Cafe culture Madawaska man’s experiment in cooking for a hobby blossoms into popular eatery

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It’s 1 p.m. on a snowy Thursday – pea soup day – and Cafe de la Place is hopping.

Laughter fills the Madawaska restaurant as a group of regulars seated at the “community table” starts heckling the owner, Michael Corbin. But he takes it in stride, laughing along with them as he sits in the cozy dining room.

“It’s an experience coming to dine here more than anything,” Corbin said. “Make yourself at home, pull up a table, do your thing.”

Cafe de la Place is like Cheers, minus the beer. Once you’ve been there a few times, everybody knows your name. And nobody seems to mind if a stranger pulls up a chair at the community table, which accommodates eight comfortably, but often seats 12.

“They put up with us,” said one of the regulars, Rina Collins of Madawaska.

“If they put up with us, they’ll put up with anybody,” Rina’s husband, Gino, added, laughing. The couple eats lunch at the cafe almost every day.

When Corbin set up shop in a train car on Main Street four years ago, he had no idea how popular his cafe would become. Though he had a background in cooking, he hadn’t thought of opening his own restaurant until his vision started to deteriorate in the early 1990s. When he lost his peripheral vision in 1993, he was declared legally blind and lost his driver’s license. At the time he was working in Limestone, and he had to pay a driver to take him to and from Loring.

After a while, he stopped working and started collecting disability benefits, but that got old fast. So with help from the Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired, he opened the cafe as an experiment.

“I said, ‘I’m going to create this job. If it works, fine. If it doesn’t, I’ll just stay home,’ Corbin said, stopping to greet everyone who walks through the door. “I opened it up as a hobby. I said, ‘I’ll make soup,

I’ll make pastries, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll try something else.’ But the business grew so the hobby became a full-time job.”

So he moved across the street and started serving breakfast and lunch in a larger space near the international bridge, but that soon became too crowded. One day, he noticed a group of executives from Fraser Paper sitting on the windowsill and eating soup, and he knew it was time to expand again. Now, the cafe occupies two storefronts, with a seating area where patrons can curl up on a couch or an overstuffed chair, sip coffee and watch the hustle and bustle on Main Street.

“I opened it up thinking of a little French cafe. I went to France, and every little village has a cafe de la place, or plaza cafe,” Corbin said. “I like to create the atmosphere. There’s a little city feel to it in the northern Maine tundra.”

He provides free Internet access, and he has set up an art gallery in the cafe as well, where he exhibits the work of local artists and holds regular openings. The current show, which includes work by Corbin’s partner, Arthur Lamoreau, contributes to the urban vibe.

But it isn’t just the atmosphere that keeps people coming back. It’s the food – inches-thick sandwiches on homemade bread, wraps, panini sandwiches, inventive salads (on a recent visit, the special was Philly cheese steak salad), decadent pastries, and the occasional five-course dinner, for which Corbin and his staff deck out the cafe in white linen and candlelight. But perhaps the most memorable thing on the menu is the soup.

At Cafe de la Place, there are four words you’d never hear: “No soup for you!” Unless Corbin runs out, that is.

Unlike the grouchy Soup Nazi from “Seinfeld,” who was known for his crab bisque, Corbin’s selection is a little more eclectic – and it’s served with a smile. In addition to the Acadian classics such as yellow pea soup or chicken stew, it’s not unusual to find chicken cordon bleu soup, boiled dinner soup or chicken pot pie soup on the menu.

“It’s like the inside of a pot pie only thinner, and then he crumbles a biscuit on it,” Rejeanne Dubois of Edmundston, New Brunswick, said while sitting at the community table. “It’s so delicious.”

And his creamy chicken noodle soup was enough to cause Madawaska High School students to plan their whole lunch around it.

“I had a group of senior students who had senior privileges, and … if he had creamy chicken noodle, I knew they would be begging for me to let them out early so they could get there before it was gone,” teacher Gisele Faucher said. “They would just beg and plead. Occasionally I would let them go two minutes early, just to give them a head start on the crowd.”

The creamy chicken noodle is one of nearly 45 soups in Corbin’s repertoire, two of which make it on the menu each day. His pea soup recipe was handed down through the generations in his family, but others, such as the chicken cordon bleu or the chicken pot pie, are his own inventions. He also takes requests from customers, such as the Hawaiian salad, which includes pineapple, ham, and coconut. One day, the regulars jokingly suggested a hot dog and bean wrap, so he put it on the menu for the city’s Acadian celebration, and it was a hit.

“I’ve always dared to do something different,” Corbin said. “That’s the only way we’ll know. If we don’t try, we won’t know.”

Whole Yellow Pea Soup (Soupe Aux Pois)

1 pound whole yellow peas

2 quarts water

1 onion

2 ham hocks

4 tablespoons chicken soup base

1/2 cup grated carrots

Salt and pepper, to taste

Wash and soak peas overnight. Put first 5 ingredients in a pot. Bring to a boil and simmer, stirring occasionally, for 3 hours or until peas are tender. Remove ham hocks, cut meat into small pieces and put back into soup. If the soup is too thick, add water until soup reaches desired thickness. Add carrots, salt and pepper.