CANADA’S BEST
NEW RESTAURANTS

Middle of Nowhere: The Maine Course

Robinhood Free Meetinghouse, Georgetown, Maine

By Ilana Weitzman

Photo by Scott Dorrance

Harpswell, Maine, is where lobsters go to die. Driving along the crooked finger of the peninsula to our little rental cottage – okay, glorified shack – my partner and I pass the lobster trucks coming back from the sea, loaded down with a Jenga stack of traps. The lobsters will soon be stuffed into rolls, one shucked claw outstretched like a drowning sailor, at Estes Lobster House or the Dolphin Chowder House & Marina – places that run so close to the ocean it looks like the lobster has been tossed out of the water and caught mid-swan dive at the kitchen door.

I’m a vegetarian, and while I’m willing to flex the rules, the seafood here is a little too close to its maker for my tastes. And woman cannot live by the Lobster Shack’s potato blossom alone, as good as the deep-fried streamer of carbs is, especially liberally doused with a spray of apple cider vinegar. So after a few days, we called up the Robinhood Free Meetinghouse restaurant in Georgetown, which is sort of like the tail pinned onto the donkey of the nearby town of Bath. Troy, the chef de cuisine, promised to forage for some tofu that would be turned into pad Thai in time for our 8:30 reservation.

It was dusk when we started out, driving up one peninsula and then down another. It reminded me of those T-shirts you get on a Caribbean holiday that say, “Isthmus Be the Place.” After about an hour, the doubt that can set into the big-city traveller in these situations stuck to us like a barnacle. Sure, foodies will go to extremes to find their next meal in places like El Bulli, where you have to drive two hours out of Barcelona to the resort town of Roses to sup on the culinary whims of superstar Spaniard Ferran Adrià, or Michael Stadtlander’s Eigensinn Farm just south of Collingwood, Ontario. But here there were woods. It was dark. We started to argue over the map and I pined for my tofu. Then we found it, barely carved out of a clearing. The name “Georgetown” turned out to be a misnomer: The population hovered around 1,000 on a good day, and at this moment, everyone seemed to be hiding in the bushes.

The Meetinghouse was vintage 1855, complete with blackboards at the back from the days when it used to be the local schoolhouse. The staff flitted about in that careful compromise of country hospitality and cosmopolitan service that can only happen in a gourmet restaurant plonked down, mysteriously, in the middle of nowhere. Maybe it was the relief of finding an outpost of civilization, but a mushroom puff pastry has never tasted so first class. We sunk into the homemade cream-cheese biscuits that Bostonians, apparently, will have shipped overnight by FedEx. By the time we had finished the pad Thai, the butternut squash ravioli in sage butter and a fantastic bottle of white wine that the waitress had suggested, I made the international sign for surrender, one arm outstretched like a drowning sailor.

For dessert, on our trip back, we bought a roadside pie by stuffing $5 into a wooden box. Now there’s another thing worth going out of your way for.