Good Lord!

Finding comfort Harborside

By Jill Strauss

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.

SOUTHERN (MAINE) COMFORT: who knew? Hellmann’s and Hawaiian pineapple is all it takes.

It’s been difficult to focus on food lately. On September 11, my mother called to assure me that my youngest brother was safe. He had watched from the window of his nearby office the second hijacked passenger jet crash into the second tower of the World Trade Center and had escaped from the devastating scene relatively unscathed. Even after I talked with him myself and knew he was intact and that I should go back to thinking about the latest dining trends, it has been hard to concentrate. The day after this atrocity, my friends suggested I forget about work for a while and join them at a place we often go when the world is too much with us: Lord’s Harborside Restaurant.

Everything about this seafood establishment is reassuring to my cohorts and me because, after hundreds of visits, we know there will be no surprises. Hostess Pam Kershaw (who, along with her husband Dave, has co-owned Lord’s for 32 years) will greet us cordially and lead us, if it’s available, to one of the 13 window tables overlooking the newly dredged Wells Harbor. We will open our red, white, and blue menus and pretend to peruse them. We will debate which second side dish we will choose to accompany our entrees (cottage cheese with pear, potato salad, garden salad, applesauce or pineapple coleslaw, baked potato, French fries, or rice pilaf) and then we will all choose pineapple coleslaw. Furthermore, no matter which cooked appetizers or entrees we end up ordering, they will be brought to us on time and piping hot.

“There’s enough garlic in these mussels to ward off any evil doers,” one of my friends declared as he lifted the lid off of the glass container filled with steaming mollusks. A familiar pungent aroma filled the air and I picked out my share of our group appetizer. As I plucked the plump meat from the shell, I noticed people around me ordering the usual anti-anxiety New England classics: fried onion rings and clam rolls, seafood chowder and baked stuffed haddock. There are 145 seats at Lord’s and on this Wednesday evening, most of them were filled. It seemed I was not the only one in need of normalcy, patriotic banter, and comfort food.

The term “comfort food” means bland, boring, and fattening to some connoisseurs and is, therefore, anathema to them. (Last year, New York Times comfort food critic William Grimes complained: “It is everywhere. It’s a fad that turned into a trend that now threatens to become an unassailable institution, a mashed-potato mountain so large that a hundred backhoes working around the clock could not make a dent in it.”) But in times of stress, simple old-fashioned fare prepared with care is more important to me than novelty and pizzazz. Since I decided to save room for a slice of homemade coconut cream pie, I ordered the lobster stew and the aforementioned pineapple coleslaw and when my unadorned dishes arrived, I was content. The lobster was tender and sweet, the broth was rich and hot, the pineapple coleslaw with carrot shavings was creamy and crunchy and the coconut cream pie was as white and as fluffy as a cloud.

Some people come just for the $21.95 baked lobster stuffed with whole lobster tail. Before they are baked, the lobsters are kept alive in saltwater tanks located in the restaurant’s huge kitchen. I saw the tanks filled with wiggling crustaceans a few days ago when 65-year-old Dave Kershaw — lobsterman, mechanic, tool inspector, recipe developer, executive chef, restaurateur, and overall control freak — gave me a tour of his immaculate facility. Although I could not get him to part with any of the pie recipes used at Lord’s, Kershaw did let me in on a few secrets that I will now divulge. Heavy cream, butter, and fresh picked lobster are used in the lobster stew and it is never prepared until the order has been placed. The coleslaw is made with Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Hawaiian pineapple. This may not sound astounding but, according to Kershaw, Hellmann’s mayonnaise is expensive and Hawaiian pineapple, the only kind Kershaw will allow in his coleslaw, is very hard to find. Hot food is delivered to the table while steam is still rising from it because of a finely tuned timing system which Kershaw devised and which the kitchen and wait staff abide by absolutely. All workers at Lord’s, many of whom have been employed by the Kershaws for well over a decade, are treated with respect (“Dave and I do not allow swearing by anyone on the staff,” Pam Kershaw emphasized to me after my tour). And unlike most restaurateurs, the Kershaws pay 70 percent of health benefits to any employee who wants to take advantage of the plan.

I’ve been watching a lot of newscasts lately and I’m admittedly emotional, but frankly, when I walk into Lord’s Harborside Restaurant I feel like saluting the Kershaws. Their attention to every aspect of food preparation, to their staff, and to their customers take my breath away and, at the risk of further antagonizing hip foodies everywhere, I declare I am proud to eat plain, soul-satisfying food at a restaurant run by truly honorable Americans.

Jill Strauss can be reached at straussj@adelphia.net.