It all started as a joke.

After a few years of working as a pastry chef in Manhattan, Lucas St. Clair was ready to return to his native Maine. When he told his buddies that his mom, Burt’s Bees founder Roxanne Quimby, was going to help him open a bakery in Winter Harbor, they teased him mercilessly.

“My friends said, ‘You’re such a mama’s boy. You should call it Mama’s Boy Bakery,'” St. Clair said, laughing. “It stuck.”

St. Clair had the last laugh, though. He has since turned the bakery into an upscale bistro with the help of his chef, girlfriend and business partner, Jen Amara. Over the three years that have passed since St. Clair hung out his shingle in Winter Harbor, the restaurant’s popularity made it necessary for the couple to move their original digs – the old hardware store – off-site last winter and replace it with a soaring, gabled structure that serves as their base of operations and their home. But while much has changed, the name remains the same, except Mama’s Boy Bakery is now Mama’s Boy Bistro.

“Everyone’s like, ‘Who’s the mama’s boy?’ and everyone points to Lucas,” Amara said with a smile.

“It’s also a way for us to not take ourselves too seriously,” St. Clair added.

He found that when he worked in New York, the restaurant scene was “tremendously pretentious,” and that was the last thing he wanted when he moved back to Maine.

“Everything was so serious,” he said. “We wanted to soften that pretension and seriousness and make it fun. We want people to have a good time.”

St. Clair is 25. Amara is 27. He grew up in Parkman. She, in Pittsfield. Both of them admit that they never dreamed they’d own a restaurant at their age. They’re young. They’re laid-back. And they’re anything but stuffy. But make no mistake: they’re serious about cooking. He trained at Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in London, and she’s a self-taught chef who shares his passion for fresh, local, organic food.

“We feel the only way to be a really great restaurant is to work with really great ingredients,” St. Clair said.

Over the last several summers, they have forged relationships with farmers, fishermen and specialty food producers in the area. Amara is in charge of the kitchen, and she said that at first, it was hard convincing local growers that their produce was restaurant-worthy. They didn’t believe that she wanted a funny-looking cucumber or an ugly tomato. But that’s how real vegetables look, and that’s the way Mama’s Boy wants them.

“Everything isn’t supposed to look perfect,” St. Clair said. “That’s part of being organic. … Our servers will tell people, ‘If you find a bug in your salad, it’s a good thing.'”

There were no bugs in the salad during a recent visit. But the seafood – crab cakes, lobster-stuffed ravioli in a delicate cream sauce, and honey-sesame crusted salmon – tasted like it was caught 10 minutes before it came to the table. A plate of roasted root vegetables was sweet and satisfying on a stormy evening. And the citrus-nut phyllo napoleon, stacked with strawberries, basil and mascarpone cheese, was decadent but not cloyingly sweet.

In other words, these kids can cook.

And they’re not afraid to show it. They designed the restaurant around a spacious open kitchen, where Amara and 11 other cooks work calmly and confidently, even with an audience.

That’s how they wanted it. For Amara and St. Clair, eating is one of life’s biggest pleasures, and watching a meal come together is as entertaining as good theater. The restaurant’s design reflects that, with its second-story balcony overlooking the kitchen and a good view of the drama from almost every seat in the house.

The building itself is the talk of the town. Designed by renowned barn builder John Libby, the space is at once classic and edgy – cathedral ceilings, banks of windows, and warm wood combined with raw steel, unfinished concrete floors and uberstylish glassware and china.

Mama’s Boy’s previous home was tiny and understatedly elegant. The new building is entirely different in scale – one hometown gossip Web site calls it the tallest building in Winter Harbor. You could drive by and hardly notice the old restaurant, but you can’t miss Mama’s Boy now.

“We always wanted to turn this into a really grand eating experience,” St. Clair said. “We started out with something very small, very understated and worked with it. By the end of the third year, we were bursting at the seams. … When we realized that the potential was there, we knew it was time for expansion.”

But St. Clair and Amara tried to remain true to the village’s architectural style while creating the restaurant of their dreams. When they started building, they knew they wanted something that would stand out and fit in at the same time, because they feel a responsibility to maintain the character of their adopted hometown.

“I’ve loved this area ever since I could remember and so does Lucas,” Amara said. “We wanted to live here and share our passion for the area.”

The couple met in the winter of 2000, while both were working in a Portland restaurant. It was love at first sight. The same could be said of the first time St. Clair took his girlfriend to Winter Harbor.

“I took one look at the bakery and I knew I wanted to be here,” Amara said.

So she came up the following summer, and together, they turned it into a cozy, relaxed-but-upscale restaurant. By the end of the 2002 season, they knew it was time to expand, so they made plans to build a three-story building with their living quarters on the top floor. Though their new home may be much larger, the restaurant still has an intimate feel.

“What we kind of feel is that since we live here, we’re having guests,” Amara said.

Fittingly, the menu is a mix of comfort food and haute cuisine – diners can order a traditional Maine lobster bake or they can skip the crackers and bib and order lobster ravioli with roasted shallots, fennel and red grapes. The couple’s philosophy is simple: dining should be an experience, whether your taste is simple or a bit more exotic.

“So often people eat mass-produced burgers on their way to work,” St. Clair said. “It’s certainly not the way we should look at food. It should be more of a celebration. So many people eat to live. We are trying to make people live to eat here.”

It’s enough to make any mama proud.