ROCKLAND, Maine ― Waldoboro-based chef and wedding caterer Shane McGarvey has a pretty straightforward purpose in life: he just needs to feed people.
So when the COVID-19 pandemic brought the wedding industry to a halt last March, McGarvey knew he needed to pivot so he could continue to fulfill his life’s mission. He wanted to offer people comforting dishes and something that he was personally craving: Middle Eastern inspired street food.
While he never saw himself working in a food realm outside of high-end catering, the pandemic gave McGarvey the opportunity to take a risk and so far it’s paying off.
In July, McGarvey opened Maine Kebab ― a fast-casual takeout restaurant ― in downtown Waldoboro and less than six months later he opened a second location in Rockland. By summer, McGarvey plans to open a third location in Portland.
“I had no idea if [the concept] was going to fly around here but I wanted to try it and because of the pandemic I could. I had nothing else going on. I’m a wedding caterer in a year where there were no weddings,” McGarvey said. “[Maine Kebab] really just came out of me wanting to feed people.”
The success and rapid expansion of Maine Kebab is largely due to its simplified menu, McGarvey said. The menu centers around several protein options that customers can choose to have served wrapped in a flatbread or atop a bowl of golden turmeric rice.
Maine Kebab’s selections are McGarvey’s riff on the food he would get from halal carts in New York City, where he worked as a private chef and caterer before moving to Maine. He was first introduced to this style of Middle Eastern food when he was a foreign exchange student in Germany, a country with a large population of Turkish immigrants.
“The concept behind a kebab place was me personally just wanting street food. That’s what I was craving,” McGarvey said. “It’s the kind of food that chefs want to eat.”
Given that people have spent much of the last year in isolation, McGarvey felt that comforting food was what people really wanted to eat. To him, that meant huge portions of meat and rice, fried pork belly wrapped in a handmade flatbread, as well as a really good, heavily spiced and hand-cut french fry.
Since the region lacked Middle Eastern food options, McGarvey wasn’t sure how Maine Kebab’s offerings such as lamb kofta or hummus and falafel box would fly. But he has since seen that his customers are working Maine Kebab into their weekly take-out routines, right alongside more common takeout options like pizza or Thai food.
“It might sound exotic on paper. But once you eat it, you realize the difference between our flatbread sandwich and a hamburger isn’t all that much, it’s just sort of rearranged,” McGarvey said. “I wanted to do something that was affordable, with big portions and a different taste.”
To make the menu replicable and consistent at multiple locations, McGarvey keeps the ingredients to a minimum. This way he can easily train the executive chef at each location how to prepare the ingredients and use them in a multitude of ways.
“In order to keep the refrigerator simple and keep the tasks simple, we use a few things and try to make it really exciting,” McGarvey said. “I wanted to make it so it was a simple process of putting the food together.”
The way Maine Kebab is run has all the tell-tale signs of being born out of a pandemic. Currently, the restaurants are strictly take-out only. No currency is exchanged in person, since ordering is done through an online portal. A person simply places an order on the phone or computer, gets a text when it’s ready and picks up the food.
As pandemic restrictions ease, McGarvey envisions opening up indoor dining and adding a patio dining area at the Rockland location. Still, even in a post-pandemic world, Maine Kebab will never be a table service kind of place.
McGarvey is currently in the process of putting the right individuals in place at his existing locations to make sure Maine Kebab can walk on its own when he returns to wedding catering this summer. But he still has plans for future expansions, because for McGarvey, it’s always about feeding people.
“I see the same people order once a week, every week,” he said. “I love that people are working us into their weekly rotations. So I just want to get more locations and more accessibility to feed more people.”