ROCKPORT — Take one half Los Angeles hairdresser with a craving for burritos and one half Cambodia-reared elephant lover with a yen for spring rolls and you’ve got a recipe for?
How about Rockport’s latest eatery, a quaint little roadside restaurant that gives the flavors of Southeast Asia and Southwest America — an enthralling kind of “spring rolls meet burracho burritos” form of place with papaya salads and creamy coconut dressings all ready and cooked in a comfy hand-built kitchen and served on natural-edge wooden counters.
Nestled, if not shoehorned, neatly right into a 20-foot sq. fire-engine purple roadside constructing on Business Avenue close to Pascal Avenue, it’s referred to as Avenue Meals 330 and payments itself as the world’s solely — perhaps Maine’s solely — vacation spot eatery for the savored fares of Cambodia, Mexico and the American Southwest. The entire dishes are of the “vegetarial/pescatarian” genres.
The every day menu at Avenue Meals 330 is displayed in colour on a big chalk board. Picture by Jack Foley.
The brainchild of retired Los Angeles-area hairdresser Stephanie Turner and Cambodia-raised Marykate Moriarty — each have deep roots in Midcoast Maine — the eatery opened its doorways in mid-September, after 18 months of dreaming and constructing and classes with the city officers to safe the requisite approvals and restaurant allow.
If a latest Friday afternoon’s regular stream of consumers is any indication, what started as off-handed chitchat between clips and colorings at Stephanie’s hair salon subsequent door — Salon Suites by the Sea — the duo’s experiment in primarily fusion delicacies could be on course to changing into a Midcoast culinary hit.
The reception has been “actually good,” Marykate stated of their first two weeks. So good, in actual fact, that they ran out of meals at some point and needed to make a fast run to Portland for actual Asian fixings. That’s one thing they do usually as a result of every little thing is made with genuine elements.
“We’ve got gotten probably the most fantastic welcome from everybody,” Marykate stated.
Marykate Moriarty, proper, prepares an order as Stephanie Turner greets a brand new buyer at Avenue Meals 330 in Rockport, the brand new a Southeast Asian/American Southwest restaurant on Business Avenue. Picture by Jack Foley.
That the 2 ended up in enterprise in any respect appears nonetheless to be a wondrous shock to the pair as they navigate the tiny kitchen collectively like a mother and daughter in a ballet of blissful concord.
Stephanie, who has two grown sons and three grandchildren, grew up all around the nation as a consequence of her dad’s work, however lived most of her grownup life out West, largely in California. There, she ran a profitable hair salon for years in Hermosa Seaside, studying the nuances of the enterprise as an proprietor.
However as a child, she and her siblings summered yearly with their grandparents in Hope. She returned to the world as an grownup within the Nineteen Eighties for some time earlier than heading west once more.
She and her husband, Jim, married in 1999, however they met when each labored on the Waterfront Restaurant in Camden in 1985, he as a bartender, she as a cocktail waitress. They purchased a house in Union 5 years in the past and the return to Maine turned everlasting. Jim is an enormous a part of the restaurant enterprise; mainly, he constructed the place.
For her half, Marykate was born in New Hampshire. Then in 1996, on the age of 4, she moved along with her household greater than 8,500 miles away, to Cambodia, a rustic bordered by Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and the Gulf of Thailand. Her dad is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam Battle, and needed his household to stay in that a part of the world the place he turned concerned in philanthropy work.
She grew up in Kampot, on the Gulf of Thailand, a city whose pepper is named the most effective there’s to cooks worldwide, she stated.
Not like children right here, rising up in Cambodia Marykate realized about UXO, unexploded ordinance; mines and shells and bombs fired and dropped however undetonated even years after the battle that raged far past Vietnam. To at the present time, they kill and maim unsuspecting youngsters and adults. Within the first six months of 2022, such explosions induced 10 deaths and 30 accidents in Cambodia alone, 12 victims being underneath 18, in accordance with that nation’s English language Phnom Penh Put up.
Marykate was additionally witness to the languishing affect of the battle years on Kampot, which in 1974 was the scene of a ferocious, 5 week battle between the Cambodian Military and the insurgent communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas, the latter victorious.
Rising up, she realized to prepare dinner Cambodian-style like a local, turned equally fluent in Khmer, the nationwide language, and would play within the close by sprawling salt flats on the shores of the Praek Tuek Chhu River, the place ocean water is captured and evaporates in diked enclosures earlier than the salt harvest.
And all the way in which from Cambodia, Marykate, too, summered usually as a toddler in Maine, along with her mom’s household in Camden. She returned once more in 2007 to attend Camden Hills Regional Excessive Faculty and was graduated in 2010.
The day after commencement, she was on a airplane again to Cambodia, drawn mightily by what in impact turned her actual hometown and the font of so many childhood recollections. It was in Kampot that she typically discovered footprints of untamed elephants within the filth roads. It’s additionally the place she gathered banana leaves from the entrance of the household home when phrase got here {that a} man who couldn’t afford to feed them by himself was taking the “city elephants” on certainly one of their common walks down her street. And it was the place at her dad’s prodding every year she gave all of her Christmas toys to very poor youngsters dwelling in flimsy banana-leaf dwellings close by.
That behavior of giving nonetheless is clear. Lately, Marykate was queued up in her automobile to purchase espresso and observed a U.S. Marine Corps sticker on the automobile behind her. She gave the cashier additional money and advised her it was for the Marine’s espresso. He pulled over and thanked her.
“I like my Marines,” she stated.
So how did the 2 from-far-away people get collectively and begin a Maine restaurant? They get a kick out of recounting the way it all started — within the hair salon subsequent door. Stephanie was slicing hair and Marykate was a shopper of one other hairdresser at Salon Suites by the Sea. As Stephanie talked along with her shopper she talked about looking for dwelling cooking elements at Veranda Asian Market on Forest Avenue in Portland.
“My ears went up with that,” remembers Marykate, 31, who was getting her hair performed within the subsequent room and likewise shopped usually on the Portland retailer.
The mom of three and married to lobstering sternman Jordan Roling, the couple lives in Rockport. Marykate had been to culinary college. However most just lately, she ran the Angkor Wok Cambodian meals cart on the Thresher Brewery on Predominant Avenue in Searsmont. The cart’s title is a takeoff on Angkor Wat, the sprawling twelfth Century temple complicated in Siem Reap, Cambodia.
Again on the salon, an intrigued Stephanie listened intently to Marykate’s story and knew she had chanced on a culinary kindred spirit.
“So, I advised her that I had an thought about burritos. Can I’ve your telephone quantity? I haven’t advised my husband but.” she recalled saying excitedly.
They met quickly after and the entrepreneurial intrigue started, with each husbands on board.
When Stephanie, an actual animal lover, talked about the restaurant needed to be meatless, Marykate replied, “I’m wonderful with that,” she recalled.
The inside of Avenue Meals 330 was all hand constructed by Stephanie’s husband, Jim, a woodworker and excessive finish wooden finisher — from the natural-edge meals ledges the place seated friends eat, to the prep desk and counter tops and the racks for pots and pans and utensils.
The homeowners/founders of Avenue Meals 330 work like a pas de deux of their tiny however well-appointed kitchen, in full view of consumers with whom they sustain a pleasant banter. Picture by Jack Foley.
Stephanie’s salon and its a number of non-public, particular person enterprise owner-rented rooms is staffed by an array of magnificence care professionals and has been an enormous success, and it was an idea new to Maine, in accordance with Stephanie.
She and Marykate see the restaurant in the same mild, noting the closest different Cambodian eatery is in Massachusetts and nice Southwestern fare is tough to search out. Anyway, combining Cambodian with Southwest was a no brainer as a result of so most of the elements are the identical and since it’s one thing completely different, the ladies stated.
“It’s a idea that hasn’t been performed in Maine,” stated Stephanie, who has “at all times had at the back of my head making burritos.” So, she hung up her comb and scissors, retired from hairdressing and went into the restaurant enterprise with Marykate. Stephanie’s the burrito chef and Marykate cooks Asian.
Alongside Freeway 1 in Rockport is an outdated boat embellished with the American flag and with the brand new eatery’s title, Avenue Meals 330, lettered on the strict. Picture by Jack Foley.
Inside Avenue Meals 330 (330 is the road deal with) there are a variety of veggies and fish and beans wrapped up in tacos, tortillas and translucent, delicate rice paper. Accompanying fillings vary from long-simmered borracho and black beans to white fish, cilantro, cucumber, salmon and creamy coconut and peanut dressing.
You may get a conventional Vietnamese Bahn hoi, a bowl of vermicelli noodles, with lettuce, cucumber cilantro and topped with a garlic lime fish sauce, for $15.
Or Banh Xeo, a Vietnamese pancake, with tofu or shrimp, candy onions, bean sprouts and extra for $15.
The shredded inexperienced papaya salad consists of lengthy beans, tomatoes, cilantro and roasted peanuts tossed in tamarind dressing and goes for $6.
On the Southwest portion of the massive, multi-colored chalk board menu, two fish tacos with sides are $14, the borracho bean and cheese quesadilla goes for $5 and the Americana burrito at $8 comes with black frijoles, lime cilantro rice, Mexican salad and a salsa of alternative.
And whereas they’re absorbing what looks like a scrumptious success, the ladies are fast to provide an appreciative nod to Doug Clayton, who owns the salon and restaurant buildings and has been an enthusiastic supporter.
“You couldn’t ask for a greater landlord,” Stephanie stated.
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