It’s the sort of place every tourist dreams of: the slightly funky, clean, down home, locally run small seafood restaurant that uses only the freshest, cooked to order Maine seafood, with a few specialties like seafood cakes and homemade biscuits and pies. Mabe’s Seafood Restaurant and Lobster Pound, located about halfway between Freeport and Brunswick on the Old Portland Road (Route 1) has it all.
This seasonal dream is run by Mabe MacLean and her husband, Dave, who own Mabe’s Kitchen, which encompasses Mabe’s Seafood Restaurant and Lobster Pound, Mabe’s Catering Services and now, an Internet business, www.mabeskitchen.com, which offers their secret recipe clam, shrimp and crab cakes nationwide. The
MacLeans use only fresh Maine seafood: lobsters and crabs Dave catches, clams he and other locals dig, fish, scallops and shrimp from local fishermen.
All Mabe’s Kitchen ventures are based on Mabe’s almost 40 years’ experience in the food service business. One of 10 children raised in Brunswick, she began by washing dishes in a restaurant at age 14, and later worked in different-sized establishments as a waitress, short order cook and caterer’s assistant.
Her first independent venture, catering, developed after one of her brothers asked her to do the food for his wedding reception. Several people were so impressed they asked her to cater events for them. Word of mouth has kept that business flourishing since 1986.
In 1988, Dave, who is now 71 and has fished for just about everything since he was a kid, stopped longline fishing off the Grand Banks because regulations had tightened and the catch was dwindling. He began to fish for lobster, and he and Mabe installed a large tank so they could sell lobsters from a barn at their home on the Old Portland Road.
Pretty soon, they were cooking lobsters for tourists who didn’t want to kill the creatures and didn’t want the cooking smell in their cottages or motel efficiencies. “Then,” Mabe says, “people kept asking, `What else do you have?’ — they didn’t want to cook on vacation — and we decided to open the restaurant and take-out in 1989.”
Located next door to their home, Mabe’s Seafood Restaurant is small, with seating for 12 and some picnic tables outside. It opens from June till the end of October, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. With part-time help, Mabe and Dave do everything in the small kitchen except catch the seafood. Like most people who depend on the tourist season for the bulk of their income, they work all the time during the season to keep the businesses going. Dave fishes in the morning while Mabe opens the restaurant and prepares for catering or packs seafood cakes for overnight shipping. He returns with fresh catch and helps out. He’s in charge if Mabe has to leave for catering. In the evening, after the restaurant has closed, they make up and freeze seafood cakes 100 at a time, cook chowder, daily specials and other menu items. He picks the crabs and makes his special cole slaw. Recently, he picked 1,000 pounds of shrimp, which they froze to make shrimp cakes throughout the season.
Somehow, Mabe finds time to pick strawberries in Bowdoinham to put in their strawberry-rhubarb pies (they grow the rhubarb), bake the three-inch-high biscuits she sells wholesale and uses at the restaurant, and to take care of the thousands of other details like maintenance of equipment, prep for weekly clambakes and monitoring the Internet business.
Mabe, 52, says when they opened the restaurant, they decided to make sure they satisfied all the regulations for retail, wholesale and Internet sales. Jumping through those hoops took about a year. The process was expensive, including $200 fees to determine the nutritional content of each type of seafood cake they would wholesale. Later, there was additional expense to develop packaging and set up a web site.
During the past few years, loyal customers who return each season from other parts of the country have urged Mabe to market her seafood cakes over the Internet so they could have them year-round. Last year, she made the leap and launched the Mabe’s Kitchen web site.
Mabe had the experience to do the food end of all of the enterprises, but to learn to run all them efficiently and to develop an Internet business she turned to the Small Business Development Center and Women’s Business Center at Coastal Enterprises, Inc. in Wiscasset. She has taken many courses there, including financial planning, QuickBooks, marketing, and website planning and monitoring, and continues to use their resources. She also has found help through the Maine Gourmet and Specialty Food Producers.
She looked into financial assistance for the Internet business, but says nothing was available. “If we were into technology, there would be tons of money,” she says.
So far, sending her seafood cakes out into the world has shown promise. She started by selling to local stores: Bow Street Market and Royal River Natural Foods in Freeport and Morning Glory Natural Foods in Brunswick. Recently, she’s filled orders for Internet customers from Washington State, Texas, Florida and Ohio. She hopes this will take off, but says experts advise her it takes about three years to really get it going.
Now, she and Dave are anticipating the new season, looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting new. The hours are grueling, but Mabe says she enjoys the work, especially meeting people from all over the country “They come in to shoot the breeze with Dave,” she says. “They love his stories about the early days of fishing, how he fished out of a dory at age 13, fishing for swordfish on the Grand Banks, all of it.”
For further information:www.mabeskitchen.com, or 207-729-0055.