The Spring Street Cafe in Belfast is a little different from Oliver Outerbridge’s first restaurant.

For starters, it seats more than four. It isn’t in a treehouse. And you don’t need a boat or a ladder to get there.

“It was very limited – he could only serve four,” Oliver’s father, David, said of the minirestaurant on Seven Hundred Acre Island off Lincolnville. “People would come over from Islesboro and climb into the treehouse and have these lovely meals.”

Oliver was 14 at the time. In a tree by the beach, he served crepes Suzette and steamed mussels to his customers, mostly relatives.

“It was definitely my destiny,” Outerbridge said, sitting on a stool in Spring Street’s small lounge.

His menu has evolved dramatically in the 26 years since his first venture, but his love of cooking remains.

“My style is fairly eclectic,” he said. “I love Thai ingredients. I love the purity of the Japanese style of cooking. I love the flavors of the Southwest’s smoked peppers and spices. I think it’s great to kind of reach out and sprinkle them into the menu.”

Spring Street Caf? is like the United Nations of food – wasabi, pad Thai, pesto, tostadas and Serrano ham peacefully coexist on the menu. In turn, Outerbridge is the ambassador of fusion, sampling liberally from a wide range of ethnic flavors and presenting them with a flourish. The result is dishes such as duck with a blood-orange reduction; salmon with tomatoes, olives, capers and saffron; a light, unpeanut-buttery pad Thai with fresh peppers and scallions, or a Caribbean scallop cake with grilled mango in a pool of cilantro-flecked butter sauce.

Although fusion as a cooking style has come and gone in many larger cities, it’s relatively new to Maine. There are restaurants here that serve meals inspired by different regional dishes, but few that are full-on fusion. Outerbridge and his fiancee and business partner, Carole Anne Emmett, thought Belfast was ready for it.

“The word on the street was ‘yes,'” Emmett said. “Everyone we spoke to before we opened was absolutely thrilled with the idea of having this kind of food here.”

This isn’t the first time Outerbridge has offered something a little different to the diners of Midcoast Maine. For eight years, he owned Oliver’s, a seasonal restaurant on Islesboro, and the Crow Bar, a tavern upstairs. There, he served a mix of fine dining and pub food. He decided to shake things up by offering a dish many of his regulars had never heard of: pad Thai.

“To bring pad Thai to Islesboro was like, ‘Ooooooh,'” Emmett said. “He just kind of introduced them to a different way of eating and cooking and he’s doing this here, too.”

For Outerbridge, cooking is an adventure, and his guests get to share in the fun. It started in a treehouse bistro. From there, things got even more interesting. After high school, he studied at Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School. Then he headed off to France, where he apprenticed at Royal Gray, a Michelin two-star restaurant in Cannes.

“I know, it doesn’t sound like a French restaurant,” he said, laughing, as he told of his escapades at the Royal Gray. “That was very interesting. The French are psycho about food. There’d be a truckload of pheasant and everyone would sit around plucking feathers all day.”

When he wasn’t plucking feathers, he’d be busy mastering his dicing technique. Part of his training involved cutting vegetables into cubes “the size of a grain of salt.” They were supposed to be perfectly square.

“Mine would be slightly rectangular,” he said with a grin.

From there, it was back to the States. He cooked in New York for a while, then set off for Seattle, which had a reputation as a “great restaurant town.” He dropped off resumes and checked out a few leads. Then he heard about a job on a factory fish-processing ship out of Portland, Ore.

“That sounded like an adventure to me, so I looked into it,” he said. “The pay was better than anything in a restaurant so I signed up and shipped out three days later.”

As the 700-foot ship made its way across the Bering Sea, Outerbridge worked 16 hours a day, preparing shrimp scampi and baked Alaska for 120 men at a time. The rule was a pound and a half of meat per person, per meal. That meant spending the whole morning peeling shrimp, or tossing a 200-pound rib roast into the oven.

“They ate a lot out there,” he said. “There’s not too much to do out there but work and sleep.”

That’s not to say that working on the open sea was boring. At times it got pretty exciting.

“The whole cooking on a ship is difficult because it’s not level,” Outerbridge said. “Especially in the winter … you’d get these swells. The boat would be tilting 40 degrees. Oil would be splashing out of the fryolators and the floor would get pretty slick. We’d slide down the line, flipping pancakes, and slide back.”

Despite the high seas, Outerbridge didn’t get seasick. After a few days, no one on the ship noticed the swells.

“You don’t like to cook when you’re seasick, but on the other hand, people don’t want to eat so it worked out OK,” he said. “You learn a lot of things on a boat.”

After two stints on the ship, Outerbridge had learned enough. He also had earned enough to put a down payment on Oliver’s. He moved to Islesboro and saw the restaurant through eight years and seven summers. After a while, island living started to wear on him.

“Islesboro’s a fun place in the summer, but from mid-October to the middle of May there’s no movie theater, no gym, there’s not much to do, especially if you’re single or young,” he said.

So he sold the restaurant, paid off his debts, bought a 180-acre farm in Knox with Emmett and moved to the mainland. He took some time off, but about a year ago, the urge to own a restaurant resurfaced.

“I pledged that if I did it again, it was going to be very small so I could pay attention to detail,” he said.

He and Emmett talked it over. Though they became a couple only two years ago, they had worked together on Islesboro for a long time. He knew cooking. She knew how to run a restaurant. They figured they’d give it a go.

“[Carole Anne] saw an ad in Uncle Henry’s,” Outerbridge said. “We checked out the space and it seemed like the perfect size and location for us.”

They spent the winter renovating. Emmett gave the intimate dining rooms character, painting the walls a soft terra cotta or a deep olive green, picking out handmade pottery dishes, and stenciling the floor of the lounge in an olive and cream checkerboard. Outerbridge tailored his wine list and created a menu of eye-catching dishes. In March, the Spring Street Caf? opened.

It’s a far cry from young Oliver’s treehouse. The vegetables aren’t cut so small you need a microscope to see them. And unless there’s an earthquake, you won’t find fryolator oil flying through the air. What you will find at Spring Street is a global menu of strong ingredients playing off one another in interesting, surprising ways. And of course, it’s an adventure.

“It’s kind of a melting-pot approach,” Outerbridge said. “The one thing I didn’t like about calling it fusion cuisine is that someone had already called it that – I always like to be original. It just means you don’t know what to expect.”

The Spring Street Caf? is open from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. On Sundays, a five-course prix fixe tasting menu is served. For information or reservations, call 338-4603.