A Plea for Help from Portland, Maine

Dear readers, friends, colleagues, and former customers,

I write to you now from Portland, Maine, where I have settled with intentions to linger. These intentions have manifested, as they often do, in my signing a lease for a restaurant space. It’s an ambitious project, two projects, in fact, linked by a shared space and philosophy: a cafe by day and a farm-to-table restaurant by night. I have never felt more strongly about the potential of a business, the energy of the location, or my capacity to create.

I have, however, hit a stumbling block, and am hoping that reconnecting with you all might help me regain my footing. Perhaps one of you, or someone you know, might provide a steadying hand? I need a partner. It could be a working partner, a chef, a somm, a manager, a baker, or a farmer—or it could be someone behind the scenes. There is no need to invest any capital; I have already invested everything I have. But I do need someone to co-sign a small business loan. This is a funny way to go about finding someone like that, but I am leaving no stone unturned. The stakes are too high.

I am interrupting the business portion of this two-headed calf of a newsletter to get personal. Without losing sight of this plea for help, I’ll touch on the two-and-a-half years of silence between this post and the last, in October of 2023, when I was sitting at a streetside cafe in Kutaisi, Georgia, rhapsodizing about khachapuri micro-climates. I’ll move between now and then in reverse. Last summer, Sarah and I decided to end both our personal and professional partnerships. The parting is amiable. One could say fate simply pulled us apart as suddenly as it had stitched us together. One could say that we came to need different things out of life. Regardless, we are grateful for one another and wish each other well.

Sarah has founded a winery and vineyard in Kent—the British one— called Great Old Hay, and is well on her way to becoming the winemaker she always dreamed of being. You can follow her journey via the Tannat Instagram page. We planted the first vineyard together last spring, and spent the year before that planning, researching, and preparing the site. I owe an important artistic insight to the hours I spent mowing the seventeen acres suitable for vines, and the twice-kitted vixen gleaning rodents from the nettle, briar, and long grass in the dusky wake of my shearing.

Before that, Sarah harvested grapes in Japan, and before that she pruned grapes, again in Georgia, with stops in Greece, Turkey, Morocco, and France in between. The autopsy of why I stopped publishing this newsletter is complex and contested— my inability to mix writing and commerce, rarely being in one place for more than two months (and frequently much shorter), a general confusion and malaise around what I wanted for the entire project, the old chestnut: unresolved generational trauma, but the fatal blow was the beginning of the genocide in Gaza and the age of horrors I perceived on its heels. I could not find a way to write through it. It swallowed my words.

And now I find myself thrust back into the muck and mire of these United States, trying yet again to live a life of beauty, decency, authenticity, and independence. I moved to Maine on a whim, fell in love with it, and decided to stay. When a beautiful space on a coveted Portland corner became available for lease more or less before my eyes, I committed everything.

I discovered a strange quirk of the American banking world when I decided to apply for a loan: they require, by law, three years of income in order to approve one. As Sarah and I were living and creating what has become Great Old Hay Winery from our savings, I had no income to report. I had a partner lined up to co-sign, but they have had a change of circumstances that led them to back out.

Here is the advertisement I’m passing around. Please share it with anyone who might be interested or who might know someone who is. One signature from a willing partner is literally the only thing standing between me and this dream.

Restaurant Opportunity

A restaurant owner-operator with 20 years of experience is looking for a working partner or loan guarantor. He is in possession of a 5 year lease on a 2400 sq ft location on Washington Avenue in Portland. The business plan is complete, a bank is lined up for the loan, and a contractor is ready to begin remodeling, however, the owner’s prior partner had to drop out suddenly, thus creating this opportunity.

The business will be a coffee house by day and a casual fine-dining farm-to-table concept by night. This is an amazing chance to have an ownership stake in an ambitious new Portland restaurant in an ideal location with no capital investment.

The partner must have the willingness to cosign a $125,000 loan and assume a portion of the risk of covering the payments should the business fail. For a guarantor, the owner will offer a percentage of the restaurant profits for the first 5 years. For a working partner, he will offer a management level position (head chef, FOH manager, Beverage Director, etc.) in the company and a higher percentage of the profits. Farmers are also encouraged to reach out, as local ingredients will be the driving force behind the menu.

The bank requirements are fairly simple. Candidates must have three years of steady income as demonstrated by tax returns, low debt, and good–but not necessarily great–credit.

Please contact William at feastephemera@gmail.com for more information. He is looking to bring someone on ASAP and hopes to open in April.

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As for the future of this newsletter— I feel freer now to write without regards to other perceived obligations or phantoms of self-censorship, and so I shall write on food, culture, and politics however I see fit. I’ll also write about starting this new business, with all the juicy behind the scenes details. All payments have been stopped and I don’t intend on restarting them until I have demonstrated the consistency of writing that warrants the presumption.

I’m also going to begin republishing my 2008 food book, Edges of Bounty, with annotations from my current self, nearly 20 years after writing it.

I encourage anyone to reach out and say hello. The core of the readership of this newsletter is people who I have fed in a space that I helped build, people I have talked to, looked in the eye, and shared moments of this life with. I hope I get the chance to create something again with the spirit and welcome that I did at Tannat, and that many of you will eat and drink with me again.

—William