We Can Still Hang Out Outside!

ABOVE: Around the firepit at Oxbow Beer Garden, in Oxford, where the kitchen’s still turning out pizzas and calzones and the dining room is outside.

By Brian Kevin
Slideshow photos by Cait Bourgault

Back in the spring, when some of us still hoped this whole pandemic thing might peter out in a few months, Fluvial Brewing co-owner Lisa Graham was already surfing the web for garden domes and bubble tents, envisioning a winter when customers at her Harrison nanobrewery couldn’t crowd the taproom she opened with her husband, Shaun, in 2019. 

“Pretty early on, we knew COVID wasn’t going away and that winter was going to be a challenge,” she says. On Facebook Marketplace, she found some used geodesic domes she liked, perfect for Fluvial’s beer garden, each with room for a half-dozen people to crush pints outside-ish while more or less protected from the elements. Now, they’re Fluvial’s reservable “beer domes,” where drinkers gather every Thursday through Sunday, enjoying space heaters and views of the Oxford Hills and ducking out here and there to loiter by the firepits.

“Bring your bubble to our bubble, is the idea,” says Graham, who realized during Fluvial’s first winter that customers would often rather stand out by the fire than sit in the taproom. “I think Mainers are used to our winters and being outdoors, and people just enjoy them.” 

Plenty of people in Maine hospitality circles are hoping she’s right. As of this writing, indoor dining is still permitted under state guidelines, with strict capacity and distancing limits, but with COVID cases surging, many diners are justifiably hesitant to pull up to a table indoors. In November, meanwhile, the state indefinitely pushed back a planned reopening date for indoor seated service at bars and tasting rooms, still prohibited when this magazine went to press. So business owners are left seeking creative outdoor solutions — and hoping Mainers will lean into their rugged north-country heritage.

They are at Marshall Wharf Brewing Company, says co-owner Dann Waldron. When he and his wife, Kathleen Dunckel, reopened the Belfast institution this summer (previous owners had closed it in 2019), they added an outdoor bar to their riverside beer garden. “Then, around September, we started getting a lot of inquiries from regulars: ‘Oh man, are you going to keep this going in the winter?’” Waldron says. “At first I was like, how the hell are we going to do that? But it just became a no-brainer. We had to at least try.”

Waldron and Dunckel invested in a fleet of propane-powered heat lamps and built a massive chimenea out of an old propane tank. They covered the beer garden with a corrugated plastic roof and added extra wind blocks with open space above and below, for air circulation. “You’re still outside, but you’re under cover,” Waldron says. “You might be cold out there if you’re away from a heat source, but you’re not going to be blasted by wind or moisture.”

Waldron had to wait out a backorder for heat lamps — a consequence of high demand. Ian Malin, owner of West End Portland bistro Little Giant, anticipated the rush and ordered 10 electric ones last summer. Now, they’re heating a handsome new covered courtyard with socially distanced seating for 30. At the barbecue/Tex-Mex restaurant Terlingua — recently reopened in a new location on Portland’s Washington Avenue, a block from its former spot — owners Pliny Reynolds and Melanie Kratovil put in a covered deck with wall-hanging space heaters hooked up to natural-gas lines, overlooking an outdoor picnic area with firepit. At Chaval, chefs Ilma Lopez and Damian Sansonetti’s West End brasserie, electric infrared heaters crank out BTUs over patio tables, where guests sit with loaner (or purchased) blankets from Portland’s Evangeline Linens, nursing hot toddies served in thermoses. Four heated mini-greenhouses are scattered around the patio, each enclosing tables that seat up to four. As of now, the Portland City Council has permitted outdoor dining only through January 4, but some restaurateurs are hoping for an extension.

“Our whole goal is just to get people out and feeling like this is normal,” Lopez says. “Yeah, it’s cold, but we can still have this experience together.”

Particularly for taprooms, the experience of eating and drinking outside often dovetails with more active outdoor rec. At Fluvial, the Grahams’ 40-acre property includes an extensive trail system for skiing, snowshoeing, and fat-tire biking. At Oxbow Beer Garden, in Oxford, which serves wood-fired pizza along with suds, the backyard picnic tables, lounge chairs, and firepits overlook a free, groomed, 5-mile trail network. Funky Bow Beer Company, in Lyman, put in a 3,200-square-foot skating rink this winter, along with a takeout window for food and drink. At Odd Alewives Farm Brewery, in Waldoboro, skiers and snowmobilers come off the adjacent snowmobile trail for pizza and beer around one of six new reservable firepits. 

“A dose of winter sunshine and fresh air is good for the soul,” says John Bonney, who co-owns Portland’s Foundation Brewing Company, where infrared heat lamps and tables with built-in firepits warm the patio. “Other cultures get it. A great example is Quebec City’s Winter Carnival, where they’re literally having a party on the ice.”

“There’s a woman I know from Norway who tells me they have a full-blown film festival outside in winter,” says Sarah Pike, co-owner of Waldoboro’s Tops’l Farm glampground and event space. “Barrel fires and firepits everywhere, just this embrace of it.”

Pike takes a page from the Swiss with Tops’l’s winter picnics, ticketed lunches and dinners featuring grilled veggies, oysters, cured meats, and Swiss raclette cheese. In non-COVID times, guests take apéritifs around the campfire, then gather in a riverside yurt. This year, they’ll melt raclette over private firepits or grills, then dine at tables scattered in the pasture or a large open barn. This Swiss motif continues across the Medomak River, where Allison Lakin, of Waldoboro’s East Forty Farm, put a woodstove in a snug screen house and offers private fondue dinners featuring her Lakin’s Gorges cheeses. (She does guided cheese tastings too, during which she bundles up, stands outside, and narrates through the screen, so as not to invade visitors’ pods.)

Some restaurants are taking a playful approach. At the Boathouse Restaurant, in Kennebunkport, the riverfront deck is dotted with “gingerbread houses,” wooden private-dining shacks done up with faux-candy decorations, warmed with space heaters, and seating four to six. Kennebunk’s Batson River Brewing & Distilling offers reservations for heated, custom-made ice-fishing shanties, complete with tip-ups outside the door, so diners can raise a flag to signal waitstaff.

“For us, we want to make sure that guests coming out to support us are going to have the same service and ambiance they would otherwise,” managing partner Debbie Lennon says. “It’s important to still represent your brand when you do these things.”

“It’s hard for me to go to all my favorite places and see plexiglass and things that seem very hospital-like,” agrees Allison Stevens, who owns the Thirsty Pig sausage emporium in Portland’s Old Port. She put up four rustic wood-framed booths, seats lined with heat-reflecting space blankets, in an al fresco lot behind the restaurant. They’re unheated, but Stevens suspects this won’t deter her regulars, who once built snow bleachers out back to watch the Super Bowl outside in February.

“Why not? We live in Maine, you know?” Stevens says. “I think we can just put on our thickest socks and our big boots and get out there, because what else are you going to do? This might be the hardest time in our lives, but if we don’t keep doing fun and cool things for people, then what are we even doing?

Read more tips about COVID-friendly winter outdoor hangs! 

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