Sam Richman

 

2019 | Issue 103

Restaurants: Rockland, Maine

Artisanal Lowbrow

By Sara Jenkins

Sammy’s Deluxe
488 Main Street, Rockland, Maine
tel 207.466.9059, sammysdeluxe.com
open for dinner Tuesday through Saturday, 5 to 9 p.m.
average dinner $35 without wine

Sammy Richman, the owner, chef, and frequently the dishwasher at Sammy’s Deluxe, cooks some of the most honest food in Midcoast Maine. He opened two years ago in a space hastily exited by an anonymous Mexican restaurant, but he was already known to Midcoast diners from his work as chef at another restaurant that closed abruptly, through no fault of his own.

Now at Sammy’s Deluxe, he is reveling in his own, 100 percent chef-owned place where he can do exactly what pleases him. He’s strictly about food, specifically the food that he likes and wants to cook. You’ll find none of the softness that someone skilled in customer service or front-of-the-house operations might bring. Opening on a shoestring, as he did, means the decor of the former Mexican place hasn’t changed much, apart from a paint job, and it has forced Sammy to hammer out his food in a rudimentary kitchen that dictates what he can and cannot do. The ways he’s found to survive and even thrive are exciting, innovative, and honest.

Limited operating capital and a great love of foraging and fishing drive Sammy’s menu, along with a rigid respect for the seasons of local food. His foraging, much of which he does himself, is not just trendy or inspired by a love of the woods, but it’s carefully thrifty in an old-fashioned way that reminds me of Maine country folk, rounding out what they grow with what the land offers them. Foraging begins in late spring with ramps, fiddleheads, and knotweed, but throughout the year he might fish for whatever’s at the end of the dock, like mackerel and calamari, or pick periwinkles off the rocks at low tide. When mushrooms emerge, it can seem as if Sammy is right there beside them in the woods, ready to fill a basket as they come out of the earth. Black trumpets, chanterelles, chicken-of-the-woods, porcini, matsutake — he knows where they grow and tirelessly seeks them out.

Local, seasonal, foraged food drives a lot of cooking these days, and many of the world’s best restaurants craft menus around it, sometimes manipulated to a laughable extent, plated with tweezers on expensive china and served up for a small fortune. Sammy’s Deluxe is not that kind of restaurant and Sammy Richman is not that kind of chef, which is why I find his food so thrillingly honest. (I’m also a chef, which has something to do with it.) Like his colleagues at fancier restaurants, he mixes foraged finds and farmers’ market produce with good, local, humanely raised meats or sustainable seafood, but he feels equally free to offer a regular commercial Klondike bar as a dessert option. He makes a spectacular cheeseburger of grass-fed beef, served on a sesame roll that he buys at the local commercial bakery. Unlike high-end restaurants that spend time and resources on the look, the service, and the (ugh!) Instagramability of their dishes, Sammy spends his time in the woods or on the water, then makes it all work in his extremely limited kitchen, which consists of a Maytag home stove, a smoker box, and a jerry-rigged fryer.

He smokes and pickles a lot of his finds to preserve them and round out the lean winter months. Both pickled vegetables and smoked haddock “snacks” are perennial items on the menu. The rest of the small, ever-changing list relies on what’s in season from local suppliers. At the end of the summer, during the brief abundance of tomatoes and tomatillos, he serves skate wing in a soupy sauce of charred tomatillos that reflects his passion for Mexican food. In late winter, the skate is served up in a very French cream sauce, enriched with winter storage vegetables — golden turnips and purple daikon from a local farmer. When squid and mackerel are running, you can expect multiple versions on the menu. This isn’t fancy, worked-over food. It is simple food that roams the globe for inspiration untethered to a fixed rationale, tied only to Sammy’s creative mind.

If it’s Hanukkah, he’ll reach into his Jewish heritage to serve the crispiest, lightest latkes imaginable, with a side of fish that he smoked that afternoon. The smoker, which sits out behind the restaurant where no one will complain about the smell, is something he found (foraged, you could say) in a local thrift store. In season, wild mushrooms are all over his menu in normal and inventive dishes. An abundance of chicken-of-the-woods, for instance, led him to bread and fry them like buffalo wings and serve them with hot sauce and blue-cheese dressing.

Chicken and pork are the meats most often served, usually in the form of what chefs call an off cut. He’s more likely to braise chicken thighs than roast a whole bird, and he favors cheap parts of pig, shoulder or ribs, that braise well. Wedges of Little Gem lettuce are served with a dressing that’s called “Caesary Ranch,” as though he can’t make up his mind which he likes best and just ends up mixing the two to make one.

Desserts are simple, but often have a twist — watermelon granita jazzed up with jalapeño, or “Cheesecake with Some Concord Grape Stuff on it.” Beach-rose meringue with rose buttercream last June was a perfect ode to early summer. But you can also count on the aforementioned industrial ice cream sandwich.

The dining room is spare, decorated with his collection of cookbooks and the garish oilcloth table covers he inherited, which somehow fit. The tableware is an eclectic mash of flea market finds and leftovers, while a beat-up but functioning upright piano rounds out the decor, inspiring people to sit down randomly and belt out a song or two, especially if they’ve had too many pickled chanterelle Gibson cocktails.

Cocktails are a combination of straight-up classics made well and inventive options like that Gibson. The wine list is small, thoughtful, and curated with help from Joanna Spinks, a passionate lover of natural wines — not really my thing but I admire the strong point of view behind them, which is so in keeping with this distinctive restaurant.

Sammy delights in making artisanal lowbrow food, preparing a so-called “really good corn dog” with a special sausage he gets from Rosemont, a deli in Portland, dipped in polenta batter made with Maine-grown flint cornmeal. He makes blue-cheese salad dressing for crisp iceberg he buys from a local farmer. One beautiful dish in early June was a rhubarb-beet borscht, pale creamy pink and showered with wildflowers so it looked like it came from the fanciest restaurant.

Over all, there is a stubbornness and purity to Sammy Richman’s vision that I admire and am sometimes jealous of. I love the fact that he doesn’t compromise, that he doesn’t make food to please a certain demographic, that he’s determined to follow his path and make what he wants and believes in. If you can give up a little control and follow along with him, you’ll have a splendid time. I always do. ●

From issue 103
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