Porto call Takeout shack in Stonington offers Maine and Portuguese seafood (and cockatoos, too)

On a moonless night not too long ago, a lone boat chugged into Webb Cove in Stonington. It was late – almost 9 p.m. – very late by local standards. But twinkling white lights and the din of lively chatter on the shore had captured the captain’s interest. For a moment as he drew near, he must have felt disoriented. Were those chirping birds he heard? Was this Maine, or had he magically crossed into some exotic wonderland?

Turns out that he did hear birds, he was in Maine, and he had also reached the Portuguese kitchen of chef Suzen Carter, who – despite the hour – was serving dinner at her Cockatoo Seafood Takeout.

It’s easy enough to say that Carter’s food is the highlight of any evening spent eating at her outdoor tables. She serves the Maine regulars: crabmeat rolls, fried clams, chowders, steamers, mussels, lobster. Her particular specialties are Azorean: codfish balls, clam cakes, kale soup, bacalhau ha “Nina,” which is a shredded codfish dish, and traditional paelha, a stew of scallops, shrimp, mussels, clams, lobster on saffron rice.

But in fact, it was the captain’s vision and that sweet accompanying feeling of discombobulation that make this family-run seafood shack a jewel off the beaten path of the tourist map.

“I wanted this to be a place where people who were on vacation could be on vacation,” said Carter, who grew up in Fall River, Mass., and in Capelas, a fishing village on the island of Sao Miguel in the Azores off the coast of Portugal. “I wanted people who lived and worked here in Maine to feel that they were on vacation, too. While they were here, they could be wherever they wanted to be. It would be a hidden pleasure, out of sight, with Portuguese food.”

And cockatoos. Carter owns three Moluccans – Peaches, Mango and Kiwi – which sometimes provide entertainment to guests on the side deck of the seating area. (When they aren’t at the restaurant, they are at Carter’s home, which sits on a hill above the takeout.) If Carter is not too busy in the kitchen, she might remove a bird from a cage to show the pet’s hammy side.

“Pick it up! Pick it up! Pick up your wings and your hat!” she says encouraging a display of regal plumage. Peaches, who is 15 and has been with Carter since the bird’s birth, is by far the most vocal. A social beast, Peaches’ favorite attention-getting words to customers are: “I’m over here! I’m right here!”

A dozen years ago, Carter was living in Massachusetts working in the fashion industry.

Like her birds, she was accustomed to being on display, but in advertisements and on the runway where she modeled formal gowns and wedding dresses as a young woman, and then mothers-of-the-bride-and-groom dresses when she got older. Eventually, she ran two modeling schools for young people. Her goal was to teach self-confidence and self-esteem.

Carter was single then, and two of her students insisted on introducing her to a lobsterman and seafood seller from Maine. She declined. “I assumed I’d be another truck stop on his route,” recalled Carter. But she was wrong. “We met and were instantly best friends, and we still are,” she said.

A year and a half later, she married Bradley Carter, a fourth-generation lobsterman, and moved to his family’s compound on Webb Cove in Stonington. She traded in fancy clothes for a rubber apron and boots, decorative sequins for smelly fish scales. For five years, she worked as Bradley’s sternman and trucked with him each weekend to Boston to buy and sell his products.

“My lifestyle in Massachusetts and my lifestyle here are like night and day,” said Carter, who is 55. “When I go back home, people don’t recognize me because there is so much of a transformation. I was in the pageantry world. It was a glorified lifestyle with everything fancy, sparkly and shimmery. Then I find this simple person who brings me to a life of hard work. I’ve never worked so hard in my life, and I’ve never been so happy.”

On bad-weather days when she wasn’t on the sea with her husband, Carter devoted herself to a serious cooking habit. She would pass the time preparing meals so abundant that Bradley had to share them with friends and neighbors when he got home. When he refurbished a fish shack on the property a few years ago, he added extra space and told his wife it would be hers if she ever had the impulse to share her culinary talents with the world.

The other person who offered encouragement was her friend Julia Child. The legendary chef and cookbook writer, who died in 2004, was a summer resident on Deer Isle and patronized Carter Seafood, Bradley’s family business. She would sometimes talk to Suzen about cooking.

“I told her someday I’d do what I am doing now,” said Suzen Carter. “She asked me what my fears were. I told her that I was afraid I couldn’t feed large groups of people. You can, she said. If you can feed one, you can feed a hundred – one at a time.”

Three summers ago, Carter opened the Cockatoo as an annex to her husband’s seafood market, where shellfish off the boat and a clam shucker and crab picker provide fresh ingredients for the day’s lineup. Carter is at the restaurant every day, including weekends when Bradley continues his trucking routine to Boston. Except now, he stops at Portuguese markets in Fall River to pick up salt cod and other Azorean foods such as spicy chourico sausage. If he gets to the stores too late, Carter’s menu shrinks. But if there are no codfish balls, customers can turn their taste buds on to fish chowder loaded with chunks of sole or piquant stuffed clams.

Portions are large because Carter couldn’t bear to send a customer away hungry. “I tend to adopt people I meet as family,” said Carter. “Once I say hello, I’m there for life.” In other words, Carter treats everyone like a regular. “When I was brought up, we didn’t serve people meals, we served them feasts,” she added.

Diners can order the food to go, but many opt for the tiled tables on a patio, where they open bottles of wine they’ve brought from home. (Carter serves soft drinks but not alcohol.) The cove provides a breathtaking backdrop, but customers also have a bird’s-eye view of Carter’s garden featuring tiers of flowers, cedar topiary of a seahorse and sunflower, and a waterfall made of stones she hauled from the shore over a two-month period.

Anyone who works for her will offer this bit of advice: Save room for dessert. Carter’s Portuguese treats, which use many eggs, are rich and unapologetic. Molotoff pudding is an airy meringue pie flavored with caramelized sugar. Lemon cake has bits of lemon peel in it. Carter also makes a spongy Portuguese sweetbread that is at once filling and calming – almost as much as her goodbye of “God bless. Good health to you all!” at the end of the meal.

The work ethic Carter learned at sea has served her in the kitchen 16 hours a day, seven days a week between Memorial Day and Labor Day. She will rejoin Bradley on the road beginning in September, spending time and speaking Portuguese with her mother and family in Fall River. Naturally, she is licensed to drive the truck. So she shares the driving responsibility, giving a rest to her husband, who leaves the docks every day by 4:30 a.m. to haul lobsters.

Next summer, Carter hopes to expand the business to offer more seating and more food options. She used to return to Portugal, where she lived from age 8 to 12, every year before opening the Cockatoo. And Bradley has never been there. But her ancestral land is never far from her thoughts. It’s as close as the garlic, safflower, sausage, olives, parsley, onions, saffron and paprika on her kitchen shelves.

“I have a passion for cooking,” she said. “I’m having an affair with my kitchen. It brings me back to who I was as that little girl in Portugal.”

The Cockatoo Seafood Takeout, off Oceanville Road in Stonington, is open noon- 8 p.m. every day through Monday, Sept. 4. Costs are $4.95 to $39.95. For information, call 367-0900.