Oh Brother! Ellsworth’s Rooster store – with its coffees, chocolates and culinary wonders – gives kitchen crowd something to crow about

Across the Union River, in the old Oddfellow’s Hall in Ellsworth, there lived a store by a peculiar name. Passers-by who set foot inside found more than the name to be strange.

Here, a brick of Syrian apricot paste. There, a liter of organic volcano orange juice, straight from Sicily’s Mount Etna. Rows of quirky tools appease every whim of kitchencraft. Shelves stock hot mango relish, wines and teas from near and far – not to mention Mr. Sprinkles rainbow ice cream topping – and, drifting up from a cellar roaster, the atmosphere of coffees from around the world.

The story of the Rooster Brother store is the tale of a culinary outpost. It began 17 years ago, when George and Pamela Elias named their new store for one of their children’s favorite books.

The Elias children have long since outgrown bedtime stories. One has graduated Columbia University, the other is a theater professional in Boston. But the shop, which officially expanded to three floors in June, remains a through-the-looking-glass experience for anyone apt to get creative in an apron. On any given day the floors are visited by shoppers and chefs from throughout the area, and by Ellsworthians in search of a fresh pastry, a new spatula or a world-grade cup of java.

George Elias concedes the shop was a tad out of step with its surroundings when it touched down in 1987. That, he says, was the general idea.

“Customers rhapsodize about the beginning of our business,” he said. “For the first time they didn’t have to go to Boston to buy good olive oil.”

John Hikade, whose family owns the Arbor Vine restaurant, the Vinery cafe and Moveable Feast catering in Blue Hill, said shopping trips to the Rooster often include cookware, serving trays and Christmas gifts among the kitchen-centric family.

“We’ve been shopping there for years and years,” he said “Both my sons are cooks who work with the business, and we use Rooster Brother’s for specialty needs that we can’t get elsewhere.”

The roots of the Rooster Brother store were decidedly unexotic – a single room, selling what pans, utensils and kitchenware remained after the venerable Shepard’s Hardware store shut its doors. A year later, Rooster Brother moved from its original building (now the Union River Lobster Pot restaurant) to the basement of the Oddfellow’s Hall. A year after that, the couple expanded the shop to the street-level floor and took charge of the century-old, 5,000-square-foot, sink-or-swim behemoth.

“At the time, we couldn’t imagine how we could fill it up,” Pamela Elias said.

A Milwaukee, Wis., native with a degree in studio art from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., Pamela shows both a baker’s grace and an artist’s eye. Her small homegrown bakery business provided the stepping stone to a kitchenware store. The couple’s first step beyond cookery was wine, the second marked the onset of an eclectic future.

“In order to sell wine, you have to sell food,” Pamela Elias said. “So we decided to put in chocolate.”

Combine that logic with her husband, the kind of thoughtful fellow who starts out as a graduate in English literature (also from Columbia), becomes a family and couples counselor and then a home builder before investing in a family retail business. (He maintains his practice in couples and business counseling from an office a few doors up the street.)

Astute additions such as a bakery, a deli and an Internet coffee sales operation all have led to more employees, steadily improving sales and a business that peaks during the winter holidays. Much of those sales come from a clientele at ease with the idea of an $80 teapot or a $150 saucepan. But the Rooster’s new upstairs section gives Wal-Mart pricing a run for its money. English teapots dip below $10. Decent cookware can be had for even less. The Eliases pick and choose each bargain, aiming to broaden the home kitchen perspective. As George succinctly puts it, once you hear Bach, “Jingle Bells” never sounds quite the same.

“There are people who 15 years ago thought Hershey’s special dark was just really tremendous chocolate,” he explains. “Now they taste chocolates like Valhrona and Scharffen Berger and somehow your relative expectations change.”

In many respects, the Ellsworth store is tapping expectations shifting on a much broader scale. Media outlets such as the Food Network and Martha Stewart Living have, in the past decade, rephrased kitchens as studios in which to experiment and create.

Williams Sonoma, probably the best-known retailer of elegant kitchen equipage, has nurtured that market for years. The company, which also owns the Pottery Barn catalog retail business, is pushing toward more than $3 billion in revenue this year.

The Cookware Manufacturers Association reports industrywide sales peaked above $1.2 billion in 1999, falling to just over $1 billion last year. As far as measures of success, the Eliases count the Rooster’s 15 year-round jobs, 12 of which are full-time and provide full benefits, near the top of his list. As far as sales, they say growth has been steady, averaging about 5 percent a year and pushing past $2 million in annual revenue in 2003.

“We’ve never had a down year,” George Elias said.

There are other places to go for kitchenware and ingredients – Northeast Harbor’s Kimball Shop and Pine Tree Market in one direction, and R.M. Flagg in Veazie in the other. But the Rooster offers its own inimitable soup pan to pine nuts dimensions, placing it on shopping lists of the likes of Louis Keifer, executive chef at the Bar Harbor Inn. Keifer says he goes to R.M. Flagg or C.Caprara in Winthrop to stock his professional needs. In a pinch, the chef says, he stops by the Rooster for a pasta cutter or other specialty items, or to look through its choice selection of cookbooks.

Maggie O’Neil, owner and chef at Maggie’s Special Scales in Bar Harbor, says the store is a regular stop on her list.

“For food we go to local farms, but we go to Rooster Brother for dinnerware, or wineglasses sometimes,” she said. “I buy my wine openers there, and they have cool little ramekins and things like that.”

George Elias says pasta cutters and ramekens (very small serving dishes) are just part of the plan to create a destination, “to just have so many things here that we get on people’s shopping lists.”

“And we want to be first on the list.”