Bobbie Lynn Hutchins likes it hot. She also likes it spicy, bold, Cajun, Greek and Creole. She can’t seem to settle on one favorite style of cooking, but it doesn’t really matter – most everything that touches her pan turns to gourmet.

On Mount Desert Island, folks have known Hutchins’ cooking for 14 years, returning to dine again and again at Cafe Bluefish on Cottage Street in Bar Harbor. Now the chef has turned heads at the Food Network, which will feature her Lobster Strudel at 9 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 28, on “Roker on the Road.” She also runs Blue Sage Bistro in the MDI village of Town Hill.

Hutchins is quick to say the idea to match flaky phyllo dough, traditionally Greek, with Maine lobster in a dish with caramelized onions and homemade Boursin-style cheese came from George Demas, former owner of George’s Restaurant in Bar Harbor.

“I went with it and made it my own thing,” she says, seated in a dark wooden booth at Cafe Bluefish. This recent sunny afternoon, she’s been cooking with mint and curry, and her restaurant is fragrant with sweet and spicy smells.

It’s only September and cold weather hasn’t gripped MDI yet, so plenty of people are still out and about, examining the cafe’s posted menu and peering in the dining room’s windows. On the tables, teacups filled with Trivial Pursuit cards perch atop worn books such as “Halfway House” by Maurice Hewlett and “Thankful’s Inheritance” by Joseph Crosby Lincoln. Fresh cut sunflowers, which a friend with a green thumb dropped, and old Bar Harbor High School yearbooks grace a central table. On a large chalkboard, cranberry sorbet, double cinnamon strudel, old-fashioned fruit crisp and other homemade desserts are listed.

While the Lobster Strudel is getting all the attention, Cafe Bluefish’s menu draws from many diverse cuisines and regions of the world. To see where she draws her inspiration, just look at Hutchins’ passport. You’ll find stamps from Greece, Morocco, Jamaica, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Belize, Guatemala and Cameroon, among others. You’ll taste different influences whether it’s the pecan-crusted salmon with Creole brown butter sauce or Scallops a la Greque, flavored with garlic, lemon zest, olive oil and ouzo. Hutchins’ personal favorite, Cajun Crusted Swordfish, boasts 16 ingredients in the barbecue sauce.

“You might look at [my menu] and think it has a Cajun influence or a Greek influence. But my style of cooking is really my own style. I like cuisines with big, bold flavors. I borrow from any cuisine that appeals to me,” she says, “and that, essentially, is fusion cuisine.”

Fusion cuisine became popular more than a decade ago and Hutchins continues to be an avid subscriber. A collection of photographs shows her in kitchens around the globe, sharing her cooking techniques with chefs and learning new tricks to take back to Bar Harbor. Even during vacations around the United States, she constantly picks up ideas.

“Down South, I ask for the local foods, down-home grits, collard greens, whatever the hometown people eat. That’s what I want to eat when I’m there – what the locals eat.”

“Everything I eat influences my cooking. Everything I read and see on TV influences me. It’s my passion, my vocation, my addiction,” Hutchins says, launching into the potato’s history.

And she makes sure to share her own traditions, too. In a cafe in Athens, she requested scrambled eggs, but not knowing the translation, she found herself behind a Greek chef’s stove.

“He didn’t understand, so he said, ‘Come on back here. You show me how to do it.’ And I did,” she recalls.

Before then, Hutchins says, she never would have entered another chef’s kitchen. By the look of her, that’s hard to believe. Behind dark-rimmed glasses, her eyes possess a confidence and you have to wonder if it comes from her own family’s culinary tradition.

“My dad is brilliant,” she says, scanning the Cafe Bluefish menu with a pen in hand as if in a constant state of editing. “He was a self-taught cook. He used more seasonings than a typical Down East person – garlic, spices and seasonings – long before it became trendy. The rest of the country caught up with my dad and it became more common.”

Hutchins’ culinary roots run deep. Her fraternal grandmother, “Grammy Sue,” worked as a cook for author E.B. White in Brooklin and other prominent people. Grammy Sue’s father cooked at a Canadian lumber camp, and Hutchins’ mother makes a fine macaroni and cheese.

Despite the legacy, Hutchins credits professional baker Sarah Grant for really teaching her how to cook at a restaurant they started – called Fig o’ My Heart, a play on the 1933 movie “Peg o’ My Heart” – when they were students at the University of Maine in Orono.

“We had this fantasy that we wanted to start a restaurant,” Hutchins remembers. “We asked [Sarah’s] mother to lend us the money – they were an old Bostonian family that expected Sarah to attend an Ivy League – and for some reason which I will never understand, she said yes. It should have ended there. She should have said no, and we would have gone on with our lives, but instead, I finished out the semester and I didn’t go back.”

Then 21 and 23, Grant and Hutchins pored over cookbooks and began creating recipes for Fig o’ My Heart. In the ’70s, in the “Natural Foods Guide in New England,” the Old Town restaurant was called the finest vegetarian restaurant in the region.

From the Fig, Hutchins moved on to found Cafe Bluefish.

“I’ve fallen off the wagon … I’m no longer a vegetarian,” she says. “But I still take care to have a couple really special vegetarian options on the menu, and one that doesn’t contain dairy.”

Three years ago, almost by accident, Hutchins’ Blue Sage Bistro was born, too. The chef had thought her downtown Bar Harbor lease was up, and she swiftly secured another site – an 18th century schoolhouse that since had served as a bakery where Sarah Grant got her cooking start. She wound up not losing her lease, but still forged ahead and started another restaurant.

“I never intended to have two restaurants,” the 51-year-old chef declares. Still, her passion for food and life keeps both restaurants vibrant. She also gets a helping hand from apprentices.

“I used to do it all,” she reflects. “I’m sharing with them now what Sarah shared with me.”

Cafe Bluefish, located at 122 Cottage St. in Bar Harbor, is open much of the year. Dinner is served from 5:30 p.m., seven days a week, through October. For reservations, call 288-3696. Blue Sage Bistro, on Route 102 in Town Hill, is open nightly except Tuesdays, through Columbus Day. To reserve, call 288-5222. Tracy Collins can be reached at TracyCollins@umit.maine.edu.