There’s a new place to grab lunch in Old Town.
Katahdin Kitchen, a modern Indigenous cafe, opened Aug. 6 and offers breakfast and lunch options on Wednesdays and Thursdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The Kitchen is one of just a handful of restaurants open during the day in Old Town and the only one offering a modern Indigenous menu. Katahdin Kitchen had previously been operating out of the Korean Dad kitchen in Veazie as a pop-up option but is now settling into its location in the Old Town Professional Building.
Co-owner Zack Neptune said part of the reason for the move to Old Town was because of a visible lack of breakfast and lunch options in the area.
“There’s not really any great places to go for a good sandwich or a good wrap or anything for lunch, and so we just kind of wanted to fill that gap,” Neptune said.
Neptune said Katahdin Kitchen will continue to pop-up at Korean Dad but only around once a month, while the restaurant will try to push its hours in Old Town to three days a week in the future.
Part of the pull of the cafe is the menu that differs from anything else around, Neptune said.
The Kitchen offers Indigenous food using local ingredients that would have been the cuisine before settlers came to the area, he said. The menu creates contemporary dishes, like wraps and smoothies, using ingredients like squash, corn and game meats.
To do that, the cafe is sourcing its ingredients through local Indigenous farmers and growers, as well as vendors from local farmers markets.
“We’re really trying to keep it local, serve food that would have been eaten regionally back in the day” before European settlers arrived in Maine, he said.
This week, 90 percent of the ingredients used for Katahdin Kitchen’s menu came from local farmers markets.
The variety of ingredients allows it to make orders personalized for what the customer wants.
“We have the freedom to just make whatever we want, whatever people want to eat, and just have that creative freedom, that culinary freedom while staying in the vein of modern Indigenous,” Neptune said.
The menu has attracted more customers. This Thursday was the restaurant’s busiest day yet, Neptune said.
The Kitchen’s addition to the Professional Building has also extended what Neptune called a “Wabanaki renaissance” in the building, with Wabanaki Youth in Science and Wabanaki REACH being a few doors away.
The proximity to those organizations couples with the Kitchen’s idea of giving back to the community whenever possible. Neptune said the revenue from the cafe is being put back into an outdoor kitchen being built on Indian Island and supporting more workers from the Reservation joining the Kitchen.
“It’s really all about keeping the money in the Nation,” he said.