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Muddy Rudder Sets Sail for Brewer BREWER — The former Harborside Restaurant, a fixture of the Brewer waterfront for nearly two decades, will reopen as the Muddy Rudder this summer. Officials from the Maine Course Hospitality Group, with headquarters in Freeport, confirmed this week that they have acquired the Harborside property and plan to invest at least $1.5 million in the site. Established in 1980, the Harborside Restaurant has been vacant since it closed three years ago this month, after the former owner’s operating funds ran dry and he was unable to negotiate a new lease. According to President Jack Crawford, the company has chosen the former Harborside site, just off the Chamberlain Bridge on Brewer’s waterfront, as the home of its second Muddy Rudder restaurant. If all goes according to plan, the upscale eatery will be open by summer. The Brewer restaurant will be similar to the one in Yarmouth, located on coastal U.S. Route 1 overlooking the Cousins River, he said. It will offer essentially the same menu, but the decor will be localized to reflect the history and heritage of the Penobscot River. The menu features more than 100 entrees and appetizers, with an emphasis on fresh seafood, said Crawford and Peter Anastos, an owner and principal. Proposed is a 220-seat restaurant, about 50 of which will be in the lounge area. The patio will accommodate another 40 to 50 diners in warm weather. Eventually, the company would like to add a dock to accommodate boaters. The restaurant will require a staff of 75 to 100 full- and part-time employees and four or five salaried managers. Company representatives said much work must be done before the restaurant opens. The entire interior will be overhauled and the smaller building in the driveway will be demolished to open up the parking lot. The main driveway will be moved back from the intersection. The group’s decision to locate a Muddy Rudder in Brewer is a huge boost for the community’s waterfront redevelopment effort, noted Economic Development Director Drew Sachs. The property occupies a key location on the waterfront. It’s one of the first things seen by visitors crossing the Joshua Chamberlain Bridge. It also is located at the convergence of Wilson, North Main and South Main streets, three of the city’s primary travel routes. “Its quality and name recognition will draw a lot of new traffic to the area. It’s not just a restaurant, it’s a destination restaurant,” Sachs said, meaning that patrons would come from several miles out specifically to dine there. According the company’s Web site, the company’s holdings include Ground Round restaurants in Bangor, Auburn and Nashua, N.H., the Freeport Inn and Cafe, and the Comfort Suites Hotel, also in Freeport. The company also owns the Maine Square Mall in Bangor. The company has been interested in the Bangor area for some time but needed to find the ideal site. In the mid-1990s, the company scoped out the Bon Ton property in Brewer and then Bangor’s historic Waterworks building, but found development costs to be prohibitive. Sachs, later joined by waterfront consultants MBIA Bartram & Cochran, has been working to persuade the company to open a Muddy Rudder here after the restaurant was identified — by name — as the kind of business that community and members of the waterfront advisory panel wanted to one day see there. “I ordinarily wouldn’t want to be first,” Anastos said of opening a new site on a still-developing waterfront. “The pioneer takes the arrows in the back.” Over time, he said, it became apparent to the company that the waterfront plan was, in fact, going to be implemented. City staff also helped work out some of the project’s kinks. The fact that the city will soon begin work to halt erosion and build a riverside recreational trail helped seal the deal, officials said. This is a copyright article written by Dawn Gagnon of the NEWS Staff that appeared in the Bangor Daily News, Friday February 8, 2002. |
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The
City of Brewer