Food

Lord’s Harborside Restaurant, 352 Harbor Road, Wells, Maine, (207) 646-2651. Open Wed. through Fri., Sun., and Mon. from noon to 8 p.m., and from noon to 9 p.m. on Sat. Visa and Mastercard accepted. Full bar.

GARDEN VARIETY: Marcia MacDonald, Clark Frasier, and Mark Gaier surrounded by Arrows’s raised beds.

The month of May is upon us, and like gardeners all over the state, Clark Frasier and Mark Gaier’s thoughts have turned to planting. The only difference is,

this harvest is being grown for their restaurant, the award-winning Arrows, in Ogunquit, Maine.

In the height of the season, Frasier and Gaier, along with garden-tender Marcia MacDonald and her assistant Annie Lefleur, will grow something like 80 percent of the herbs and vegetables used on their ambitious, daily-changing menu. The harvest ranges widely, everything from lettuces and greens to haricots verts (tiny French-style beans) and 14 different kinds of heirloom tomatoes — all of it organically grown, and all of it produced from an intensively cultivated three-quarters of an acre, complete with a new greenhouse and rows of covered beds. Another team of gardeners, led by longtime associate Tom Lovejoy, tend the flowers and the beautiful ornamental beds that surround the restaurant. It’s the ultimate expression of the ingredient-driven maxim that so many successful chefs have adopted in recent years: Think Globally, Eat Locally.

Frasier and Gaier didn’t set out to grow their own produce, or to become the owners of one of the largest restaurant-garden operations on the East Coast. The two chefs met in California during the 1980s while working at Stars, a groundbreaking contemporary American brasserie in San Francisco. Lacking the funds to pursue their original dream — a similar restaurant in Carmel, California — they looked into a place that was for sale here in Maine, where Gaier had spent time as a teenager (his first job, in fact, was at WoodenBoat magazine, in Brooklin).

“All Mark ever talked about when we were working together in the kitchen at Stars was how wonderful Maine is,” says Frasier. “Maine, Maine, Maine, Maine, Maine. I never would have considered it otherwise.”

The partners liked what they saw in Arrows, which had been converted from an 18th-century farmhouse in 1980. With its attractive two-acre site, series of small, fireplaced front rooms, and dramatic, porch-like main dining room across the back of the building, the restaurant had serious potential, and in 1988 Frasier and Gaier signed a one-year lease. They bought the restaurant outright the following year, and business — and their reputation — has been growing ever since. This year, the restaurant opened on April 15, and will stay open until the winter holidays, the longest season ever.

One of the first things they learned about Maine when they first arrived, however, was the dearth at the time of high-quality ingredients. “Compared to California, where we were used to being able to get anything we wanted, this was completely different,” says Gaier.

They were buying from local farms, but the produce was still three days old by the time it got to the table — a day to harvest, a day to deliver, a day to prepare. In 1992, the partners planted the first garden, starting with a large assortment of vegetables and herbs, but no real idea how much and when to plant. “They kept records from the very beginning, so they could track everything,” explains MacDonald, a professional garden designer and herself a veteran restaurant alumna.

The second season, they doubled the size of the garden, and the following year it was doubled again. Raised beds followed, then covers, and in 1998 a heated greenhouse was added. Now vegetables that are picked in the morning, with the dew still on them, are served that evening, and the entire menu is designed around the day’s harvest. All told, the team grows more than 150 different kinds of fruits, vegetables, lettuces, herbs, greens and flowers, constantly refining their selections, trying new things, learning what works and doesn’t. Frasier and Gaier meet with MacDonald all winter to discuss what they want to do, and the first planting begins in February. “The vegetable garden really drives what we do here now,” says Frasier.

And while the food scene has exploded around them, with more producers and purveyors of high-quality comestibles — from artisan-made cheeses and breads to farmed oysters, smoked seafood, and exotic herbs — coming to market every year, the kitchen at Arrows has become evermore self-reliant. “Two hundred years ago, when this place was first built, everything eaten here would have been made or grown right on the property,” says Frasier. And that is inspiration for everything he and Gaier and their crew of 40 employees do. Virtually everything they serve is made in-house, from breads and pastries to ice cream. They make their own jams and preserves, roll their own pasta and puff pastry, smoke their own fish, even cure their own proscuitto — a year’s worth of this flavorful, Italian-style ham is hanging in the temperature-controlled wine attic. And whatever they don’t actually make is bought close to home, from like-minded local growers and producers. The six-course Garden Tasting Menu from a recent evening affirms that, featuring local oysters with salmon caviar and horseradish grown on-site; spring asparagus soup with Arrows house-cured proscuitto and rosemary crème fraiche; a salad of garden and field greens; grilled Maine sea scallops with grilled radicchio and ramps (a wild onion that grows only in the spring); and grilled venison with a plum and herb tart and locally foraged fiddlehead ferns.

Every winter when the restaurant is closed for the season, Frasier and Gaier undertake new projects. Three years ago it was the greenhouse. The following year saw a brand-new kitchen, and after that the wine attic. This year all the beds surrounding the restaurant were redesigned, and a new entrance is being constructed. The public has been appreciative, to say the least. Arrows and its owners have won accolades from organizations all over the country, from the James Beard Association to Wine Spectator magazine.

But it’s the garden that continues to push them to new heights of inspiration. “It’s really shaped who we are as chefs,” says Gaier.

Garden of eatin’

Arrows’s plot twists

By Joan Lang