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Bill Roderick had hoped to get a deer, maybe a grouse, when he and his dad took their annual hunting trip to Maine 11 years ago.
Instead, he ended up with a restaurant.
“This is the last thing I ever thought would happen,” the Rhode Island native said recently after the lunch crowd had cleared out of Horn of Plenty in Island Falls. “One year we were over in Sherman riding around and happened to see this place for sale. I said, let’s give it a shot.”
It wasn’t a long shot, however, because Roderick, now 50, wasn’t exactly a stranger to restaurant life. He attended Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island and honed his talents in the kitchens of the Harborside Inn on Martha’s Vineyard and the Oceancliff Resort in Newport, R.I. Even his girl-
friend and business partner, Nancy Levin, has restaurants in her blood. They met 17 years ago at Friends Bar, a neighborhood favorite that Levin owned in Newport. She served him a drink, and it was love.
Around the same time as the fateful cocktail, Roderick bought land in Crystal, and the couple started coming to Maine when they needed a break from their 80-plus-hour workweeks. It was the polar opposite of touristy Newport – no crowds, no traffic, no attitude. They saw the possibility in this small town in southern Aroostook County. But their buddies had doubts.
“I had come here with Nancy and two of my chef friends, and they said, ‘You’re going to open a restaurant in here, Bill?'” he said. “They were like, ‘Where is everybody?’ They just couldn’t believe it. They said, ‘You’re crazy.'”
Even their friends who lived in Island Falls were skeptical. When they told a couple who had moved there from Boston their plans, their response was, “Oh, good, but I don’t know if they’re going to like what you’re going to make.”
“But I knew,” Roderick said.
He was right. On Horn of Plenty’s opening day the following August, the couple didn’t hire a dishwasher. They figured they wouldn’t need one. By dinnertime, Bill was cooking up a storm, Nancy, the restaurant’s manager, was prepping food, waiting tables and trying to do dishes, and she had to enlist the help of a friend who had come to eat.
“The place was packed,” Levin, 52, said. “We thought it was going to be slow, maybe 20 people. The first day, we served 71.”
Roderick proved his friends wrong.
“As soon as they ate the food, they weren’t going to throw the chef out of town,” he said with a smile. The restaurant became so popular that he had to hire a first cook, Janice Carr, to keep up.
In the 10 years that have passed, Horn of Plenty’s reputation has grown among local – and not so local – residents. People have been known to drive from as far away as Caribou, Bangor and Woodstock, New Brunswick, for Roderick’s dynamic dinners.
“You can always get something to eat that you can’t find anywhere else, and you never know what to expect,” said Al Butler of Houlton, who eats at Horn of Plenty about 10 times a year.
On his last visit, Butler had a New York strip steak with banana-pepper sauce – “Does that sound hot?” he asked, “because it was.”
Roderick’s menu reads like a United Nations roster – on a given day, you can find Chicken Piri-Piri, Azorian Pasta with chorizo and port-wine tomato sauce, Crab Rangoon or German-Style Calf’s Liver among the offerings.
Though it’s not uncommon to hear chefs in Maine complain about how hard it is to find unusual or high-quality ingredients, Roderick doesn’t seem to have any trouble coming up with fresh, innovative dishes. And he doesn’t ignore the old standbys, either.
“Some people, all they want is fish and chips,” he said.
And that’s OK. Horn of Plenty isn’t about pretension or food snobbery. It’s a place where customers come as they are and eat what they want. It’s located in a small strip mall downtown, but it’s still cozy – there’s a boar’s head and hunting signs on one wall, and baskets of every shape on another.
“The biggest reason we keep going back is the atmosphere – and the food,” Butler said. “I go for the entertainment.”
Whether you stop in once a week or once a year, Nancy will still remember your name and your usual order. She jokes that if she doesn’t know, she’ll guess, figuring she has a 50-50 chance between the enormously popular Chicken Sicily and Seafood Tetrazzini.
“If he ever said he’s not doing them, I’m not waiting tables,” Levin said, laughing.
Since they opened Horn of Plenty, Levin and Roderick have gotten to know their customers well. They’ve made friends from all over the state, and they’ve been able to savor the slower pace in northern Maine. They recently took a few weeks off to entertain friends and to hunt, but even when they’re at the restaurant, it doesn’t feel like work.
“Here, we only work 60 hours a week,” Levin said. “It feels like vacation.”
More important, Roderick says, they can do what they want, when they want.
“At least we’re in charge of our own destiny here.”
Horn of Plenty is located on Route 159 in Island Falls. Hours are 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. The restaurant does not accept credit cards. For reservations, which are recommended, call 463-2861.
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