Category: People

Dobra Tea owners Ray Marcotte and Ellen Kanner are on a research trip to Korea and Japan. You can follow their travels online at dobrateame.tumblr.com. According to a press release,

[They are] seeking to strengthen tea culture in Portland by traveling to meet their tea producers and farmers in Asia and bring their knowledge back home to share. The tea plant – Camelia sinensis – is the focus of this journey. There are six classes of tea including green, white, yellow, oolong, black and pu-er, but the focus of this year’s journey is Korean and Japanese green.

Shannon Moss interviewed Kate McCarty earlier this week on WLOB about her blog and her upcoming book, Portland Food: the culinary capital of Maine. An archive recording of the session is available on the WLOB website.

Knack Factory has published an interview with Stephen Lanzalotta. In the interview Lanzalotta share details on his upcoming restaurant Slab (instagram) and his early history as a cook and baker.

What about baking specifically?
The way I got into baking was crazy. My ex-wife—my wife at the time—and I had moved to Maine to get back to the land. I built a house out of the trees of the land, cut the Spruce logs down and built a log house. I built all of the furniture. While I was doing this incredible endeavor I needed some carb sustenance so I would make these big piles to burn off the Spruce and when it would get down to ash, I would make very crude breads by burying it in that ash.

Knack Factory has published an interview with bartender John R. Myers.

What about those revelations appealed to you?
I think it is just like anything that you start to care about. You start caring about quality on another level, especially when your craft is related to your employment. When you care about doing it, it brings a whole new level of enjoyment. When you care about the quality of ingredients you are using and the fresh juices and the homemade concoctions, it keeps it interesting and makes it worth doing.

Knack Factory has posted a Q&A with Arlin Smith from Hugo’s.

Why are you in this business?
I love taking care of people in a way that they didn’t even think was possible. I would say that fact alone is what drives me. Ultimately it is what I do every day for people. Most people see service as service, where they have a server and they get to beckon them, call them over, whatever is brought over, they pay them and they are on their way. I feel like hospitality is an anticipation of needs, it is making suggestions, it is getting guests something they wanted that they didn’t even know they wanted.

Knack Factory has posted an interview with Kim Rodgers, pastry chef at Hugo’s/Eventide.

This industry can be a difficult one and sometimes people don’t stick around for very long. What made you stick around?
I went to school for art, sculpture and French. For me, it was a marriage of all of those things. It was a tactile and visual thing. There are materials and you are changing them and there are endless possibilities and I fell in love with it. And you go in every day and it is never the same. It is not always the easiest, but there is always something to learn and there are great people to work with.

Maine Today has published an interview with Luke Davidson, head distiller of Maine Craft Distilling.

How does your upbringing on a farm influence the way you work now?
That’s interesting. I definitely approach it in a more practical way, but it limits my abilities in other ways. Fortunately, I have my partner Fred [Farber] and a few other collaborators who have whole different skill sets, and together we make a good unit. In terms of the practical piece: growing up in a really, really remote setting during a really remote time, I learned from everybody that if you can’t find it, you make it. Basically everything here we’ve made ourselves.

Shift Drinks has posted an interview with Damian Sansonetti, chef and co-owner of Piccolo.

That is an excellent motivator.
You don’t really feel like you are going to work. Now it’s even more rewarding because it is our place. It is a smaller place too and so we get to see our customers and so it is easier. When you see a guest and they are happy, that’s the ultimate reward. When they tell you that what you made with all of your crew took them back to their childhood, or to a food memory, and it transported them in some way big or small, that is really rewarding.