By Brian Kevin
Photos by Hannah Hoggatt
From our October 2024 issue
Before you get cute and ask: no, there is no candlestick maker at downtown Bangor’s The Butcher The Baker. Nor does the name refer neatly to co-owners Carl Birmingham and Brittany LeVasseur — chef and general manager, respectively — who opened the place last year, in the snug Hammond Street space that formerly housed The Fiddlehead Restaurant.
Instead, the moniker is a general nod to Birmingham and LeVasseur’s from-scratch ethos, which the pair honed as private chefs-for-hire during the pandemic and over a year running a food truck of the same name around greater Bangor. You’ll find no candlesticks at all at The Butcher The Baker, since the restaurant doesn’t carry on the elegant fine-dining tradition that made The Fiddlehead something of a Bangor institution during its 12-year run. Instead, it’s a spunky little gastropub, with a menu of eclectic comfort foods, a miles-long cocktail list full of cheekily named drinks, and photos and paintings of shaggy highland cattle staring inexplicably out of their frames — a fun and tasty addition to the city’s dining scene.
To hear LeVasseur tell it, her partner and fiancé, chef Carl, has an omnivorous mind and a tendency to flit from one culinary fascination to another. On a recent date-night visit, the entrées on the seasonally shifting menu ran quite a gamut, from a panko-coated schnitzel to a coconut curry to St. Louis–style ribs with hush puppies to a Caribbean seared red snapper served with sweet-potato latkes. Call it a bit scattered; call it ’00s-style “fusion”; call it, as Birmingham and LeVasseur do, New American. The pair isn’t stressing if it makes the restaurant a little hard to pin down.
“I feel like ‘New American’ really means, you know, the big jelly-bean bowl of the whole world that you can pick out of,” Birmingham says. “We don’t want to be put into a box that says, well, you can’t have a pu pu platter on your menu because you’re not Oriental Jade. We can, and we do.”
But The Butcher The Baker can play classic notes too, and my wife and I put in orders that showed off both sides of the restaurant’s impulses. Elsa’s cocktail, the Spicy Mother-in-Law, was a spiked lemonade with pomegranate liqueur and cucumber-and-jalapeño–infused tequila, served in a hefty tiki mug. Mine was as basic and ideal a Sazerac — rye, absinthe, sugar, and bitters — as you could hope to order. Our tuna-poke appetizer was riotously smothered in diced cucumber and avocado and togarashi-spiced aioli, served with a pile of crispy fried wontons. A wild-mushroom tart, meanwhile, was an unadorned puff pastry filled with local oyster mushrooms and creamy chèvre and Gruyère — simple, rich, and a real winner.
Elsa’s entrée looked like a party: Cajun grilled shrimp with garlic-cheddar grits, a chorizo ragu, and an elote-like succotash of charred corn, cotija cheese, zucchini, and cilantro. It hit tangy, savory, and sweet, and there was enough of it to supply a midnight snack and lunch the next day. I, on the other hand, powered all the way through my perfectly medium-rare 12-ounce strip steak, unembellished but for a too-generous dollop of herbed butter (which might be right up another diner’s alley).
Birmingham and LeVasseur have updated the room only a bit: The grand backbar will be familiar to The Fiddlehead patrons, lining the exposed brick of the 1834 building, a former furniture factory. But the once-white ceiling is now a matte black and faux foliage hangs off some new Edison lamps. Wall-mounted speakers, on our visit, pumped ’90s alternative. It was a bit intimidating, LeVasseur says, changing things up from a destination restaurant Bangor knew well. But The Fiddlehead co-owner Laura Peppard gave the incoming restaurateurs some solid advice. “She told us, ‘This is your rodeo — let it be your own thing,’” LeVasseur says. “And we’ve taken that to heart.”
