By Brian Kevin
Photos by Kody Theriault
From our March 2025 issue
A framed photo, taken around 1920, hangs on the dining-room wall at Mezza, a black-and-white image showing a row of houses pressed up tightly against the Kennebec River, in Waterville’s Head of Falls neighborhood. Along the bottom, in a stylized font, is the single word “Roots.”
The print belongs to Tom Nale, who owns the tiny building that houses Mezza and that formerly housed a similar restaurant, officially called Lebanese Cuisine. Known to most Watervillians simply as “the Lebanese bakery,” it was run for 44 years by Laya Joseph, who came to Waterville from Lebanon in the 1960s, decades after waves of Lebanese immigrants settled in Head of Falls, shaping the city in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When Joseph died, at 87, in January of last year, Nale set out looking for a restaurateur who could take over the space and preserve the Lebanese culinary tradition — his roots.
Clockwise from top left: arayas (beef-stuffed flatbread); spinach-and-feta pie; cilantro zhoug sauce; falafel wrap; chef-owners Jim Veilleux and Melissa Grant.
He found a pair of them in Jim Veilleux and Melissa Grant. With backgrounds in food and hospitality, the couple was looking to open a restaurant of their own and asked Nale about the space. They knew him through his daughter, who’d been the Veilleux family’s lawyer, but lots of folks know Nale, a retired district-court judge, former Waterville mayor, and pillar of the city’s Lebanese-American community.
That’s how Veilleux and Grant found themselves in Nale’s kitchen, learning the recipes that his immigrant mother (“fluent in Arabic and a marvelous cook”) prepared for her six kids — and for plenty of others. “Within that culture, when you would walk into someone’s home, you couldn’t leave without having something to eat, either there or to go,” Nale says. “Really, the relationships were built around food.”
Nale family recipes constitute the backbone of the menu at Mezza, the terrific little lunch joint Veilleux and Grant opened last summer. I tried a few on a recent visit: The kibbe, a loaf-like mixture of spiced ground beef and cracked wheat, was rich and savory — it’s the unofficial national dish of both Syria and Lebanon. The tabbouleh was tomato-forward, like Nale’s mom used to make it, with big chunks tossed into a lemony mix of bulgur, parsley, mint, and scallions. My favorite was the chicken and rice. On another menu, you might see it called hashweh, a complex, aromatic dish of basmati rice cooked in chicken broth, tossed with minced beef and chicken, and made fragrant with baharat spice and roasted pine nuts — staples of Lebanese cooking.
The spinach- and meat-filled pies, called fatayer, are perfect to grab-and-go. So are the wraps, which are among a few more broadly Mediterranean dishes that Veilleux and Grant brought to the menu. They’re filled with house-made falafel, chicken shawarma, or a nicely spiced lamb-and-beef kofta, folded into griddled tandoori bread with a schmear of labneh, the tart yogurt cheese. The bread is baked at Portland’s Sindbad Market, while lean beef comes from butchers at the century-old Joseph’s Market, just down the road, itself a landmark of Waterville’s old Head of Falls neighborhood.
“Working in the shadow of Laya’s reputation is intimidating,” Grant says, “but we want to keep drawing the community together with Lebanese food.” Neither she nor Veilleux have Lebanese heritage, but like Nale, they say they learned from their mothers and grandmothers about the power of food to bring people together — and the menu includes a sweet dedication to family matriarchs everywhere.
“We’ve had a lot of sittoos — that’s the Lebanese word for ‘grandmother’ — dropping in and suggesting how we should do things,” Veilleux says with a laugh. “All of our regulars, everybody’s got a take, and it’s great. And of course, the funny part is that everybody’s sittoo did it a little bit differently.”
