The menu for The Butcher The Baker, a new Bangor-area food truck, is as eclectic as it is fun — exactly how owners Carl Birmingham and Brittany Levasseur want it in their first outing on their own after decades in the restaurant industry.
The Butcher The Baker, set to open this weekend, is the longtime dream of Birmingham and Levasseur, who have worked in kitchens and behind the bar at area restaurants for years, including most recently at High Tide in Brewer. They intend to open most days of the week beginning later on in June and offer catering for events in eastern Maine.
“It’s definitely our dream,” Levasseur said. “To do everything from scratch, homemade, all the kinds of stuff we love to eat and we know other people do, too. We make our own bread, our own sauces, our own cheeses. We smoke everything ourselves.”
The four main components of the menu are snacks, sandwiches, tacos and entrees. For snacks, hand-cut fries can be topped with cheese or had as poutine, or you can try things like a curry basil wonton dip or a doughnut filled with bacon jam. Sandwiches include classics such as a Cubano and a banh mi, and there are entrees spanning an array of cuisines, including a Korean beef shank bibimbap, Cajun etouffee and southern-style chicken and waffles topped with a chile-maple glaze and pork belly crumbles.
“Everybody is excited for the chicken and waffles,” Levasseur said. “It’s just something that I think everybody loves, but you don’t see on menus around here that often.”
Rounding out the menu will be tacos with a choice of a variety of fillings, including coconut shrimp, ahi tuna, pulled pork, smoked carrots and the Instagram-famous birria, a slow-stewed flavorful beef originating in Mexican cuisine. Birmingham and Levasseur call their cooking style New American — a fusion of multiple cuisines and techniques.
Levasseur said that not every item that’s currently on the menu will be available every day.
“We’ll be changing things up daily and rotating things in and out,” she said. “We want to really see what people grab onto and what they love.”
The Butcher The Baker will be at the Wings & Wheels Car Show and Fly-In, set for 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday at DeWitt Field at 100 Airport Road in Old Town. A permanent location for the truck will be announced in the coming weeks.