Good Company Issue 1

Sometimes a place can make a person. The place that made me was the cragged, rocky, sea-sprayed coast of Maine.

I was fortunate enough to grow up there, on a small island at the edge of the earth, home to rugged, salt-cured fishermen and descendants of Italian immigrant quarrymen. It was a place I fled as soon as possible, to “see the world,” but it was the place, too, that always called me back. Pulled by tides and seasons, I finally surrendered to my home. Moving back to such a rural place was frustrating for the same reasons it was attractive—isolation and simplicity. But I found that this place has a way of finding and feeding the strength we diminish inside ourselves.

When I moved home, I did any and all odd jobs. I worked as a line cook, a bartender, a sternman, and a housepainter before I realized that to really find your place here, you have to make it yourself. Shortly after that realization I met the woman who would become my business partner and we schemed up an idea that would become a successful business, growing and dynamic with year-round employees and two properties. In making space and creating a life in this rugged place, I found beacons of strength in visionary women who had done before me what I felt in my bones I wanted to do, who had left other worlds or moved home to re-create a truth that lives so strongly in this place of Maine.

Ingrid was a pioneer and a lightning rod. To say Maine’s working waterfront is male dominated is an understatement. The self-described cowboys of the ocean pride themselves on working extreme hours in extreme weather for extreme profit. Historically, the role of women has been one of support, and it has been largely homebound. This binary saturates the culture of fishing. Men pass on unwritten knowledge of the seafloor, fish and bird migrations, hidden ledges, and seasonal weather patterns to their sons and crack crude jokes to each other over the CB radio. Women make the homes, raise the children, prepare the lunches, and wash bait-soaked clothes. The community that Ingrid called home—Stonington, Maine—embodied the quintessential working waterfront. She was a native New Yorker and had spent extensive time traveling and living around the world—including in Mexico, Nicaragua, Greece, France, Israel, and Russia. She is proficient in Russian and French. She authored several acclaimed short essays and books, and at the young age of twenty-eight gained recognition and was nominated for a National Book Award for her book Combat in the Erogenous Zone (Knopf, 1972). This book and other essays brought her fame, but this spotlight and urban bustle was not the life she wanted. With her earnings from published writing, she bought a house and moved to Maine. She chose Stonington as her home and made the fisheries her business.

Ingrid created Ingrid Bengis Seafood (est. 1985) as a direct connection between top chefs from across the country and fishermen, crab pickers, urchin divers, and oyster farmers long before “farm to table” eateries were a trending obsession. She believed Stonington and its fisheries offered something unique that should be recognized and valued. Ingrid was seen by many as a fierce predator on the docks. To others she was fearless, driven, and a perfectionist. She was shrewd and demanded the freshest and highest quality catch from fishermen, harvesters, and farmers. Her demeanor and presence was one of passion and conviction; she would talk over, walk out on, and dismiss people or conversations that she saw as irrelevant to her motive. She built a reputation for superb quality that was sought after by chefs, and she insisted they come and visit her in Stonington, so they could see where the scallops, lobster, and crab were being harvested and meet the fishermen and their families who worked, sometimes risking their lives, to harvest these products. Ingrid was adamant that the fishermen and chefs knew each other, understood that they were in the pursuit of quality and value together. She saw and filled the need for a seafood monger who could both negotiate prices on the dock and guarantee quality to the chef. Ingrid built her business from the shore up, and she established herself as an unflinching advocate for the fishermen and farmers of Stonington. She met the clammers at dawn, the crab pickers at noon, the lobster boats in the afternoon, and the FedEx pickup on time. She provided the freshest and highest quality products, and the chefs she worked with staked their reputations on it.

To see a woman on the docks was a rarity, but Ingrid made her presence known. She created a market that was not previously there, and she required and delivered the best. She understood the marketability of a place in the form of a product procured directly from the fishermen. One of her trademarks was the peekytoe crab, a native pest to the lobster trap that she rebranded as a delicacy. She thrived on the ego of the fishing industry and embraced the rugged culture as part of her. The passion and drive she brought to Ingrid Bengis Seafood and Stonington has assured a place for Maine seafood on the most acclaimed menus and in the most elite kitchens.

Ingrid passed away in the summer of 2017 after years of fighting cancer. She left behind a family, a thriving business, and an absence that cannot be filled. I was fortunate enough to share an island home with Ingrid and a summer birthday. We made a point to find each other in the heat and hustle of summer to sit outside with a glass of wine and talk about the particular struggles of business and small-town living. She was relentless in her support of any female entrepreneur and in her vision to create a connection between place and people in this unique community.

Erin French

To visit The Lost Kitchen is to feel at home: all the comforts of family, loved possessions, and food prepared with exquisite passion. This is the intention and the creation of Erin French. Rendered from the remains of a historic mill and perched over a harnessed stream, her restaurant embodies what it means to make our home and heart our work. Erin has meticulously created every detail of this restaurant. As the name suggests, The Lost Kitchen has had multiple reincarnations, starting as a pop-up dinner club in her home to a mobile custom-designed Airstream to its final home in the historic Mill among the rolling hills of Freedom, Maine. Erin grew up here, a place that seems midway between anywhere—a few hours north of Augusta, south of Bangor, and inland from the coast. She has carved out a life where there was nothing before, only a place that called her home.

Today The Lost Kitchen is one of the most sought-after dining experiences in Maine. The phone line opens up at midnight on a day in April and all reservations for the year are filled before the day is out. This is the demand she has created, on her terms, from her vision and from her heart. The menu is never the same, never repeating, never without the most current and freshest seasonal ingredients. She welcomes guests into her restaurant as if she were welcoming home old friends. The ruralness and destination quality of The Lost Kitchen add to its magical allure. It is thrilling to travel so off the beaten path and to find a restaurant of such simple perfection. it has been nominated several times for a James Beard Award. Erin has been propositioned by critics and investors to build bigger, build more, expand the space, open earlier, stay open later in the season, etc., but she has always declined. That is not the model she intended. She has recently published her first cookbook, which serves as a portal inviting the reader in to the beautifully curated life Erin has created for herself.

When I first met Erin and started working with her, it was her clarity and drive that were undeniably attractive. She is unwavering in knowing what she wants. Her commitment to perfection comes across in every part of The Lost Kitchen. Her determination to create a place where there was none and to know what will work, what is real, what is right, and what feels like home comes down to how Erin has embraced the place where she is from and answered the call to grow, nurture, and thrive where she was planted.

Cecily Pingree

Left to right: Amilia Campbell, Cecily Pingree, Lydia Brown, Jessica Hallowell

Sometimes the journey is the adventure, people say, and if North Haven and Cecily Pingree’s Calderwood Hall is your destination, you had better enjoy the journey, because it is a ways from anywhere. The island is part of the Penobscot Bay archipelago, one of many islands including my own, but unlike in Deer Isle, there is no bridge. The ferry departs the small fishing town three times a day in the winter as the population shrinks to a quarter of what it is in the summer. The hour-long ride gives time for contemplation and adjustment before entering this slow, small town.

Cecily grew up on North Haven, where you know everyone and everyone knows you. In a town so closely knit in the winter, it can be a jarring adjustment in the spring when ferry load after ferry load of “people from away” arrive in North Haven. This influx of outsiders boosts the economy and makes many people’s year-round incomes possible; however, it is not without social chafing. Uniting two distinct parts of the community—the visitor, vacationer, and second (or third) homeowner with the working fisherman, the carpenter, and the farmer—is no easy feat, but that is exactly what Cecily has done with her creation of Calderwood Hall market and restaurant.

The large classic New England Mansard building sits just a few hundred yards from the ferry terminal and the commercial piers where most fishermen keep their boats and sell their daily catch of lobsters. Cecily bought the building that had been the central meeting place of the island community over its hundred-year history, a place for dances, basketball games, and town meetings. Her vision was to create a year-round restaurant, market, and brewery with on-site housing. In a time when more and more young people were leaving the island to find jobs and community elsewhere, Cecily took on the project to create a space that would support a community identity.

To enter the renovated community hall on any summer evening is to be met with a cacophony of celebrations: bellowing fishermen, deaf from the long day aboard their diesel-engine boats, screaming children, clanging pots from the open kitchen, and laughter ringing through the room. The setting is informal: long community tables obligate strangers to sit next to each other, to engage in conversation. The menu is simple and perfect: there is a rotating variety of pizzas topped with fresh ingredients from the island’s farms. Summer favorites include peach and prosciutto, or goat cheese and fig. The salads are made from local greens and topped with ingredients picked from the farm that day. The food is fresh and the facilities a new rendering of the historic rural community. Cecily’s clarity in her intention to create a welcoming space is impressive. The space comes alive, as a beacon to newcomers, old friends, even some enemies. The hall incites engagement and creates community.

Maine is rugged, it is remote, it can be isolating in the extreme, but it is also in these small towns and on these remote islands that the spark of community thrives in people. To choose to leave urban comforts and make something where there was nothing before is terrifying, but it is also exhilarating. These small rural communities can be the most fertile for unique business opportunities to take root and thrive in. Towns built on strong work ethics and the tight-knit fabric of chosen family create the structure and support that is unique and undeniably powerful, where all you have to do is breathe life into a dream and create a home for it among the rocky cliffs, deep in the quiet forest, in the dark frozenness of winter, and under the star-strewn sky. What these three exceptional women have taught me and continue to remind me is that if you allow it and if you listen to it, a place can be a powerful partner.

In making space and creating a life in this rugged place, I found beacons of strength in visionary women who had done before me what I felt in my bones I wanted to do.