Don Lindgren has leased a retail space at The Black Box on Washington Ave which will become a temporary retail shop for his acclaimed culinary bookstore Rabelais Books (website, facebook, instagram) during the months of July, August and September.

The shop will feature a mixture of food and drink-related books, ephemera, and artifacts, mixing new and recent publications with old and rare cookbooks, recipe manuscripts, and culinary ephemera.

Once a behemoth of a cookbook shop in Biddeford’s North Dam Mill, the tiny container space will be a cabinet of curiosities, featuring a mixture of food and drink-related books, ephemera, and artifacts. Mixing new and recent publications with old and rare cookbooks, recipe manuscripts, and culinary ephemera, we expect a visit to Rabelais’ tiny space to make a gargantuan impact on what you think about cookbooks, or food writing, or culinary history.

Lindgren plans to launch this pocket-sized Rabelais on the July 4th weekend. The regular hours of operation will be Wednesday through Monday, 11 am to 7 pm. It will be located in the space immediately to the right of Moonday Coffee.

Rabelais was named to the Saveur 100 list of their favorite foods, people, places, and things, was called the “Best Cookbook Shop in America” by Andrew Knowlton in Bon Appetite, and was featured in the Maine episode of the show of Somebody Feed Phil. Launched in 2007 in the storefront that’s now home to Eventide on Middle Street, Rabelais was in the city to witness and participate in its rise as a culinary destination. In 2012 the bookshop moved to Biddeford. Lindgren closed the Biddeford store in September 2023 and since then has operated Rabelais as a virtual business.

Lindgren has spent an active life in the book trade. He has served on the Board of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of American, was a presenter at the Oxford Food Symposium in 2017 and in 2019, and was named a Literary Lion in the 2023 Readable Feast honors program. He was a contributing author to the Maine Community Cookbooks and currently serves as a Board member of Community Plate, an organization dedicated to facilitating connection and building community through a common language of food, shared food stories and recipes.

A group of friends and industry professionals—Bryce Summers, Garrett Lenderman, Ryan Nielsen, Arvid Brown and Nick Coffin—have teamed up to lease the former Petite Jacqueline space where they plan to open Cuties (instagram).

Cuties will be an all-day bar that starts off as a coffee shop in the morning and transitions in the evening into a wine and cocktail bar.  There will be a mix of bar and lounge seating and a drink rail that runs the length of the windows facing Market Street.

The vision for Cuties is to offer a brightly lit and welcoming space for folks to gather over low-ABV drinks, coffee and laptops during the day. Evenings will morph into an unfussy wine and cocktail bar and will highlight an affordable bottle list and playful drinks like unique frozen cocktails, a rotating margarita menu and an espresso martini on nitro. Later into the night Cuties will embrace a “lights down, music up” atmosphere that encourages good times while still offering good product. The food program will be a tight, fresh, and fun selection of snacks that aims to complement the beverage offerings.

Lenderman and Summers currently work at Bar Futo where Summer is the bar manager, Nielsen was the initial chef at Magnus and operates the Wild Haven pop-up series, and Coffin and Brown are the owners of Room for Improvement which launched in 2023.

The team plans to fully launch into renovations this fall and hopes to launch Cuties this winter.