa: How do you get to that place? How do you get to a place where all of a sudden the body is just this thing that you carry around underneath your brain?
Harding: I think it gets to be … You get to the point … Because I didn’t start out gigantic. I opened The Front Room in 2005, I was a little bit heavier than I am now. Slowly it comes on, you don’t really know that it’s happening, you just buy another pay of jeans, buy a little bit bigger size, you don’t really think about it that much. But then you get to this point where you’re there, and to lose that is very difficult. I don’t know how you get to that point, all of a sudden you’re there, you’re like, “Wow.”
Then you start to get a little depressed about it, you’re mopey, “How do people perceive me” kind of thing. You see a picture of yourself 10 years ago and then you see a picture of yourself today, oh my goodness. Now it’s the opposite, when I was pictured in Oprah Magazine that [inaudible 00:08:19] took and look at that picture now, I was like, “Wow, that’s a great shot,” but then you look at the one that was in another magazine 2.5 years ago and I’m like, “Oh my, look at that.” I looked like a jolly Red Socks fan.
Lisa: You know it’s interesting I asked you how old you are, and if you don’t want to tell people then you don’t have to, but when I met you and saw you for the first time I would have aged you up. I would have aged you up probably at least 5 years. Now I realize you’re actually not that much older than I am, so I can’t call you old. Maybe you shouldn’t say how old you are [inaudible 00:08:56] after all.
Harding: I’m middle-aged now. I would definitely agree with that. I have several people, people just sitting here in the lobby today that I’ve known for years, couldn’t barely recognize me. Somebody told me the other day, “You look so young.” I don’t feel that, my hair’s nearly white and I don’t feel old. I don’t know. I’m 46. I don’t feel 46 but I never really knew what that meant. When I was younger, in my teenage years, 46 seemed like it was ancient. Now somebody in their mid-50s, you say that’s the old guy, he’s like, “That’s not really old at all.” I feel younger, I have great vitality. I walk places with much more vigor, speed. I just want to get there, that kind of thing. I suppose it’s like, “I got to go down and get that out of the car, all right.” Now it’s totally, it’s like, “Okay, I’ll get that.” It’s a much different way of being, it really is.
Lisa: When I think of people who are old, and I mean mentally old, these are often people who have decided, “You know what? I’ve accomplished all I want to in my life. I’m good. I’m just going to keep, I don’t know, showing up at the same job, or maybe I’m just going to retire.” But they’re kind of good, they’re coasting. I know people of lots of different ages who I wouldn’t consider old, and in part it’s because there’s always something else that makes them excited. I think that’s true for you.
Harding: Absolutely, you have to keep moving forward. This was one of the questions that Karen for that Oprah Magazine article asked me was about that sort of thing. I said, “You have to keep moving forward.” That’s why I like sailing so much, because you’re always going forward, you always know that you have to keep going somewhere. In the restaurant business you have to keep growing, not necessarily have to keep growing by opening more places, that’s how I choose to do it sometimes, but constantly keeping it fresh, keeping it new. I think that’s the same thing with life, you have to keep going and doing things.
I’m so pleased that I’ve lost enough weight that I feel like this is going to be a longevity thing for me. I had my son when I was 44 years old, that’s relatively late in life to have a child, not the latest a could have but when he’s in his high school years and baseball playing years and so forth, I’m going to be old so to speak. I want to make sure that I can still do that, that I can get off the ground, I can play catch and I can hit balls to him and I can do those sort of things, or go hiking, or keep going sailing with him and go skiing with him during those years, because it’s really important to me. Because I’ve always liked that sort of thing and I want him to hopefully, if that’s something he wants to do, to enjoy those things too and be able to have memories of doing it with me.
Lisa: Did you do those sorts of things with your own father?
Harding: Yes. Yes, we started skiing at Sunday River when I was 2. We started Nordic skiing for a while and then we switched back to downhill when I was 10 and my dad and I would go every weekend.
Lisa: You also were part of his restaurant business in Ogunquit.
Harding: That’s true.
Lisa: Even from a very young age.
Harding: Yeah, very true. 7 years old in the summer time. We’d ski in the winter and summer time we’d cook.
Lisa: Do you think that your son, Griffin, will be the same?
Harding: I have no idea. If he chooses to be, hopefully the restaurants are there for him to take over, if he chooses. I know that some people in his life would definitely wish that he doesn’t do that and he goes to either do law school or becomes a doctor like yourself, or something along those lines. I have a feeling that he probably will go into it in some way. I know that he’ll work in the restaurants at some points, that will be his summer job, that will be what he’ll do, just like I did. He’ll probably wash dishes and do that sort of thing. But hopefully he sees that I have a passion for.
What I want him to do is do what he has a passion for, not necessarily, doesn’t have to be cooking, whatever he happens to do. It’s my job as a parent to make sure I support those, when he shows interest in something I support him in that. Not to say, “Okay you have to be a cook, or a front of the house person or whatever.” I would love it but you know, it’s okay Griffin, you can do what you want.
Lisa: It’s nice of you to say that. Yeah. There is I think an enormous family cultural influence on the kids. Even when we say to them, “You can do whatever you want,” there’s something about the milieu they’re raised in.
Harding: Absolutely.
Lisa: It’s hard to avoid that.
Harding: They want to emulate us in a sense. You look at, there’s lots of baseball players for instance that their fathers are baseball players, and other sports it’s the same kind of thing. I don’t know so much in the other fields but I’m sure there’s plenty of lawyers that follow in the footsteps of their parents. I know that in the restaurant business, particularly because usually you start working at it at such a young age, if your family is in it, that it’s what you know. It’s what I knew. It’s what I knew, I could have done many things I’m sure but it’s what I had a passion for, it’s what I wanted to get better at, it’s what I went to school for, because that’s what I knew what to do. When I graduated high school I was like, “That seems like it’s logical. Let’s do that.”
Lisa: What is it about cooking in particular that appeals to you? What do you like about that piece?
Harding: Very hands on, I’m visually stimulated I think. I don’t know, I wouldn’t say I’m ADD certainly because I can focus but I get bored easily, and I think that having visual stimulation, it changes. Each time you plate a dish it’s another new way of doing it. There’s lots of smells, very visceral in that sense that I get my food memories from smells. I can walk into a kitchen, anybody’s kitchen, any restaurant, and, “Oh that reminds me of such and such.” I love that part of it, but when you cook something and you make it for them and they like it and they smile, it’s completely rewarding. It’s fantastic.
Even with something very simple, like you just cooked them a piece of fish but they’re like, “What did you do?” “Salt and pepper.” “What? No.” They don’t do it at home necessarily, or they think there’s some magic behind it, and there is definitely some magic it and so forth. Making people happy like that is tremendously rewarding. I also like the theater of it all. I was taken to the theater a lot when I was young. The fact that at 5:00 the curtain goes up and you’re on stage, and you’re creating some new reality for people to get out of their daily lives and out of their daily routine, give them something unique.
Lisa: This love of newness and the stage, does that ever conflict with people’s desire for the familiar? Where they’ll come to The Rooms and they’ll go to The Corner Room and they’ll want their same favorite pasta dish, every Wednesday at noon time.
Harding: It does happen, a lot. We have people that, we’ve had some thing we’ve taken off the menu at The Front Room, The Front Room in particular because it’s such a neighborhood spot and a comfort food spot. We take something off the menu and people are, “Where did that go?” You either put it back on or hopefully they’ll appreciate the new dish or something like. It does, but we’ve also sort of built our restaurants to have a core menu and core thing that is familiar and even familial that people keep coming back for. Innovation, and not necessarily innovation but by keeping fresh, is keeping new products on, new specials, and whether you’re keeping the fresh paint on the walls and that sort of thing is more what I mean by that I think.
Lisa: I know that I enjoy, because I work here in the old port a few days a week so I will often go over to The Corner Room or to The Front Room … I mean The Grill Room, which is right across the street from where I work. I really like the salad and I usually have the white fish if it’s available on top, but I actually like the fact that you have rotating salads, that you have whatever is available on the market that day.
Harding: Yeah, we work with a lot of farmers, even this time of year. They have the root vegetables stored up and carrots and different things like that. All of our chefs are very passionate about working with these farmers, so they take those things that they get and they try to create them and do new things.
Lisa: How does that look in March versus in July? I would think that in March you’re doing some very different sorts of produce.
Harding: Very different things. The best time really is in October and September. That’s our favorite, most every chef you talk to I think would probably say that. That’s when you have wild mushrooms coming in, all the bounties, the tomatoes are coming in in droves, all of these great things that they’ve been growing all summer are now available to you. In March you’re really still in the root vegetables. You’re into some greenhouse lettuces and things like that. It looks completely different, it really does. Even in May, and even in July, you’re starting to get some things but in June you’re not getting much for it at all, unless people have their gardens. We use a lot of people also that are cultivating mushrooms, a lot of local mushrooms, and right now it’s scallop season so you’re using more of the protein aspect of it, and wintery greens like kales and things like that. Stuff that does well in greenhouses over the winter time. That’s really more what we’re using now.
Lisa: Has it gotten easier to incorporate some of these foods that grow in the winter greenhouses now that people are more open to eating kale for example?
Harding: Definitely. People are more open to eating it and there’s more available to us. There’s more than one farmer now. They’re realizing there’s a big market for it. Once people, chefs and consumers, get over the fact that an apple shouldn’t necessarily be perfectly round and red, or carrot is not necessarily orange and straight, it’s much easier to use these kinds of products. We had some guests this summer at Boone’s on the patio, and the dish came back because we were using multi-colored farm carrots, they’re heirlooms carrots. Carrots didn’t start out as orange necessarily, they were purple and white. She sent it back because she said they were potatoes.
Very rarely do you go to the dining room and say something to a guest but I went and I said, “Ma’am, I understand you think these are potatoes.” “Well carrots are orange.” I said, “Not all carrots are orange, these ones happen to be purple and white but I promise you that these are carrots. I promise, I wouldn’t give you potatoes as carrots.” “Fine,” and then she ate them all and loved them. But sometimes getting over that part, realizing that heirloom is the original thing and these things haven’t been modified. This is really healthy, wonderful food that’s originally as it was appearing. It’s much easier now than it was, certainly. It’s still an education process, for all of us, for the consumer and the chefs.
Lisa: Is it also an education process when it comes to the seasonality of food and the availability of food? Because we are known as, and I’m not sure I like this word but, foodie. We are considered to be a foodie town and state.
Harding: I don’t like the word either.
Lisa: Okay. Neither one of us like this word but let’s just pretend that we’re okay with it for the purpose of discussion. People come to this town which loves food, and they want to eat good food at The Rooms in February, but some of the stuff that they might want to eat is not available in Maine. Is there ever a conflict there?
Harding: We do have the miracle of the jet airplane, so you still can get naturally raised produce and organic produce and get stuff here that’s beautifully fresh. There’s great companies that are doing so and there are greenhouses. Now there’s tomatoes available, they’re doing great things in New Gloucester with hydroponic growing tomatoes. We do offer, because particularly at Boone’s it’s more a tourist driven sort of place. If you can’t get a tomato on your burger people don’t understand why. At the other restaurants we don’t but at Boone’s we do because we have the tourists, so we do utilize the jet airplane and hydroponic and greenhouse and things like that.
I think that people are comfortable with the fact that we’re using celery root and parsnips and rutabaga and things like that. Those are our vegetables that we’re using right now, as opposed to green beans because green beans aren’t growing here right now. I think that we’re come a long way from that but I don’t have … Obviously in Maine we can’t be 100% out of the ground in the winter time. It’s not possible. There are people who are trying to do that with different levels of success. I think you have to be aware, as long you know that your product is quality and you know where it’s coming from, that it’s okay if it came not necessarily from right here at this time of year. In summertime we’re using almost all that, all of our carrots, all of our onions, all of those things are grown locally.
Lisa: I want to ask you about mushrooms because I’m intrigued by them. This is something that when I was growing up … Actually I’m not sure how many children of any sort like mushrooms when they’re growing up.
Harding: I don’t think any.
Lisa: Probably because-
Harding: I’ve gotten them spit out at me a couple times.
Lisa: Yeah. I think I grew up with the white button mushrooms, probably in many cases I grew up with canned mushrooms.
Harding: They’re known as champignon.
Lisa: Exactly. Exactly. My mom, she would try a few times, but then she was like, “You know what? I’ll just feed them to your father.” But I’ve actually grown to like mushrooms over time, and in Maine we have really some great access to lots of different types of essentially fungus, right?
Harding: Mm-hmm , absolutely.
Lisa: What has been your experience with introducing these into the menus at The Rooms?
Harding: Extremely popular. We had a very bad mushroom season last year unfortunately, so we didn’t have the great volume of mushrooms that we had the previous 2 or 3 years. Previous 2 or 3 years we had mushrooms hauls that were unbelievable, end of the woods in particular just out there, big giant, you know? One of my chef, Shawn, he found I think a 45 pound end of the woods mushroom. We have great success with them. We have foragers that come to us, there’s different laws now governing them by the states and people got sick, some people that were not real foragers or mycologists, didn’t really know what they were picking. There’s a couple mushrooms out there that have parasites that if you don’t know what you’re getting you might be eating the wrong mushroom. They look very similar to the others but slightly different. That’s better now because you have to be a licensed mycologist, you have to verify that you know that these are correct mushrooms.
Once we had that and we have good people bringing them to us, the customers love it. Black trumpet mushrooms are my favorite thing. It’s tremendous. Also with the miracle of the jet airplane there’s great people that bring things, at reasonable prices now, from Oregon and so forth where it’s like the mushroom capital of the world. So many forest fires, that’s where a lot of mushrooms grow out of that, morels in particular. But we also have great people cultivating mushrooms now. Relatively easy to do, they grow them on logs in garages and greenhouses and different things like. Some of them they’re sort of mimics of wild mushrooms and they’re fantastic. They’re uniform, they’re really tasty, you can use it for all sorts of different things. I think mushrooms have come a long, long way.
Would anybody 10 years ago have been excited about a mushroom, like a wild mushroom? Probably not, but now I think they almost expect it. You can go to Whole Foods, and I don’t know how they get away with keeping them because I don’t think they sell that many of them, but they’re almost always available, at least one variety of a wild mushroom is there. They’re great.
Lisa: I like the idea that here in Maine we actually have some things that really have very high quality health properties. Chaga is one of these varieties of fungus which is known to be good for promoting health.
Harding: I don’t know about that one.
Lisa: It’s a fungus. It’s not exactly like reishi, it grows off the side of a tree. We have people who are cultivating chaga.
Harding: Okay.
Lisa: Actually they’re foraging for chaga. If we go to a … Just talking about blueberries, here in Maine we have blueberries which have very high antioxidant levels. We have sea vegetables that people are either cultivating of just foraging for.
Harding: There’s a whole new company that’s just dropped off at our door there, doing great things with sea vegetables.
Lisa: What I love about this is that these essentially are plants that are taking the energy of our state and they’re packaging them into this form that is readily available to us for our health. It sounds like you’re using a lot of this stuff in your restaurants.
Harding: Yeah absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I think the food industry, and not just for shall we say tomatoes or lettuces and things like that, but there are other things that people are doing now. It’s just amazing. I was reading the paper the other day about lobster bodies and lobster shells being used for a treatment. I forget what it was for. It’s crustacean, I believe is the compound that comes out of it that they were previously shrimp shells and so forth. We have all these leftover lobster shells, all the time. They just realized that they can do this. They’re actually shipping them to Iceland to extract the product. It’s tremendously life invigorating stuff, amazing.
Lisa: Last night I think I watched 4 episodes of Chopped with my 20 old daughter. I, and actually both of my daughters, specifically my 15 year old and my 20 year old, love that show in particular but cooking shows in general. There is this whole thing I think within that generation and the generations around cooking. But when you started this, it wasn’t like the Chopped generation.
Harding: Definitely not. When I first started cooking there was no cooking show, Julia Child was our cooking show. That was what I grew up watching, was Julia Child and Jacques Pepin. In fact both of them ended up being one credit professors for me. I assisted Julia at Boston University, it was amazing. That was the celebrity then, it was from PBS, it wasn’t Food Network and so forth. Now it’s everywhere. We really, as much as lot of people probably wouldn’t admit this, we owe Emeril Lagasse a huge debt because, would we be eating quail? We probably would have evolved to this point, at some point we would have gotten there. But all these different things that he introduced.
You can call him a hack and he was just putting on an entertaining show, he’s a great chef, if you eat at his restaurants it’s tremendous. But he was cooking, he didn’t care how he was accomplishing it, he was just entertaining the people. He did that and he brought food culture right into the people’s living rooms, into middle class America not just foodies and that sort of thing, but to everybody. He started that whole explosion of the Food Network and that sort of thing. We all owe him a great debt. We can say whatever we want about him, and even Anthony Bourdain who wanted to disparage him now says, “I was wrong.”
Lisa: What I like about this is that it’s gotten people interested in food again, in cooking. They’ll go to a good restaurant, they’ll also cook for themselves. Now they know what an eggplant is, now they know how to actually cut end of the woods mushrooms. That’s what I really like about this. Hopefully people will tear themselves away from the television and actually go into the kitchen and do some of this stuff.
Harding: I think a lot of people are. If you look at the kind of foods that they’re selling at Whole Foods, even Hannaford has upped their games tremendously and the local markets as well and Rosemont and all those sort of things. People are buying the food so they must be cooking it. I would certainly assume the propagation of William Sonoma and the other cooking stores and so forth, in this town in particular chefs, they’re somewhat celebrities. A lot of the kitchen that you see they’re opening in restaurants today are all open, because the people want to see you cook.
We have a dining bar at all the restaurants except for The Front Room, where you can sit and watch the people cook and people love it. They really are into it because they understand like, “I wonder if that’s what they were doing there,” because you see little techniques from the TV shows that you see, because not all cooking shows now are just … Most of them now seem to be competitions but there were a few years ago, and even some still today, where they’re actually in the kitchen of a chef, so you’re seeing the kitchen equipment and neat stuff like that. When I was a kid seeing kitchen equipment in the stores, “All right a kitchen stores, this is really neat.”
Lisa: It’s actually one of my favorite kind of stores to go.
Harding: I really, really like it. Yeah.
Lisa: Yeah, I probably have way more kitchen equipment than I ever could use, but it’s a guilty pleasure I guess.
Harding: Yeah, just don’t ever buy the asparagus peeler.
Lisa: Yeah, no that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me either. You have, as we said at the beginning of the show, the 4 rooms. Boone’s was the most recent one, but you have this other one that’s opening, The Mountain Room at the Peak Lodge up at Sunday River. This will be next winter.
Harding: It’s going to be open for the winter of 16/17, hopefully in December. We should be starting construction, or renovation so to speak, in June, or if the snow keeps staying away, probably May.
Lisa: What can people expect from The Mountain Room.
Harding: Kind of a greatest hits. It’s going to have a great big deck overlooking the valley. There will be fire pits all over the place, there’ll be wood burning fire with couches surrounding on the inside. It’s kind of a apres-ski, during the ski day. There’ll be a full service bar with big seat, open kitchen and wood burning grill, cooking burgers and steaks and things like that. We’ll have fondue, you kick back in a Adirondack chair dipping fondue, drinking a beer, or a hot toddy or a malt wine, that sort of thing. Basically, there will be slippers for you so you can take your boots off, leave your boots over to the side and LL Bean slippers to walk around in.
It’s a really unique experience, sort of the idea that the president of Sunday River and I have come up with is sort of that Swiss feel to it where you go out on the deck and you get a blanket given to you. You sit there and you can have a couple of pops, go back, get back in your skis, ski down or if you don’t want to ski down we have the gondola right there so you can take the gondola down. It’s going to be very unique, we actually hope to attract some people coming up on their own, that aren’t necessarily skiing, come up in the gondola, walk over and have a nice dinner as well, or lunch.
Lisa: How about your full plates, full potential fund raiser. I believe you’ve done this 2 years now?
Harding: 3 years.
Lisa: 3 years now.
Harding: We had out third annual this new year’s eve. We have a charity gala at Boone’s in the upstairs function area every year. This year we packed the house, we had 225 people up there at midnight. It was really tremendous, raised lot of money for full plates full potential and the Good Shepherd’s food bank. They’re sort of in together but we wanted to make sure we brought a lot of attention to the food bank, which was really near and dear to our hearts as chefs. We did really well, it was tremendous. It’s become sort of an annual thing, which is what we were trying to get it to be. I mean it is an annual thing but it’s become kind of that thing. We were sold out well in advance this year and we hope the same thing for the next 20/30 years, whatever it is, however long it should be. Boone has been well over 100 years now so who knows?
Lisa: We went and we really enjoyed it. We were upstairs, there were people dancing, they were downstairs. The place was packed.
Harding: It was packed.
Lisa: Absolutely packed, we couldn’t actually get a place to sit and have dinner, because we called to late, so we only got to go upstairs.
Harding: It was packed.
Lisa: But the people who were there, they were loving it. This next year it will be your fourth year and you’ll go on ad infinitum.
Harding: Yes. We hope to keep going, keep an annual event, and always … It’s a unique thing that we’re doing I think because we’re taking a night which is typically a night that you just try to make as much as you can, and we’re turning this into a night where we can bring focus to a cause. I don’t know that we’ll always stick with the same charity, I would assume that we will, or something along the same goal of ending childhood hunger in some way. By using it on a night that’s usually typically a very busy night, which it is always for us as well, it brings that much more awareness because people are focused on that, on a night when they’re all going to be going out and so forth.
They’re going to know that they’re going out for a reason. We call it party with a purpose, trying to get people to realize that they’re doing something by purchasing this ticket. We did a great auction this year too, a lot of different … Not auction but a raffle. Where lots of good things were given away, and that money went to the charity. Really it was nice, good thing to do.
Lisa: You have a lot going on, what are you most excited about?
Harding: What am I most excited about? I got my son to go down on skis, he’s 2.5 years old and he skied down the mountain. Well, not down the mountain, he skied down the bunny slope, by himself and loved it, with a giant smile on his face. When I caught him he said, “Again.” I think I’m probably most excited about that, it’s actually choking me up a bit right now. I’m probably most excited about that. I am very excited of course about The Mountain Room, I’m thrilled to death it’s like a dream come true, having a seasonal place up at a place that I’m passionate about you’re either a Sugarloafer or you’re a Sunday River person if you grew up in Maine, and I’m a Sunday River person. Love Sugarloaf as well but Sunday River is like home to me, we call it home when we go.
I’m really excited about that as well, and the prospect of my son being able to grow up in a skiing kind of culture, and maybe becoming a championship skier, who knows, instead of a chef. But him being able to grow up in that thing and have a reason to go there, and really know that as a community … Because it’s such a beautiful place, the community of Newry and Bethel, and Sunday River in general, and the owners of the mountain, the Boyne corporation, just such wonderful friendly people. I’m really happy for him to be able to grow up, at least some of the time, in that environment. I’m really looking forward to summer and sailing too.
Lisa: I hope that summer comes early for us this year.
Harding: It looks like it outside, it’s looking pretty sunny outside right now.
Lisa: Yeah, absolutely, and then you can open up your deck at Boone’s Fish House, people can down there and watch the-
Harding: Start eating oysters.
Lisa: Start eating oysters, watch the ships coming in. We’ve been speaking with Harding Lee Smith, he is a chef and restauranteur who owns The Rooms in Portland, which include the The Grill Room, The Corner Room, and The Front Room, as well as Boone’s Fish House and Oyster Room, and also the upcoming Mountain Room, which will be at Sunday River. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you again today. Thank you for coming in.
Harding: Thank you. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: Experience chef and owner Harding Lee Smith’s newest hit restaurant, Boone’s Fish House and Oyster Room, Maine seafood at its finest, joining sister restaurants The Front Room, The Grill Room and The Corner Room. This newly renovated 2 story restaurant at 86 Commercial Street on Custom House Wharf overlooks scenic Portland Harbor. Watch lobster-men bring in the daily catch as you enjoy big stuffed lobster, raw bar and wood fired flat breads. For more information visit theroomsportland.com.
Lisa: It’s not often that I have the opportunity to interview a passel of individuals truly all at the same time. Today we have 3 people in our studio and I feel pretty luck about that actually. We have Chris Avantaggio, John Turner and Nate O’Leary who are the owners of Cratefull of Maine. Chris Avantaggio is an advertising art director/associative creative director, and the founder and creative director of the Maine Lifestyle Brand Live Maine. John Turner is the founder of Traps Eyewear. He repurposes oak lobster traps to make sunglasses, cufflinks, tie-bars and authentic accessories with a nod to the past. Nathan O’Leary is the founder of Mainly SEO, a digital marketing firm specializing in SEO, social media and eCommerce website design for small businesses. You guys are like a crate-full of talent across the microphone from me today. Thanks for coming in.
Nathan: Thank you.
John: Thank you.
Chris: Thanks for having us.
Lisa: Obviously Maine is important to each of you, you each have your own links to the state. I guess John I’ll start with you. You have this whole Harpswell connection. Tell me about that
John: Definitely, I was born in Portland and grew on the coast of Harpswell. Definitely really had a great coastal upbringing, making forts on the beach, looking for lobsters, crabbing, those were all things that I definitely got to do. I think that ability to really explore and really use my imagination has helped me create businesses here in Maine around Maine. I think that that whole upbringing is a big catalyst to why I’m doing what I’m doing now.
Lisa: When you say the beach you mean Popham?
John: Yeah, definitely, Popham was a great place, but just the rocky coastline in front of my house, that was definitely where I spent a lot of my time, a lot time, Ragged Island, just islands off the coast of Harpswell.
Lisa: Thus I’m assuming that the oak lobster traps became somewhat of a draw for you because of the stuff that used to build when you were younger?
John: Yeah definitely. I’ve always been into repurposing salvaged materials. The original idea was to take old wired frames and melt them down, and to make metal sunglasses. But that material’s not very malleable, and I saw the oak lobster traps and I really like the history behind the traps. The traps they’re using now to make lobster traps are actually made by the lobster-man who fish them, and then his son fished. It was this really cool progression of the material, a great story behind every single pair of glasses. They’re all different. They’re all different because of the environment that they are put in. Each time they banged up against the boat or encountered frigid water, changes the grain pattern so each pair is definitely significantly different. Each pair tells a story. Yeah the whole Harpswell really has created and honed my skills and talents into what I’m doing today.
Lisa: Chris you tell me that you’re also a saltwater guy, you also like the ocean.
Chris: Yeah.
Lisa: You’re the Live Maine guy, so when we see the shirts that say, “Live Maine, Run Maine, Eat Maine,” you’re that guy.
Chris: Yeah.
Lisa: Maine is really important to you.
Chris: Yeah, I love Maine. I grew up here. I grew up in Damariscotta. Similar to John I spent a lot of time on the water growing up, fishing with my brothers down in the South Bristol area. We had some … My mom’s father was a lobster-man, I never met him but it’s in our family heritage. There’s cool, that connection to the ocean there. It’s just, I feel like, a part of who I am. I have a lot of strong connections with this state and love celebrating all the great things that there are to do here.
Lisa: That brand has been pretty successful over the years.
Chris: Yeah. Every year it gets a little strong I guess. It’s something that I started about 5 or 6 years ago, and it started on a whim. Really it was a single t-shirt design I put together for a bunch of friends and myself. We go to neighbors festival every year and one year they asked me to put a design together. The first one that came out was, “Beer Me,” there’s was a lot of attention drawn to it. I saw an opportunity to really expand it and create a lifestyle brand for Maine. From there it’s grown through friends and family supporting it.
Lisa: Nate, you’re the soul freshwater holdout. You are a big fan of Sebago Lake, but you still love Maine. Why is that?
Nathan: The culture, the diversity here. All 4 seasons, I’m a big fan of the skiing and enjoying summers on Sebago Lake. Fall is one of my favorite seasons, so just being able to experience all 4 seasons of Maine, and the people here, and how happy everybody is. I just enjoy Maine and everything that it brings to the table I guess.
Lisa: How did you get interested in SEO work? For people who are listening who don’t really know what that is describe it a little bit.
Nathan: Sure. Excuse me. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. When you go to Google and you put in a search term, Google has an algorithm with 200 different factors that determine what website results you’re going to get. I try to manipulate that as best as I can to favor our own websites or our clients’ websites to rank higher in Google. If you’re looking for a steakhouse in Portland, or made in Maine gifts, we try to optimize websites to show up for those search terms.
Lisa: It sounds like each of you are working together on this new venture called Cratefull of Maine, and it sounds like each of you has your own individual talents that you have been able to weave into this. Who came up with this idea originally?
Nathan: I think it was just us having a beer.
Lisa: It comes back to the beer again, doesn’t it.
Nathan: Yeah. There’s such a strong beer culture here.
Chris: Yeah, there are so many good ones. Yeah, it was an idea that I think Nate had originally suggested to John and I saying, “You know I think there’s an opportunity to create a business or a service where we can highlight a lot of these amazing Maine brands and small companies that make these really great products and showcase that and get it in front of a larger audience.” From there we started to think about it a little more and knew that branding would be crucial and really getting it right and making it feel like a really great product that people would be drawn to. We thought about it for a while and tossed around some ideas. After a couple sort of bad names we came up with Cratefull and the whole concept of putting it together in a crafted cardboard box, screen printed to look like an old lobster crate, just seemed like a really fun concept to us. I think we pitched it around to a few friends and other people, just got some feedback first but it seemed like a good direction to go in.
Lisa: What types of things are in your Cratefull of Maine?
John: We definitely offer a wide range of items in our crates. Right now we’re really building out the different themes in our crates. We have a baby crate, we have our evergreen crate which was the first initial launch of the product, which was what was available of Christmas. We have a lady’s crate and a gentleman’s crate. We’re working on a brunch crate. We’re really looking to cover every aspect of the great products that are made in Maine. We’re also looking to make sure that we have really great themes for both men and women.
We really look for genuine Maine makers who are doing something original and really showing off their craftsmanship. We’ve got to work with awesome makers here in the state already and we hope to keep working with many more. There’s so many people making great things here in Maine. I recently just put a quick Facebook post on our Facebook wall asking people to suggest Maine makers and we had I think maybe 50 comments of people suggesting their friends and friends of friends.
Chris: The products range though from everything from hand made soaps to leather good, small handbags, wood products. It’s a range of manufacturing. Even baby blankets and onesies. It’s all stuff that’s made here in Maine by sometimes just one person. It’s a small business looking to get exposure and trying to grow like everyone else.
John: Yeah definitely. We have products from Zootility tools which is a precision manufacturing facility here in Portland that are doing large volumes. Then we have single makers are that baking us cookies, one by one. It’s definitely a vast range of manufacturing abilities, production abilities and product.
Lisa: I’m interested in how that works, if you have … Presumably you have a variety of things to choose from, how do you I guess bring in the materials that you need in order to have them available for your crates to send out to people in a timely fashion? Because that seems to be what people want, when they order it they want it yesterday.
John: Yeah. Inventory management is obviously a big portion of this business, and so far we’ve really pushed crates out for finite dates. Whether it be a Christmas type deal of a Valentine’s type deal. That really puts a time frame on when people should be ordering these, but now we are getting into more products such as the lady’s crate and the gentleman’s crate that are standalone products that people can order at any time. It’s really just creating a great relationship between us and the people that make these products, to ensure that there’s this communication, that when we do need a product we can source that product and get it to the end users as soon as possible.
Lisa: Nate what’s your favorite crate?
Nathan: Probably the evergreen crate, the first one that we came out with. We packed I think 17 items into that crate, tried to add as much value as we could to that in time for Christmas. We launched it on Black Friday so there was a lot of noise, but we were able to cut through that with some smart marketing and getting the word out there obviously through social media and word of mouth. That was extremely successful. To John’s point, we initially went to many of those makers and asked them for a certain quantity, and then within the first couple days we were already passed that and needed to reup almost 2 or 3 times. They were all great and able to get us the product very quickly. That was awesome that they were able to move fast for us.
Lisa: Chris, you work with VIA. Your job is essential I guess branding, marketing. You’re an art director, you’re ans associative creative director, so this is your field. What have you seen when it comes to the brand of Maine? What have you see as far as trends over the last say 5 years?
Chris: That’s a great question. I would say that things are becoming much more independent and authentic. There’s a large … Maine as a state has this mystic around it. I don’t know, people are drawn to it and I think they really appreciate the quality and craftsmanship of things now. I think branding is really, really important when it comes to a product or a company and putting your best food forward and making sure that you’re creating authentic things and having a good design sense. Those are all strong qualities.
Lisa: Talk to me about authentic. I don’t know which one of you would like to tackle this word, but it seems to be something that we hear a lot more. Why is being authentic so important? What does it really mean?
John: To me this authenticity of Maine, all these companies are making great Maine goods and they want to give someone an authentic experience of Maine, or a flashback of Maine. It’s funny that so many people have some kind of connection to Maine, whether they were here for camp one year, or whether they have a camp here, or whether they met a friend in Maine. There’s so many different elements or connections to Maine. I think that to create an authentic product, when that person holds that product or experiences that product, they’re coming back to Maine in their mind. They’re remembering an experience they had here in Maine. That’s kind of what I think about when I think about authenticity or authentic product, Maine products.
Lisa: What about you Nate, you do SEO work so you know that you’re trying to make sure that people find the actual authentic thing that you are offering. What types of words and phrases, what types of things are people searching for when they’re looking for authentic?
Nathan: Yeah, “Made in Maine”, obviously is a big one that comes to mind. There’s a variety of keywords that people search for and many times they’re unique to them because they’re searching what comes to mind to them. It’s very diverse, and to their point again, the story behind all of these products is really what I think makes them authentic. That’s not something that you can easily replicate or duplicate. The story behind each one of the products we try to tell as best as we can for each one of the makers that we include in the crate.
Chris: Yeah, I think that’s a great reason of who a brand is I think. I think we’ve done a great job with the relationships we’ve already established. Each brand has such unique stories, from Alaina Marie’s bait bag clutches to Jess’s soap company. There’s so many unique businesses out there that have these really cool stories of how they started. John for example with his Traps Eyewear. I think all that adds to authenticity.
Lisa: It’s not that you can actually put in a search engine, “authentic Maine,” or that even people who do that in the first place. They’re looking for something more specific that will then lead them to these authentic products.
Nathan: Yeah, I think so for sure. Yeah.
Lisa: Chris, you went to school in Boulder, and you were a snowboarder. You’ve transitioned from this very active outdoor self into I would say probably more cerebral and more inside at the very least.
Chris: Yeah.
Lisa: Now you’ve become and entrepreneur. Describe the various aspects of your personality that are contributing to where you are sitting today.
Chris: Wow. Okay, I’m not very good at sitting still. Even if I am at desk I’m up every hour walking around anyway. I think the transition from snowboarding into advertising into entrepreneurship all stems fro having a lot of passion for things and really stems in creativity. When I was snowboarding it was trying to pick a line through the park and set up a run for tricks, or thinking about my next move on a jump. That transitioned into, now we’re coming up with ideas for brands and businesses, that it’s a creative innovation, coming up with these new ways to market a product.
Then from there getting into fun ideas or a new way to start a business. I guess it all stems from, I don’t know, just having a passion for something. With me that started with snowboarding, and got into Maine because it’s a part of who I am, where I came from. When I was in Colorado I always missed the ocean, I wasn’t sure when I would come back to Maine, I knew I’d want to. I met a girl back on the East Coast that’s now my wife, that definitely drew me back. Yeah I guess I just …
Nathan: I’d probably say not wanting to settle, and always wanting to improve. I feel like we’re all like that. We always want to do better and improve on things.
Chris: Yeah.
John: I think that’s absolutely right.
Lisa: Now we know about Chris’ snowboarding, and we know about John’s building forts on the beach. What’s your back story?
Nathan: Wow, I’ve got a pretty diverse background. I’ve done everything from race cars across the country in the Gumball 3000 and the players run to day trading stocks and building websites when I was 14 and 15 years old. I’ve always been drawn to technology, I saw the evolution of cellphones because one of my first jobs was working in a cellphone store, so I saw everything from the bag phones, all the way to the iPhone. Growing a business online has come somewhat naturally to me. That’s where our skill sets work together. Chris being the branding expert and John having a great connection to a lot of these Maine makers, and then my background with marketing and the website.
We were able to really come together and launch this thing rather quickly. We only had literally 3 or 4 weeks to get this thing off the ground when we really decided that we were going to do this. We had sat on the idea for a while, almost 6 months just to figure out if we have the time or if this is something that we wanted to pursue. Then we came together and we were like, “All right let’s do this,” and then we set Black Friday as that launch date. I literally didn’t even go to my family Thanksgiving dinner because I was building the website that weekend.
Lisa: What what the spark? Why did you all of a sudden after sitting on it for so long, why did you all of a sudden say, “We have to do this now?”
John: I guess the timing was right. Obviously the time, the season helped. The holidays were coming, Black Friday. We thought that people were going to be really into this product, that was a good time to launch it out there. We had great validation, we had, like Nate said we ordered a certain amount of product from these makers originally and I think we had to reorder 4 or 5 times. We saw that this was a good concept and now we’re building out these different themes, we’re excited to see where this company is in a year or 5 years from now.
Lisa: As I’m interviewing the 3 of you, John I’m noticing that you’re looking around, you’re looking out the window. It’s like you’re creative pathways are constantly, I don’t know, exercising themselves. I know that Chris has described sort of the same thing and so have you Nate. What’s that like for the 3 of you to try to get all your creative pathways to connect I guess and move this business forward?
John: Obviously we all have diverse background but they’re all fitting backgrounds to make a successful business. Like Chris I grew up skateboarding and snowboarding, and going back to that point, skateboarding and snowboarding is the ultimate freedom, no one’s telling you what to do. You’re really, like Chris said, choosing a line, choosing whatever you want to do. I think that has helped me develop businesses because I really feel passionate about doing my own thing and creating out a niche. Also skateboarding and snowboarding, I really learned about product collaboration and brands working with other brands, that you’re like, this juxtaposition of these 2 brands make no sense but then it makes sense somehow. I really draw a lot of inspiration from that background for sure.
But going back to us all having different not necessarily passions but skill sets, it all just makes sense. It works super well as far as the business that we’re looking to create. I have these good relationships with these makers. Chris is an awesome art director. If we need something as far as branding goes, he’s done in like 15 minutes after we’ve asked him to do it. We’re so lucky to be able to streamline that process, and especially Chris’ knowledge, he’s been shipping products for a long time. He’s been doing packaging for a long time. Nate’s been doing websites for a long time and SEO for a long time. This guy was doing SEO before SEO was even around. It all works.
Chris: Yeah, we definitely all have our own strengths. I think collectively it’s an awesome team. We’ve been working hard to chisel out those roles and figure out how we can be more efficient and more effective with our time because we don’t have a lot of it, all having other things going on right now. We’re excited when we do get the opportunity to get together and carve out those tasks, but we’re also excited for what this projects holds for the state and what it can do for all these people that are involved with it. At the end of the day we want to help all these other businesses grow and get them new exposure.
Lisa: How can people find out about Cratefull o Maine and each of you as individuals and your own pursuits?
Nathan: Yeah, just visit cratefullofmaine.com. We’re on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. You can sign up for our newsletter, we feature different Maine makers that we’re going to be highlighting in the boxes, or the crates.
Lisa: Also Cratefull of Maine will provide some sort of information on why each of you were interested in doing this?
Chris: Yeah. On the website there’s an about section that gives a little bit of our background and how the project started.
Nathan: We’ve been fortunate enough to have some great press as well. There’s links to articles in the Press Herald, or we were featured on Fox, Good Morning Maine and things like that.
Lisa: I give you a lot of credit. It sounds like in addition to having jobs that you already did and having lives that you already had, you’ve now brought together all of these creative energies and your own strengths and you’re really bringing something into Maine that will be good for not only your organization but also the rest of the state. Thank you for doing that. We’ve been speaking with Chris Avantaggio, John Turner and Nate O’Leary who are the owners of Cratefull of Maine. I encourage you to go to their website and find out more about these wonderful products that they’re offering and hopefully put in an order. Thank for coming in.
Nathan: You can use the coupon code SAVE10 to save 10% off your order.
Lisa: Excellent. Thanks so much for coming in.
Nathan: Thank you.
John: Thank you for having us.
Chris: Thanks.
Lisa: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio show number 239, “Taste of Maine.” Our guest have included Harding Lee Smith, Chris Avantaggio, John Turner and Nathan O’Leary. For more information on our guests and extended interviews visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as Dr. Lisa and see my running travel, food and wellness photos as @bountiful1 on Instagram. We’d love to hear from you so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. We hope that you have enjoyed our, “Taste of Maine,” show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day, may you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is made possible with the support of Berlin City Honda, The Rooms by Harding Lee Smith, Maine Magazine, Portland Art Gallery and Art Collector Maine. Audio production and original music have been provided by Spencer Albee. Our editorial producer is Kelly Chase. Our assistant producer is Shelby [Wasa 00:59:21]. Our community development manager is Casey Lovejoy. Our executive producers are Kevin Thomas, Susan Grisanti, and Dr. Lisa Belisle. For more information on our host production team, Maine Magazine, or any of the guests featured here today, please visit us at lovemaineradio.com.