For more than a decade, the distinctive copper dome of Sabastian’s Wood-Fired Oven was a reliable presence at festivals and events up and down Maine’s coast and into the state’s northern reaches.
From Lubec to Belfast, Milford to Fort Fairfield and into New Hampshire, Dan and Alice Sullivan served up pizzas to crowds of hungry customers.
That’s how Elizabeth Brook first encountered the Sullivans, many years ago at the Crown of Maine Balloon Festival in Presque Isle.
“I thought, that’s the coolest thing,” Brook recalled. She didn’t think much more about it, but she would one day own the mobile pizza business — oven and all.
Brook and her husband Travis bought Sabastian’s last year, rebranding to Northern Flame Wood-Fired Pizza. They hit the road for the first time in May, and have spent the summer crisscrossing Aroostook County and beyond. The public reception has been so positive that Northern Flame is already booking events into next year.
“People have been unbelievably supportive,” Elizabeth Brook said. “We’ll go to places and they recognize us from the brand.”
Elizabeth, a member of the Maine Potato Blossom Festival committee, had gotten to know the Sullivans through her role coordinating food vendors for the festival. When they told her last summer they planned on selling the business, she was devastated. Then they mentioned something interesting.
“They said at a certain point, ‘You should buy it,’” Elizabeth said. She laughed it off and told Travis about their decision to sell.
“He’s like, ‘Maybe we should buy it,’” Elizabeth said. “And I said, ‘Well, it’s funny you should say that.’”
The couple are Fort Fairfield natives and high school sweethearts who reconnected a few years ago and married in 2023. Neither had experience in the restaurant industry. Travis works at a manufacturing shop, Elizabeth as an account director for a media analysis firm. But they’d talked about one day starting a business together.
“I remember saying to her … wouldn’t it be nice to have something that we could share together? That we could both do together and put our energy and time toward?” Travis Brook said. “It turned out to be Northern Flame Pizza.”
Northern Flame has kept the staples of Sabastian’s menu — cheese, pepperoni and barbecue chicken pizzas — but it’s also added some flair of its own, swapping specialty pizzas at various events. Hawaiian Heat, a Hawaiian pizza with jalapenos, has become another menu regular. The Brooks have also sold garlic fiddlehead, jalapeno popper and chicken-bacon-ranch pizzas, among others.
Set up outside the Fort Fairfield Fish and Game Club on a recent night, they planned on introducing a taco pizza.
“Becuase of the mobile aspect, we have to keep it a relatively limited menu because we can only carry so many ingredients,” Elizabeth said. “But we try to push everything to the limit. We try to keep it interesting.”
Travis, manning the oven, burns a mixture of maple and ash to give the pizzas their wood-fired taste. At 800 degrees Fahrenheit, where he’s found they cook the best, a pizza can be ready in under two minutes.
The oven was custom built by Maine Oven Craft — formerly known as Maine Wood Heat — a Skowhegan company that is the sole North American importer of Le Panyol oven cores. Le Panyol is a French company known for its ruggedly heat resistant white clay and markets itself as the “only 100% organic wood fired oven on the market.”
“It’s super clean, you don’t have any chemicals or residual from anything,” Travis said. “[With] regular red bricks, it’s got other chemicals that can impart a flavor. In this, we’ve just got the flavor from the wood and the pizza.”
Northern Flame will make several more stops around Aroostook County this month. The mobile oven and its team plan to appear at Madawaska’s Acadian Festival from Aug. 14 to 16, Coddiwomple, a music festival in New Sweden, on Aug. 23, and the Crown of Maine Balloon Festival from Aug. 28 to 30.