Transcription of Sam Hayward for the show Trailblazers, #101
Lisa: When you think of food in Maine, you think of Sam Hayward. You can’t really think of anyone else or at least you think of him first, how’s that? What a lot of people don’t know is that Sam Hayward has a very rich background including time spent as an R&B musician, and also has an interest in feeding hungry children in the State of Maine, which goes back many years. I first heard Sam speak down at the Kennebunkport Festival at a Tim Harrington dinner and he was very eloquent in his support of Share Our Strength, the organization which is ending childhood hunger. Thanks for coming in and having a conversation with me today.
Sam: Thanks, it’s great to be here.
Lisa: Sam, first, why Maine? I know that you’ve been a musician, you have roots in New Orleans and Tennessee and New York, but you’re here and you’ve been here for a while. You’ve made Maine your home; why is that the case?
Sam: Well, I fell in love with Maine pretty much as soon as I crossed the Kittery bridge for the first time back in the fall of 1970. My wife and I had just gotten married the day before and almost on a whim we came across from the Finger Lakes District of New York where we had both spent many formative years and came into Maine just kind of on a whim and fell in love with it right away. I think it was some years after that when I was working as a musician and not really enjoying it that one of my music students, of all people, who was a Cornell Hotel School student at the time, asked me in the winter of 1974 when Ithaca, New York, is probably not the most desirable place to live, if I’d like to chuck all this and come spend the summer on an island off the coast of Maine.
Jen and I jumped at it and spent three seasons working at the Shoals Marine Lab off Kittery and Portsmouth at the Isles of Shoals. I fell in love with the Gulf of Maine. I fell in love with the resources, the culture, of course, the landscape and the seascape; how can you not? We figured let’s make a life here, and went off to a couple of other cities to get a little professional experience rather than going to a culinary school. By the fall of 1977 we were in Maine and never looked back.
Lisa: In addition to living on an island, you’ve actually spent time in multiple locations throughout Maine. What was the progression?
Sam: Well, I’m surprised it’s of interest to anybody but me. The person who brought me out of New York City in 1977, Maurice Andre, owned a small French restaurant in south Paris, and when I had run into a little difficulty in the kitchen that I was working in in New York, I just felt I was a fish out of water. I was unprepared for much of what I saw there, socially speaking. He offered me a position as the chef at his French restaurant, which I did for a couple of years. He became ill and passed away.
As it seemed with a number of other Maine restaurant people, I took a position kind of in rotation at the Samoset Resort, which was in extremis at the time and worked there for about a year and then made my way down the coast to Brunswick and was employed at 22 Lincoln, and then subsequently purchased the restaurant and operated it for 10 years. That’s a little bit of a condensed version of how I made my way down to the coast from the mountains.
Lisa: Is that when you decided to make Bowdoinham your home?
Sam: Yeah. We were living in Owls Head and I was commuting down to Brunswick and that was stressful. We had our first child while we were living in Owls Head and we made a decision to try to find something in Brunswick. We couldn’t find anything we thought was affordable. Somebody contacted us from this little one-horse town that I didn’t really know much about called Bowdoinham eight or 10 miles away from my Brunswick restaurant. We moved in there and have expanded the house several times since then and live a great life.
It’s a beautiful place to live. Merrymeeting Bay is a, as you probably know, a unique ecosystem. Environmentally it’s gorgeous. It’s changing, it’s in transition, but it was a great place to raise three children, and they’re all grateful that they had the experience of the woods and the bay and canoeing on the bay and sleeping overnight on the islands and being with their friends. Just the freedom that they had there was … as children and teenagers was extraordinary and they all relish those memories.
Lisa: How has your experience in Maine and in various parts of Maine contributed to your interest in building restaurants like Fore Street?
Sam: Maybe we can get into that by talking about how local food found its way into not just my restaurant, but many others at about the same time. In the summer of 1981 a local farmer actually from Lisbon knocked on my back door at my Brunswick restaurant with a basket of produce, the like of which simply I’d never seen before in any of the locations that I’ve been cooking. There were leeks that were blanched, that means the white parts, two feet long; herbs of such vibrant green and incredible aroma, I was just shocked by it; a number of root vegetables; and greens that he was just sort of showing off to see if there was interest on my part in striking up a relationship. As floored as I was by it, there was no way I could say no.
That was really the entre of local food into my restaurant and into my consciousness. Up to that point, I think everybody in our craft around the country knew about the quality of Maine’s seafood; iconic cod and haddock, in particular, and, of course, lobster. Scallops were, again, at that point a very big fishery in the Gulf of Maine and the Banks, and they were everywhere. Less known was that there was some pretty good livestock being grown in Maine. Maine has a lot of pastureland that may be underutilized for growing livestock; we’re trying to change some of that.
We could get all of the fish that we wanted locally, almost none of the livestock products that we wanted locally. Frankly, there wasn’t a great connection with farms that produced produce; vegetables, fruits, herbs, and salads. We didn’t have that connection at that point. It was something very new to me. By the way, I think that was happening all through the state at just about the same time. Remember MOFGA started in 1973, I believe, I think that’s about right.
At the time, the organic farming movement and gardening movement in Maine was very small, but it was clearly growing, and we had the right cultural resources, we had the right land base for it, we had the right conditions for a hands-on form of agriculture, small-scale agriculture and farming. We had the land base because there were so many farms at that point that had been farmed intensively for generations and generations of farmers was ready to retire and sell out. There were inexpensive farms available to kids, if you will, from away.
That phenomenon that happened in the ’70s and ’80s that we now call the back to the land movement really took off. I would just happen to be there kind of in the midst of that, so I was able to in my little restaurant take advantage of it. It was happening other places as well.
Lisa: In the midst of all of this, this abundance of produce and seafood and even the rising abundance of livestock, what you were noticing, however, was that not everyone had access to food.
Sam: That’s true. There seemed to be a real inequality there that the communities that had farmers’ markets, those were pretty well utilized in the ’80s, at least from what I was conscious of. That’s grown, of course; now we have somewhere around a hundred farmers’ markets active in the State of Maine, many of them even in the wintertime. Didn’t really see that much evidence of that in the 1980s.
What was pretty clear to me living out in the south Paris area was that the availability of good, quality food, not just industrial food, but according to somebody’s definition of what’s good and healthfully produced food, that wasn’t that plentiful out there. There seemed to be a lot of inequality in the accessibility of good quality food. That continues now, sad to say.
If I can just bring up one small point, this is in spite of the fact that an outfit in Vermont called the Parade of the Heifers; have you heard about their report recently? I think that’s the name of the organization, recently ranked states according to the accessibility and availability of locally produced food. Naturally being a Vermont outfit, I’m not surprised they named Vermont as number 1, and number 2 nationwide was Maine. Number 3 was New Hampshire, and then there was everybody else. Lowest on that list were states like surprisingly Texas, Florida, and some other Gulf states, which really surprised me.
We’re already known as a state that promotes local food and tries to make local food available to everybody. I don’t think we’ve been completely successful yet, but we’re working toward it. Everybody’s working toward it.
Lisa: Well, I appreciate your efforts because I’ve been to the last three Taste of the Nations. I was at the one that was at Wolfe Neck Farm this past year and, in fact, I remember the rain, the thunder, the lightning, all of the difficulties actually that were associated with really putting on this great party. What I noticed was that people were genuinely happy to be there. They were very excited to be doing this work for this organization.
Sam: Well, the organization really did a great job of making sure that everybody was going to have a great time, so I’m … that was a group-wide effort to make sure that the party was a success. I remember one of the first ones that I did in the latest way was out on Cow Island and having to take the ferry out to Cow Island, there was no place … and by the way, the weather was terrible. It was raining and drizzling and foggy and actually quite clammy and cold, but they had done a great job setting up the party space.
We all have to off-load all of our food in coolers and big crates and boxes down literally a plank of wood from the bow of the ferry down onto the beach where we loaded it into golf carts and whatever else we could haul on and took it over to the dinner site. That was a pretty interesting evening.
We set up a kitchen that was part of … now who’s that … I’m trying to think of the name of the organization that was out there at the time; Ripple Effect, and so we set up the kitchen in their facility in a screened-in building, but when we ran the food out to the tent where people were seated, we had to run it under umbrellas. We had to have two or three people holding umbrellas and running food out to them. That was an interesting challenge, but it came off really well and people really had a great time.
We live in Maine, we know that there’s nothing that’s predictable about the weather and the conditions under which we operate, so you rise to the occasion.
Lisa: Why do you think that people are so passionate about Taste of the Nation, Share Our Strength, Ending Childhood Hunger; what is it that causes people to run across the field with dinner under an umbrella to serve to people?
Sam: It’s a good question; I’m not sure I can answer it fully, but I think that people that live in Maine tend to be incredibly generous and have a strong communitarian spirit. When there’s a need and we find out about the need, I think people really do rally to a cause. I think we also love being in beautiful places and that’s where these parties are generally presented. What’s better than a Maine summer? This is just the sweetest experience anybody can have, so to set up a place along the shore or on an off-shore island or even on a boat and have a great dinner and a great party, it really brings people together in an interesting way.
Add to that the importance of the cause and the fact that these are our communities’ children that we’re really trying to benefit, and it’s pretty irresistible.
Lisa: You began your career as a musician; you were in music school. Can you draw any sort of parallels and/or intersections with your life now?
Sam: That’s a little bit harder to do. When I was a working musician I could look down the line and imagine myself as a washed-up, third-rate failure. It wasn’t going the way I wanted and I was playing kinds of music that I really hadn’t planned on getting trapped in.
I read an article by David Brooks the other day where he was talking the changes in people’s lives as we age and their priorities and their motivations as they age and he talked about how retired people, if I can use this word on the air, demonstrate a certain horniness for service. I love the phrase, I thought it was great, and you quite often see that in retired people. My own father who in his last years became very passionate about delivering Meals on Wheels.
I think now that I’m kind of too old to be a lead line cook or even a strong prep cook at Fore Street, and I leave that to the more talented and more athletic, physically strong younger guys, that I would like to devote some of my time, some of the time that I save by not being slaving in the kitchen every day, to be of some use to the community at large. I think that’s been a motivating factor and why probably I get overwhelmed with some of the nonprofit work that I do, but it’s worth it. It’s worth it.
Lisa: What would you suggest to people who are listening as far as trying to support organizations that end childhood hunger? People who are not chefs and do not work at Fore Street, what could they do in their own lives to be supportive?
Sam: There are plenty of other things that people can do other than prepare food for an event like Share Our Strength. That organization does depend on volunteers to a tremendous extent, and I don’t mean just restaurant people. They can get a hold of Share Our Strength in Maine, Share Our Strength of Portland, and get involved on other levels. There are many other ways in which people can be involved in hunger issues from working with local schools to get gardens going so that students are introduced to the joys of raising food and the joys of eating the food that they produce, which is really important in developing their sensibilities and awareness of what constitutes good food.
People can grow some of their own in their own gardens. People can volunteer with other agencies in their communities. One of the things that I frequently find myself speaking about is the amount of food waste that Americans produce generally. One study that I read estimated that 40% of the food that people bring home, that consumers bring home, actually gets thrown out and not consumed, so building awareness about that.
In a cheap food, thirst society, we don’t value the food resources that we have to the extent that perhaps we should. Make the best possible use of every ounce of food that we purchase and bring home, let alone in restaurants where I see what comes back on plates and pay attention to that. Sometimes adjust my thinking about what it is that we’re serving according to that. There are a lot of ways in which people can get involved, from awareness to volunteering to efforts on their own within their own communities.
Lisa: Sam, how can people find out about Fore Street and the other restaurants that you are affiliated with?
Sam: Well, my partners operate Street and Company, Standard Baking, and a little seafood wholesaler called Upstream Trucking, and those are all on websites. They can go to those. Sadly, Fore Street’s website is 15 years out of date and really bad. It’s a constant embarrassment to me, but I haven’t been able to get around to actually fixing that thing, so I continue to work on it.
Lisa: Despite that, it doesn’t seem to ever be a problem to fill your restaurant, so somehow people find you.
Sam: Right, and maybe that’s an argument for why I shouldn’t spend a lot of money and effort on fixing a website that I think just doesn’t work. It would be great if we could offer some links to people so that people from away and people in Maine and Portland, could learn about some of the other efforts that are going on out there.
Portland has changed so much since I started working in Maine, and if I can just toss out an anecdote that I think demonstrates that, you know that there are a ton of new hotels that have either been just constructed or being renovated or are in the process of being built, which is a shock to me. I don’t understand who’s doing the marketing research to see how many hotel rooms can Portland support.
I was speaking with a developer the other day; I think it was actually at Taste of the Nation. I said, “What’s going on?” He said, “Well, you guys did this.” He was exaggerating, of course, but what he was saying was that the restaurant scene in Portland became so well-known and so well-respected around the country that additional tourists, additional visitors were coming to Maine ratcheting up demand for hotel rooms and the developers responded by building all these new rooms.
It’s incredible to think, and I don’t want to exaggerate that effect, but that a food culture, a local food culture could have a part in engendering that much economic growth in a small city like Portland; that’s astonishing to me.
Lisa: Sam, it’s been a privilege to have you today. I having also lived in Maine for, well, since about ’77 myself, I’ve seen all the changes, I’ve been to your restaurants many times, and I appreciate all the work you’re doing with Share Our Strength. I know the people who are listening can read about you as part of Maine Magazine’s 50 Mainers which is the July issue, and I think it’s a well-deserved honor that they’ve put you in the top 50 Mainers I believe to watch and know about in our state.
Sam: Thank you very much. It’s really been a pleasure to be here.