WINTER HARBOR, Maine — Chef Rich Hanson deftly sliced sweet cherry tomatoes, mild green garlic and aromatic basil on a recent afternoon in the open-plan kitchen of the Raven’s Nest restaurant in Winter Harbor.
“That tastes like summer, right there,” he said after sampling a sungold tomato.
Later that day, the vibrant medley of vegetables and herbs topped the fresh pasta made at a nearby farm by one of Maine’s more colorful and controversial characters: Roxanne Quimby.
“Pasta is the staff of life,” Quimby, 65, said in the restaurant’s spacious dining room. “I have always been interested in arts and crafts, and this [pasta making] is a craft, really. It’s an edible craft.”
The former beekeeper and entrepreneur found fortune and fame after she co-founded Burt’s Bees, then sold the successful company to Clorox in 2007 for more than $900 million. Although Burt’s Bees is famous for its lip balms and other skin care products, Quimby is better known in Maine — infamous, even — for purchasing vast tracts of northern forest and then trying to turn that land into a national park. However, in recent years, she has backed away from public involvement with the controversial project. Her son, Lucas St. Clair, is the leading advocate for the idea, proposing to donate family land east of Baxter State Park to create a 75,000-acre national park and a same-sized multi-use recreation area as a gift to the nation.
His mother, who has lived seasonally in this small Hancock County town since 1998, has turned her energies to gardening and cooking instead of lobbying for the park. Two winters ago, she attended a school outside Genoa, Italy, where she learned how to make pasta and loved it.
“I like to learn about the origins and go to the source,” she said.
While in Italy, she found that the school would rebate the price of the course with the purchase of a pasta-making machine made by the Italgi company. So she bought the smallest one, the Micra, and had it shipped to Maine. She has been perfecting her pasta techniques ever since, and is serving her creations in the Raven’s Nest, the restaurant at the heart of the sprawling three-story restaurant she built in 2002 at the center of Winter Harbor. The building also serves as the Schoodic Peninsula Visitors Center, an unofficial welcoming stop to the area.
The seasonal restaurant opened for the year at the end of June, and Quimby said in early August she wasn’t sure when she would close it this year. Last year the Raven’s Nest didn’t open at all — it had flooded the winter before, and Quimby was still renovating. She also needed a head chef and figured she might have found a good one when Hanson and his wife, Cary, announced last December they would be closing Cleonice Bistro. The downtown Ellsworth restaurant that served pan-Mediterranean cuisine had been a fixture since it opened in 2002 and brought imaginative farm-to-table cuisine to downeast Maine at a time before farm-to-table was a byword. The couple told the BDN last December that the regional economy had been “unrelenting” and that they didn’t think they could make it through another winter.
Quimby went to dinner there just before it closed and handed Rich Hanson a note.
“I said whenever you want to start cooking again, call me up,” she recalled.
Rich Hanson said that although the couple had had other offers, this one felt right from the very start.
“We didn’t have to look anywhere else,” he said.
Quimby and the Hansons decided the restaurant would be an expression of the community, which years ago largely comprised farmers, fishermen and people who worked in the sardine canning industry. And the food they serve has a story.
“Herring has gone from being a cornerstone of the economy to bait,” Rich Hanson said. “So I got 20 pounds of fresh herring. We pickled it and sold it as an appetizer. It went off really great. To me, that was a really good way of connecting with the community.”
Another cornerstone of the Raven’s Nest is Quimby’s pasta. She uses the eggs from her chickens and vegetables from her farm to make the vividly colored shapes. She recently used kale — “it’s going crazy right now in the garden”— to make green tagliatelle nests, spiral rotini and ruffled Campenelle pasta. She also uses carrots, squash, beets, garlic and chives to color and flavor the pasta shapes that emerge from her Italian-made machine.
So far, she is making about 800 12-ounce bags of pasta per year, which she sells at the restaurant and at fairs and shows, such as the Common Ground Fair in Unity in September. That’s in addition to the pasta that gets served to hungry diners in Winter Harbor in dishes including mussels fra diavolo with homemade pancetta and spicy red sauce; eight-hour lamb ragu with lamb braised in red wine, tomatoes and aromatic vegetables; and farmers market farroto with zucchini, summer squash, swiss chard, fresh herbs and Seal Cove Chevre.
“The pasta is great. It’s the best I’ve worked with,” Rich Hanson said. “Using that machine and those beautiful eggs, it’s really great.”
In addition to lunch and dinners, the restaurant serves brunch Saturdays and Sundays. Prices range from $7.50 for a BLT on homemade bread to $15 for a half portion of the pasta specials and $25 for a full portion. There also is wood-fired pizza available from Thursday to Sunday nights.
Quimby, who admits to not being great at relaxing, said she is enjoying the work and the pace. Although she has been approached by people who would like her to expand the pasta business, she is reluctant to do so.
“I don’t want this to become a Burt’s Bees,” she said. “I got into that because I liked keeping bees and growing herbs. The bigger it got, the more removed I got from what I liked. I don’t want to make that mistake again.”
For more information, call 963-2234 or visit the website ravensnestrestaurant.com.