QSJ guide to the Quietside’s pandemic-ravaged restaurant scene
4 candidates for BH planning board; Some in Tremont fear more massive projects; Chinese stowaway article begets more history
SOUTHWEST HARBOR - The “all clear” sign is still elusive for Quietside restaurants, many of whom are struggling with severe staffing shortages.
Red Sky Cafe and Rogue Cafe are open only four and three days a week respectively. Sips has eliminated breakfast. Coda has closed. Drydock Cafe has eliminated lunch. Even stalwart Beal’s Lobster Pier is only open Wednesday through Sunday.
Still, they are extremely busy for the hours they are open. Demand is outpacing supply. The evolving restaurant scene here, despite the ephemeral shortcomings, is making Southwest Harbor the culinary destination on MDI.
Over the winter, several changes were transcendent.
Hotelier Tim Harrington purchased the Claremont Hotel and elevated that venue into the hottest luxury destination on MDI, with two restaurants and a bar of the highest caliber. The dockside snack bar opened last week - a nice counter point to the fancy dining room in the big house whose menu continues to build and evolve. It has come a long way from opening night when QSJ had only two steaks, a chicken, a salmon and ravioli to consider.
Hearth & Harbor, next to the SWH library, boldly opened last November and stuck through the winter with its wood fired-oven cuisine. It has now expanded to an outdoor space out back. (Try the white pizzas, especially the clam pizza, ala New Haven’s Sally’s!)
The biggest success story on the Quietside may be the eponymous Quietside Cafe in the Seal Cove strip mall where Ralph and Frances Reed are doing gangbuster business as the “go-to” place for locals. They lost their lease on Main Street where they had served ice cream, lunch and dinner to many generations of SWH denizens including QSJ and family. In the new space with ample parking they have added a robust breakfast business. It’s the busiest place on the island at 6 a.m.
The Drydock finally opened its restaurant this week, serving dinners only. Owner Marty Williams said she cut back the hours to maintain its level of service and quality.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have a burrito bar, “Bub’s Burritos” taking the outside space of the erstwhile Coda restaurant. The brainchild of Raechelle Sexton and Serkan Bekar, it is food delivered fast, but it’s not fast food. Sexton rolls every burrito herself.
Meanwhile, Coda owner Carter light is focusing on his sausage wholesale business. His sausages were a big hit on his previous tapas menu.
Rogue Cafe opened Friday night. QSJ has patronized Maureen Cosgrove’s restaurants since her days on Town Hill. She has never disappointed. Starting Wednesday July 14 (only on Wednesdays) she will be featuring a one-seating farm dinner at 6 pm. The Rogue Cafe, along with Red Sky are arguably the best restaurants on the island (Havana may have a different opinion). Reservations require persistence. You may have to make repeated calls.
The Upper Deck is doing its tourist thing. Its website says it’s open from 11 to 9 but QSJ was there Wednesday at 7:15 pm when the doors were bolted. The Next Level bar and restaurant was the busiest place last winter. It seems to be on auto pilot now.
Thurston’s appears to be in its groove. It still closes on Mondays as always. QSJ had its usual flawless experience with family one week ago.
MDI Lobster Company off Clark Point Road is open Sunday through Friday for lunch and dinner.
The legendary Charlotte Buchanan Gill of the Legendary Charlotte’s Lobster Pound is basking in her second tranche of media publicity for her valerian-induced crustaceans. If you drug the lobsters they will suffer less when cooked, her theory goes. Unclear whether that benefit accrues to the diner. Ask Charlotte to explain at her place on Seawall. On the way home, stop by Peter Trout’s Tavern for a pint and the best fried chicken on the island.
Beal’s has cut its 4.5-ounce lobster roll to $29.95 after selling them at the nose-bleed price of $34.95 during Memorial Day weekend.
Luckily for us, XYZ Restaurant co-owners Janet Strong and Bob Hoyt flunked retirement a few years ago. You drive up the gravel road to an unassuming house off Seawall Road and then enter a 1950s style ranchito which could be anywhere in Central Mexico. That’s where Bob learned to cook the cuisine with generous amount of mole sauce. There’s not a Tex-Mex bean taco to be found. XYZ is open only Friday and Saturday, but is offering private parties on Wednesdays and Thursdays for groups of up to 25.
Seafood Ketch in Bass Harbor is open for lunch and dinner seven days a week. Eat-A-Pita Take 2 has changed ownership to one of its employees and is open Tuesday through Sunday.
QSJ gets many inquiries about Sawyer’s market, the hole in the donut in SWH. Local investors are talking to owner David Millikin, who bought the business three years ago but hasn’t been able to staff it. It appears unlikely it will open this summer.
Two surprising candidates offer hope for vacation rental limits in Bar Harbor
Second of two parts on important questions on Bar Harbor’s November ballot
BAR HARBOR - The much honored former town council chair and Jesup Library director Ruth Eveland is seeking a spot on the planning board, along with a genetics scientist from Jackson Labs, Elissa Chesler.
While unlikely to reveal their opinion about the proposed changes to the land use ordinance to limit vacation rentals, they offer hope to those seeking to avoid needing two thirds of the votes on the question in November.
That would be required if the planning board voted against the limit which the current board likely would have done.
But two of five planning board members are completing their terms and one of them will not return, leaving only Erica Brooks, the Swan real estate broker who is seeking re-appoinment. The relentless Jennifer Cough, a self-described libertarian who got clobbered in the race for town council June 7, is also seeking a spot (QSJ can never understand why someone who doesn’t believe in government wants to be in government).
After decades of being dominated by business interests, Bar Harbor is now reverting to control by residents who spoke loudly on June 7 when they voted overwhelmingly to return to town council Joe Minutolo and Gary Friedmann, who favor cruise ship and vacation limits. Jennifer Cough wasn’t even able to muster half the votes of the two incumbents.
Town Planner Michele Gagnon and code enforcement officer Angie Chamberlain are scheduled to conduct an informational workshop on the vacation rental limits Tuesday before the public hearing July 7. The question being put in front of voters is not all punitive for homeowners. The proposal actually relaxes the requirement for minimum nights from four to two for primary homeowners who live in the same house as their rental rooms.
The biggest issue is the proposal to forbid transfer of vacation rental permits when a home is sold until the percentage of vacation rentals dips below 10 percent of the housing stock. There are many guesses as to how many years it would take to achieve that number. Almost 20 percent of all homes in town are now vacation rentals.
Townspeople began to complain in recent years that Airbnb enabled such frictionless bookings so that many owners preferred short-term rentals against year-round lessees.
“The impacts of this shift include people being evicted from their apartments,” according to a town document in December 2020, ‘Regulating Vacation Rentals.’
“As for the cost of a house, specifically a starter home for the median income earner, the prices are inflated making the homes unattainable. Consequently, many workers live off-island.”
“In addition, many renters have to move out every six months and some people end up living in cars, in the park, and/or couch surfing. These living conditions lead to stress and anxiety. In turn, the housing problem contributes to the labor shortage and to the traffic problems. However, it is important to remember that vacation rentals also provide an important source of income allowing many residents to live in Bar Harbor and pay their bills.”
In 2019 proponents of change began to make noises about a moratorium on vacation homes which only spiked a huge onslaught of vacation rental registrations - 545 as of Friday.
Two weeks ago the Planning Board reluctantly voted to send the question to a public hearing July 7. No doubt they were influenced by a poll conducted by the planning board showing voters favored limits on vacation rentals.
If the planning board votes against the question after the July 7 hearing, then the two-thirds threshold will be extremely difficult yo achieve.
That is why the two open planning board seats are so important.
The crisis has prompted some employers to become landlords.
“Finding affordable housing on Mount Desert Island has been a long-term challenge for JAX (Jackson Labs) employees, many of whom commute long distances to work,” it said in a statement.
“To that end, and with the support of the Bar Harbor Planning Board, JAX will soon be breaking ground to build 24 apartments that will be available as long-term rentals for employees.
The development, slated to be completed in August 2022, will be located on the western side of Route 3 and accessible from Woodlands Lane. “If there is additional demand from JAX employees for more apartments, up to a total of 100 apartments may be constructed in the future.”
“To remain an ‘employer of choice,’ the ability to provide options to our team to live close to campus in affordable, comfortable year-round housing is a top priority for us at JAX, as is addressing transportation needs for those living off-island,” said Catherine “Katy” Longley, executive vice president and chief operating officer, The Jackson Laboratory.
Tremont planning board in quandry over how to deal with massive projects
TREMONT - The Town has about 1,600 permanent residents and about 750 households. The Acadia Wilderness Lodge’s proposal for 154 camp sites could add about 600 persons a night, assuming four visitors per campground.
Virtually every business in town, from gas stations, to restaurants, to convenience stores, to museums and retails shops stand to benefit from the boost in economic activity.
But the increased cost in police, fire, EMT and road maintainance will be borne by taxpayers. There is no “impact fee” for businesses in Tremont. And those issues raised by residents who oppose the application cannot be remedied under the current land use ordinance.
The town’s Planning Board is having a rather public nervous breakdown with much hand-wringing over its purported lack of tools to deal with applications for such industrial-sized businesses.
Tuesday night, the board used the time originally scheduled for a hearing of the proposed Acadia Wilderness Lodge campground to lament over the town’s inadequate land-use ordinance.
“We don’t have any tools to address future requests between now and any changes should they come in … and as I mentioned in the last meeting the world is changing rapidly around us and we’re not doing enough to keep up with it,” said board member Geoff Young.
“We don’t have a lot of definitions down .. like what ‘light commercial’ is,” said outgoing member Margery Buck. “We don’t have a police presence. We don’t have a fire department’s presence. We don’t know what this impact is going to do even on the aquifers. We have nothing in our provisions to say we need to see this.”
“We have a comprehensive plan which gives us direction and that resonates a lot with me,” said member Lawson Wulsin, who sits on both the planning board and the committee to rewrite the comprehensive plan required by the state every 12 years. The current comprehensive plan was enacted in 2011.
But he added that the putting both a new comprehensive plan and proposed land-use ordinance changes in front of voters could be confusing.
Such conditions exist in virtually every rural town in Maine. Southwest Harbor has by far the least restrictive of all towns on MDI.
The reality is that the planning board still has an application for the massive campground which must be addressed. The planning board’s effort to correct arcane ordinances is noble and far-sighted. But the matter of the current application weighs heavily.
James N. Katsiaficas, attorney representing some Tremont residents opposed to the campground, acknowledged there is vague language that is “not enforceable” in the ordinance such as, “The purpose of the Residential-Business Zone is to preserve the integrity of the residential uses while allowing for maritime related and light commercial activity which are compatible with the physical capability of the land.”
But there also is enough “purposeful language” to sustain a finding to deny the application. He said he is focusing on those areas, such as water runoff, water discharge, environmental concerns, wetlands and “total area.”
Katsiaficas said he will dispute any assertion that the 154 proposed camp sites are mere “accessories” to a principal structure.
“That would like saying every store in a shopping mall is just an accessory or every house in a subdivision is just an accessory,” he said. Each camp site is its own living quarters, and minimum lot size for each will be required, he said.
That argument did not prevail for abutting neighbors who appealed the decision in 2019 for a 11-site campground on Kellytown Road also owned by the principals of Acadia Wilderness Lodge.
Town manager and chief code enforcement officer Jesse Dunbar agreed there are standards and tools in the current ordinance to make a decision on the application.
The enormity of the proposed project - 154 campsites with 72 RVs - clearly caught the board off guard last year. In January the board requested a moratorium on campground applications but grandfathered the current one. That was denied by the select board. Two weeks ago the select board suggested the planning board attempt to change the land-use ordinance by the November ballot rather than seek a moratorium.
Board members doubted they have time to get an ordinance change ready for November. Instead they voted to ask its attorney Diane O’Connell to opine on the definition of “light commercial” and to review the campground section of the ordinance. They postponed the public hearing to Aug. 10 to give the applicant another opportunity for a “neighborhood meeting” July 19.
Complicating matters is a business-friendly select board which is definitely not on the same page as the planning board as was evident by its surprise appointment this week of Beth Gott, whose family owns one of the two large heavy equipment construction companies on MDI and is already doing work for the campground applicant.
When her nomination was put forth, planning board chair Mark Good said, “I think a concern the board might have is that so many projects that come before us has work done by Gott’s construction and Gott’s disposal. I can foresee a conflict of interest.”
That was dismissed by the select board which voted unanimously to appoint Beth Gott to replace Margery Buck. In addition to Gott, two members of the select board Howard Goodwin and MacKenzie Jewett are also in the building business. Goodwin, who made the nomination of Gott, has a concrete business and Jewett’s husband has a plumbing business.
POSTSCRIPT: Chinese stowaway only half the story …
TREMONT - QSJ enjoyed writing about Daniel Cough and his clan last week. But given that there are eight generations of Coughs, some tucking and redacting were unavoidable, especially after several family members contacted QSJ with even more historically exciting news.
Daniel Cough’s wife Elvira Higgins, with whom he had nine children, was an eighth generation descendent of William Brewster Jr., a Mayflower passenger and the first religious leader and only university-educated member of Plymouth Colony. The town in Cape Cod is named after him.
Thus, all descendants of Daniel Cough, the first Chinese in Maine and the first to be naturalized a citizen, and Elvira Higgins, are also descendants of Brewster. Those are serious genealogy creds.
Timothy F. Cough, one of 13 children of Vincent Cough, and great grandson of Daniel, said of the Pilgrim lineage, “That’s nice, the Brewster thing, but its the Chinese connection which excites me the most.”
“On the other hand my kids and grand children in Massachusetts really like the Brewster thing.”
Cough sent QSJ a copy of his father’s booklet, containing joyous and sad recounts of growing up in Hancock County as one-quarter Chinese. You may read the entire book by clicking here for “Vint’s Story.”
“I encountered unpleasantness at grammar school because of my ancestry. My grandfather, Daniel Cough was a full blooded Chinese. I made much more of it than was warranted but I used to get so mad I saw red and was ready to fight and did. Kids can be cruel and this disappeared when I reached high school. My problem then was my Catholic faith. This was an adult problem and more subtle. Bar Harbor was quite bigoted as many coastal towns were. We survived.”
This resonated with QSJ who attended a Catholic missionary school as a kid with a Jewish name.
Tim Cough said it wasn’t until his twenties was he and his siblings able to get their father to talk about his Chinese lineage. His sister Ann Cough McCafferty wrote:
“We didn’t get a lot of information about Daniel … it wasn’t a matter of curiosity and pride of our heritage, it was something to avoid and hide. My father, who was about a quarter Chinese, was teased and made fun as a child. He told us of kids singing to him, “Ching Chong Chinaman sitting on a fence, trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents.”
Click for Family tree from William Brewster to Vincent Cough.
Vincent “vint” Cough and his wife Marjorie Lulu Walls were the most prodigious Cough couple, giving birth to 13 children, 11 of whom are alive.
Vint was one of four surviving boys fathered by Ezra Cough, the only one of nine children of Daniel Cough and Elvira Higgins Cough to bear children, showing how tenuous that line was. Three of Vint’s siblings died at birth.
QSJ’s article last week focused on Bernard “Sonny Cough” and his family. His son, Dickie Cough, wrote that the photo from the Southwest Library digital archives misidentified the people as Elvira Cough and her children.
“I think the photo with two women and 5 kids is my grandmother Helen Norton Cough with her mother. Four of the kids would be my father Sonny, his brother Jimmy and sisters Barbara and Janis . . . Not sure who the 5th child is. My dad was pretty good about dating photos and naming people.”
Anne Cough, daughter of Joseph Edward Cough, the third son of Ezra Cough, challenged the well-circulated story that Daniel Cough was transported here by Captain Sylvester Lord of Ellsworth. She remembered being told by Clarence Harding of Tremont when she was young that Daniel Cough came here on a boat captained by Hiram Dix. Harding was born in 1895 and died in 1993. He would have been 10 when Daniel Cough died and recalled playing in his store, Cough said. Anne Cough also said Daniel Cough bought his land from Dorcas Booth and was not given the land by Lord as was widely reported. Anne Cough has worked in the Maine state library for more than 30 years, with a trained eye (and ear) for genealogy.
Meanwhile, Ann Cough McCafferty, sister of Tim Cough, was exploring the possibility that Daniel Cough may have been brought here by a captain named Ezra Norwood on the three-masted vessel Jessie McGregor. Norwood was swept out to sea during a storm in 1901. Daniel Cough did name one of his sons Ezra. Could he have named him after the captain?
Other ruminations and amplications:
Barbara Cough, the youngest of Vint’s 13 children could not have remembered her grandfather Ezra as he died in Old Town in 1944. He was born in. Bernard.
The father and brother (not grandfather) of Sylvia L. (Young) Cough, Sonny’s wife of 58 years, worked a total of 70 years for Acadia National Park and both retired as the head of maintenance.