Courtesy / Dennett's Wharf
A wharf-side restaurant in Castine has reopened in the hands of a new owner who moved to the seaside town in 2020 from Brooklyn, N.Y.
Updated: June 28, 2022
After five-year hiatus, waterfront Castine restaurant reopens with NY talent
Courtesy / Dennett's Wharf
From left, cooks Taylor Hester and Camila Rinaldi worked for Max Katzenberg, at his Brooklyn, N.Y., restaurant Olmsted and relocated to Castine to work for Katzenberg’s new venture, a revival of Dennett’s Wharf.
Dennett's Wharf restaurant in Castine, which had been been closed since 2017, has reopened in the hands of a new owner who moved from Brooklyn, N.Y.
Max Katzenberg is the co-founder of two Brooklyn restaurants. In Castine, he’s brought aboard a pair of fellow New Yorkers — Ingrid Paronich, as general manager, and Taylor Hester, chef.
Together, they bought and restored Dennett’s Wharf restaurant, and reopened it earlier this month.
Dennett’s Wharf, at 15 Sea St., was originally Dennett’s Boatyard. It has operated as a restaurant for over 25 years and has gone through several changes of ownership in recent years.
“What was started by the Dennett Brothers and carried on by the Brouillard family for decades can be felt all over the Blue Hill peninsula,” Katzenberg said in a news release.
Pandemic move to Maine
A native of New York, Katzenberg has worked as general manager of several Michelin-rated dining establishments in Manhattan. Then, from 2016 to 2020, he co-owned and operated Olmsted and Maison Yaki, both in Brooklyn.
He learned about the Stonington and Deer Isle area and their seafood industry through colleagues and friends in the restaurant industry and began visiting the area.
“We fell in love with it,” he said of the small fishing village.
At the start of the pandemic, his wife was pregnant and they were living in Brooklyn. That April, they moved to a rental in Deer Isle, then bought the property. In the middle of 2021, Katzenberg and a partner bought Harbor Café in Stonington and began renovations.
In January, the partners were in the middle of renovations when Katzenberg was approached by Dan Leader, a Castine resident and founder of a Kingston, N.Y., bakery called Bread Alone.
Leader and Katzenberg had met at a local farmstand and Leader was familiar with Katzenberg’s Harbor Café project.
“He let me know that Castine was maybe not going to have full-service restaurant this summer,” Katzenberg recalled. “Dennett’s wouldn’t be reopening and other legacy businesses were not going to reopen. He said, ‘I know you’re busy, but maybe you can come look at this space.’”
Community institution
Dennett’s Wharf closed in 2016 after the death of the restaurant’s owner, Paul Brouillard.
In 2017, the Brouillard family sold the property to Kernan (Kip) Oberting. The restaurant reopened and closed twice since then under two different names. Oberting retains ownership of the real estate; Katzenberg bought the business.
“I wasn’t familiar with Dennett’s, but it was a major community institution,” said Katzenberg. “I went to look at it and was totally enamored with the property.”
But he didn’t think he could take on the project. Harbor Café was due to open in March and the Katzenberg family had a second baby on the way.
He offered to think about the project. The next day, he was talking with Paronich, a good friend who was managing a Brooklyn wine and spirit store that was one of Katzenberg’s projects.
“Out of the blue, she said, ‘Max, I’d love to live in Maine in the summer,’” he said. “I said, ‘I just looked at this place. If you want to look at it, come up.’ So she came up and felt the same way I did.”
Paronich is a professional restaurant consultant with over 20 years of industry experience. She worked for a decade in New York restaurants such as Gramercy Tavern and Le Bernardin, then completed a master’s degree in Italian gastronomy and tourism in Parma, Italy. Returning to the U.S., she pivoted to operations and management, first opening restaurants in Fairfield County, Conn., and then as director of operations for a hospitality group in the Hamptons.
Chef signs on
The two decided to see if they could find a chef.
They prepared an executive chef consulting pitch to send to friends in the industry. It was mid-February and the idea was to see if they could open the Castine restaurant by June. Chefs were generally busy with their full-time jobs, Katzenberg said, but they figured they might be able to find one who would have time to help train kitchen staff.
Katzenberg reached out to Hester, a friend and employee from Olmsted.
“I said, ‘Taylor, do you know anyone interested in doing something like this?’ He said, ‘I’d come and take a look at it.’ He came up and felt the same way we did. This area just has this way. So he signed on.”
Renovations
By April 1, renovations were complete at Harbor Café, which opened earlier this year.
So the crew went to work on Dennett’s Wharf.
“And we were off to the races with the renovations,” says Katzenberg.
The project included workflow improvements, refurbishing a deck and building a new service area.
The restaurant covers 6,000 square feet built out over the water. The eatery has an open deck that seats 50 to 70 and a covered deck that seats the same number. An indoor dining room features a 70-foot-long bar and seats about another 30. Across from the bar there’s an outdoor bar that’s popular with the locals and seats 15 to 20 people.
Community backing
Katzenberg credited the local community for banding together to help with the project, including providing housing and working capital.
“Once Taylor, Ingrid and I were committed to moving up here and we fleshed out a concept based on the original Dennett’s ethos, a small group of community members came together,” he said. “We had a few different levels of participation.”
For example, community members who made financial contributions received dining accounts.
The idea for community backing came about due to the alignment of the community’s expressed desire to see the restaurant reopen with the three partners’ willingness to make that happen, he said.
“There was really no time to be bashful,” he said. “It was so fast. ‘This is what we want to do; this is what we need.’”
The goal for this year is to stay open until Indigenous People’s Day in October.
“There’s some interest in year-round dining options,” he added.
The partners retained Cassie Vogel, a manager who has been with the restaurant through years of iterations. She has been instrumental in finding local employees, said Katzenberg. The goal is to hire 40 employees for the season.
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