By Brian Kevin
Photos by Nicole Wolf
From our January 2025 issue
Until chef Suzanne Vizethann showed up, the only thing southern about downtown Camden was the orientation of the traffic jam on summer Sunday afternoons. And since 1942, that stream of cars has been cruising past Marriner’s, a no-frills breakfast joint overlooking Main Street out front and the town’s genteel harbor out back. Proudly, Marriner’s didn’t change much during those many decades. Before Georgia transplant Vizethann took the place over last spring, a lyrical little sign out front declared: “Down Home / Downeast / No Ferns / No Quiche” — a sentiment all the more charming when you consider that quiche stopped being a signifier for froufrou at least 30 years ago.
Buttermilk Kitchen at Marriner’s, as the place is now known, still doesn’t serve quiche. It does, however, serve pimento-cheese grits, cloud-like biscuits, superb fried chicken, and other menu items that might seem more at home in Atlanta, where Vizethann opened her much-praised first restaurant, Buttermilk Kitchen, in 2012. A cookbook author, occasional Food Network guest (she won a Chopped episode back in 2011), and lifelong breakfast enthusiast, Vizethann fell in love with Maine on an anniversary trip with her husband, in 2022. The pair set out to find a midcoast bed-and-breakfast to run before learning that Dan and Becki Gabriele, who owned Marriner’s for 41 years, were looking to sell.
From left: French toast, made with bread from Rockland’s Atlantic Baking Company and topped with clouds of vanilla whipped cream; old and new signage grace the reimagined restaurant; a salvaged window subtly divides the bar and dining spaces; chef Suzanne Vizethann.
The second location of Buttermilk Kitchen, some 1,100 miles from the first, opened last April after an extensive renovation. Out went the tired old carpeting, fluorescent lighting, and vinyl seatbacks. In came a lovely new breakfast bar, an espresso machine, and a fresh navy-and-white paint job. Vizethann and company brightened the place up while maintaining some of its retro charms, including the cozy booths up front, and a little of the wry messaging: “Come on in!” reads a new version of a sign that hung in the old Marriner’s. “The locals will enjoy your accent.”
The menu’s accent is unmistakably southern. On my first visit, last summer, I grabbed a barstool and ordered one of the signature chicken biscuits. Guy Fieri once inhaled one on camera, declaring with his mouth full that he loved “the refined simplicity.” I lack the Mayor of Flavortown’s grandiloquence, but it is indeed a fine sandwich. Vizethann brines the chicken overnight in sweet tea, double dredges it, and fries it in leftover pancake batter thinned with milk. The biscuits are fall-apart flaky. Topped with house-brined pickles and more than a dollop of red-pepper jelly, it’s a glorious mess.
On my next visit, I ordered off the lunch portion of the menu a fried green-tomato melt that knocked my Yankee socks off. Vizethann pickles the tomatoes first, in a sugar-and-red-pepper brine. The spicy sweetness comes through in every bite, but if you need a little more kick, every table has a bottle of Chip’s Sweet Heat, a small-batch hot sauce crafted up the road, in Hope.
Syrup is from Madison’s Maine Maple Products, and on my most recent visit, my son poured it liberally on two frisbee-size blueberry pancakes. I went with a seasonal scramble of goat cheese, delicata squash, kale, and crunchy roasted chickpeas nestled in four (four!) fluffy eggs. With a biscuit and fried potatoes, of course. Further continuity with the old Marriner’s: nobody is leaving Buttermilk Kitchen hungry.
From left: coastal colors and décor feather the restaurant into its surroundings; deck seats overlook Camden Harbor; fried chicken tossed with maple hot sauce and topped with a fried egg, on a bed of pimento-cheese grits.
At first, Vizethann says, she was nervous about how Southern brunch staples would play in the north country. “But they’re our biggest sellers,” she says. “People can’t seem to get enough of them.” On the lunch menu, there’s a fried-haddock sandwich and a respectable chowder, items you won’t find in Atlanta, where Vizethann has a team running things now that she’s a Rockport denizen. Between those and some nautical décor, Buttermilk Kitchen at Marriner’s feels just down east enough for its harborfront setting — and unmistakably down home.
