{"id":10436,"date":"2015-02-13T11:22:16","date_gmt":"2015-02-13T16:22:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=10436"},"modified":"2019-03-29T08:21:47","modified_gmt":"2019-03-29T12:21:47","slug":"the-50-foot-journey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/the-50-foot-journey\/","title":{"rendered":"The 50-Foot Journey"},"content":{"rendered":"

February\/March 2015 | view this story as a .pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

That\u2019s how close chef Natalie DiBenedetto<\/b>\u2013who owns the late Fran Peabody\u2019s mansard on Walker Street\u2013is to the new gourmet takeout venue she\u2019ll unveil\u00a0 in May behind 722 Congress Street\u2013which she also owns.<\/h3>\n

By Claire Z. Cramer<\/p>\n

\"50-Foot-Journey\"<\/a>“I\u2019ve always cooked,\u201d says Natalie DiBenedetto, sipping green tea at Portland\u2019s Yordprom Coffee Shop.<\/p>\n

By May she plans to be cooking at Figgy\u2019s, her forthcoming take-out restaurant, now under construction in back of Yordprom\u2019s building, which she owns. Figgy\u2019s will offer skillet-fried chicken and classic sides like mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese, plus seasonal healthy vegetable choices and a daily dinner salad. Her other signature item will be Korean fried chicken wings.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve got the skillet-fried chicken down. It\u2019s just like I grew up with in Missouri\u2013salt, pepper, dredged in flour, that\u2019s it. It\u2019s taken me a while to get the Korean deep-fried wings as super-crispy as I want, though. Nobody<\/em> wants any more chicken for supper at my house.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her house is\u2013literally\u2013just out back on Walker Street, overlooking the job site now turning into Figgy\u2019s. She has reduced her daily commute to walking next door. DiBenedetto purchased the pert mansard Victorian known to Portlanders as the Frannie Peabody House when she moved here in 2010.<\/p>\n

How do you get from the Show Me state to 21st-century Portland\u2019s red-hot food scene? You turn up the burners.<\/p>\n

\u201cI cooked all through college\u201d\u2013she has a degree in Speech Communications from the University of Missouri\u2013\u201cand by the time I\u2019d graduated I knew I wanted to do it professionally.\u201d<\/p>\n

So it was off to the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, New York, from which she graduated in 1998. Afterward, she went to work farther upstate in Woodstock. \u201cI worked with a man named Jim Jennings, who was a Texan; he\u2019d worked with Melissa Kelly. She was still in the Hudson Valley back then, and that\u2019s how he got started, and later how I got started, in locally sourced everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Melissa Kelly is the two-time James Beard Best Chef Northeast award-winner who adopted Maine in 2000 when she opened Primo restaurant in Rockland.<\/p>\n

I\u00a0 met my husband John at CIA,\u201d says DiBenedetto. \u201cWe were in the same class. In 2000, we opened a little restaurant called Mina in Red Hook. Very small, maybe 30 seats, a few barstools. If you remember Bresca, it was that sort of restaurant. I cooked, and John was up front. He put together a fantastic wine selection. We got mentions in Gourmet<\/em>, Wine Spectator<\/em>, Travel & Leisure<\/em>. The New York Times<\/em> gave us a mention. There are a lot of really rich people with second homes in the Hudson Valley. One time, Annie Leibovitz came in with Susan Sontag. Red Hook didn\u2019t look like much back then, but if you drove around you\u2019d see these amazing houses. I went back to Red Hook and Rhinebeck for a visit last fall. People were shopping at the farmers\u2019 market in high heels with Herm\u00e8s bags!<\/p>\n

\u201cWe ran Mina for five years. In those days, being locally sourced was a lot of work. There was only one place to get my chickens, one place with cows. I\u2019d have to drive around to one guy for my potatoes and another for my squash blossoms. It was exhausting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mina closed in 2005. The DiBenedettos moved on to Milan [locally pronounced \u2018my<\/em>-lin\u2019], another tiny upstate town. \u201cWe took over a little diner that had been there forever called Another Roadside Attraction, and we renamed it Another Fork in the Road. The menu was \u2018locally sourced diner<\/em>,\u2019 we made everything from scratch. It was mobbed on weekends. We were a diner, but Philip Seymour Hoffman ate there.\u201d<\/p>\n

By then the pair lived on a farm with acreage, garden, and critters\u2013dogs, cats, chickens\u2013the whole homestead. Their son Basil was born.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen my husband died.\u201d Natalie\u2019s voice is quiet.<\/p>\n

Life as it had been was overturned. Then she rallied and made the decision to find a fresh start.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was time to downsize. I sold the farm.\u201d She laughs. \u201cTo one of those fancy city people! And I turned the diner over to my business partner.\u201d<\/p>\n

How did this lead to the next leg of her\u00a0 journey, 282 miles to Portland?<\/p>\n

My husband and I had visited Portland back around \u201998 or \u201999. We ate at Fore Street and at a place called Gabriel\u2019s [on Middle Street, now the site of East Ender]. We thought it was kind of a cool city. So in the summer of 2009, after everything had hit the fan, I drove up here. Arlin [Smith] had just started working at Hugo\u2019s. Thanks to his recommendations, I had a great dinner, a great stay, and I started considering the possibility of living here. I started bringing my son up for visits and checking out real estate. I got really<\/em> lucky on finding my house.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy mother took one look inside and she said, \u2018You\u2019re going to have get rid of all your furniture.\u2019 I have all modern stuff. But you know what? It all works.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the four years since she moved into the Frannie Peabody House, Natalie DiBenedetto, who is now 40, has set about becoming a Portlander. She\u2019s restored the perennial garden in her yard. \u201cI love this house, but my only regret is there\u2019s too much shade for vegetables.\u201d She acquired 722 Congress Street with Yordprom Coffee Shop as her tenant and go-to java joint. Her son Basil (\u201cHe\u2019s named for Basil Fawlty, really!\u201d) is now a third-grader at Waynflete.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe do this thing where we hit the road and adopt a town. We\u2019ve done Camden, Rockland. Ellsworth turned out to be surprisingly fun. Damariscotta\u2013what a great place. I could live there. We spent a week last summer in Skowhegan. But I think if I drag my son up Bradbury Mountain one more time\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Like countless West-Enders, she\u2019s become provincial about dining out. \u201cThere are so many great places right in the neighborhood! We love Pai Men, Boda, Congress Bar, Ruski\u2019s. We go to Empire. But you know where we go all the time? Hot Suppa\u2013I love that place! Basil always wants the burger, and I\u2019ll have oysters while he eats. Dollar oysters!<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the first things I did when I started in on my place was talk to those guys [Moses and Alec Sabina, owners of Hot Suppa] and to Leslie [Oster] at Aurora, to reassure them I\u2019m absolutely not competing with them. My food\u2019s not going to be fancy. No fridge cases, no prepared and packaged. You\u2019ll just walk up to the counter and there\u2019ll be the soup of the day to ladle, side dishes scooped from the pots, chicken. That\u2019s it.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s going to be a lot of work. Opening a restaurant is work. We\u2019ll see how it goes. One of the things I liked about having a diner was the line. I can work the line for hours. I hate prep, ordering. But set up a row of tickets in front of me and I can go all day.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

February\/March 2015
\nNatalie DiBenedetto unveils a new gourmet takeout venue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10441,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8,120],"tags":[90,337,336,339,338],"class_list":["post-10436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-the-women-of-maine","tag-februarymarch-2015","tag-figgys","tag-natalie-dibenedetto","tag-restaurant","tag-skillet-fried-chicken"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10436"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12568,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10436\/revisions\/12568"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}