Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. Kelly McEvers: When Jason Williams was a kid in the ’80s, he had a favorite TV show. It wasn’t a cartoon. It was more like a documentary show.
Like the educational kind. Jason Williams: I was obsessed with the show Great Chefs Great Cities, which was a program back on in the early, late ’80s, probably, where they’d go to different restaurant kitchens and make a dish.
Kelly: Jason grew up on the East Coast in a small town. It was nice, but it was not the ideal place to learn to become a chef. Jason: I grew up in New Hampshire and didn’t have a lot of access to crazy ingredients. Kelly: The closest bigger town was across the border in Maine.
But when he went there as a kid, he wasn’t going for the food. Jason: So I’d come to Portland growing up as a kid. We used to come over here and skateboard and, you know, all that fun stuff and just kind of be in the city. Kelly: Back then, the big city of Portland, Maine wasn’t necessarily known for its food scene.
It was not featured on Great Chefs Great Cities. But these days, Maine’s reputation in the food world is different. And Jason Williams, now Chef Jason Williams, is a big part of that. Jason: What drew me to Maine was just the accessibility we have, like the ocean right here, incredible cold water seafood.
We’re two miles from the ocean and we’re on a 120-acre farm. The farmers are all approachable, the fishermen are all good people, you know, there’s so much abundance. I’m Kelly McEvers, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. This episode was produced in partnership with the Maine Office of Tourism.
It’s Maine week on the show, so every day we are introducing you to someone from that great state: people who live and work in Maine and who fuel their creativity with its rugged beauty. Today it’s all about eating well at Chef Jason’s hyper-local farm-to-table restaurant, The Well, in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. And yeah, you probably have been to a farm-to-table restaurant before, but this one really is different. The food that was probably picked hours before the meal is growing right near where people sit down to dinner.
Same with the flowers. Chef Jason really believes in what he’s doing. And it shows. This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places.
Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. Kelly: Okay, so let’s go back to how Jason got started. After he fell in love with Great Chefs Great Cities, he went to culinary school. He left New England to work in restaurants around the country, classy kitchens, high-end resorts, a renowned seafood restaurant on Maui, a winery in Napa Valley.
But eventually he started to miss the Northeast. Jason: Thought about raising a family, and New England’s kind of the perfect place to raise kids, so we came here for vacation and just kind of fell back in love with it.
Kelly: It was about two decades ago, and Portland, Maine had changed after Jason left. He got a job working at a local restaurant, and one day he was driving around to farmers markets looking for ingredients when he found a special place.
Jason: I just happened to drive up this road, and I had just a really cool feeling when I rounded the corner, and I’m like, wait a second, this is a farm? Wait a second, I could get all my shopping done right here? So I just pulled in. It is a 120-acre farm, about three miles from the ocean.
A produce farm, it’s fourth generation. Kelly: It’s called Jordan’s Farm, run by the Jordan family. It’s a few miles south of Portland in the town of Cape Elizabeth, which conveniently is also where Jason was living. So he started getting produce from Jordan’s Farm and bringing it back to the restaurant where he was working.
Jason: They allowed me to kind of come out back and hand select produce and stuff like that, which is huge in my world. Kelly: Eventually, after a few years of shopping at the farm … Jason: I just pitched them the idea. I drew up a picture of a flatbed trailer and was like, what if we just did a food trailer here and I can work in your off hours? If it doesn’t work, we’ll wheel away and uh throw some grass seed down and it’ll be like it never happened.
Kelly: What Jason was proposing was to literally build a kitchen on the back of a flatbed trailer. That way, if the project was not a success, he would just tow it away and the Jordans could get back to business as usual. Jason was nervous. He’d never run a restaurant before, but the farm … Jason: They went for it.
They were like, great idea, and they were so supportive and just really let me make this happen. Kelly: Jason got the blessing of the chef where he was working and went out on his own, building out that kitchen trailer at Jordan’s farm. Jason: Busted out the graph paper. I was like, okay, well, you know, small dimensions, what can we actually do for equipment?
Just a leap of faith, obviously. I tried to do it on a tight budget. I didn’t come out swinging with a huge space, a state-of-the-art kitchen. I just kind of built what was necessary for me to make nice food.
Kelly: He didn’t know how to run a restaurant. He did know how to make nice food. Every day, he would go into Jordan’s farm, see what looked best, and design a couple of dishes around what they had. He called his project The Well, as in eating well, also as in a watering hole, a place where people gather.
And since he got to invent the menu every morning, he could get really specific. Jason: So you can really play on the weather, what’s fresh, just the mood. Everything changes. You know, Maine can be 80 degrees one day and 50 degrees the next day and rainy.
If it’s cold, I might throw a soup on. I can just adapt to what’s around me. Kelly: He started slow and simple. Jason: We didn’t have a dishwasher.
I started off with just kind of compostable plates. I was just doing like a chalkboard menu with a couple items, and I had a suggested donation box here where people would just kind of come in, drop cash, and I really like people were kind of shocked by it, you know, it wasn’t something that you saw a lot, you know, 15 years ago, really, especially in this town.
Kelly: Jason knew that was a gamble. The restaurant business is hard, and this was a restaurant on a farm stand. People were coming there to get produce to take home and cook for themselves. They weren’t necessarily looking to spend money on prepared food.
Turns out, Jason was wrong. Jason: So people would start lining up an hour before I even opened, and then all of a sudden I would be out of food in like two hours, just ripping through 70 people.
We’d put a little chalkboard menu up at the top of the thing that said “The Well is dry,” and “try again the next day.” Kelly: At that point, Jason knew he had to expand. He built out a bigger kitchen in a real building, no wheels underneath. He hired staff, started adding menu items, not just a few things written in chalk. He added more formal seating.
Before it had been picnic tables, now there would be gazebos for private dining. He started sourcing stuff from other local producers, butchers, and growers. But the concept was the same: Whatever looked best that morning, that’s what he would use. Jason: And then I started introducing, probably like year seven or something, I started introducing a tasting menu, an option, just like, okay, if you want to, if you trust me, we can do a five-course tasting menu and see what happens.
Kelly: What happened was people did trust him. The tasting menu became a huge part of his business. And now that’s what The Well does. Every day he’s open, it’s five fresh courses chosen that morning.
Jason: A veggie course, a fish course, a grain pasta course, and then kind of your fourth course protein and a dessert. It’s really nice because I can just grab totes and walk up to the farm stand, which is like 50 yards away, and hand select whatever I need for the night.
I can just adapt to what’s around me, the weather, and just new stuff that looks incredible up there. The seasons are so dramatic here in Maine. You know, things happen so quick. It’s really nice to be able to just capture that and be able to use those things that they’re hiding and put them right into play.
Kelly: A wood-grilled lamb loin with local corn and housemade barbecue sauce. A homemade brioche donut and vanilla ice cream with peaches picked that morning. Jason: I’m not throwing a bunch of weird ingredients at you, but everything’s got to be seasoned well, cooked, executed well. So I’m really focused on those details, those small things.
The fundamentals: seasoning, balance, flow of a whole tasting menu. People get so pigeonholed into what they’re comfortable ordering or eating, and maybe they’ll find out that they actually do like carrots or zucchini now, and it’s not how they remembered it from their grandmother’s mushy peas or whatever.
I get inspired by like I see these farmers working crazy, so it’s nice. I really want to do my best to kind of make them proud. I want them to know that their product is first and foremost, and that I’m doing it justice. Kelly: The Well at Jordan’s Farm has become one of the Portland area’s most popular restaurants.
These days, there are a lot of great restaurants in Maine. In recent years, the state’s food scene has grown. And just like at the well, it brings together so much of what makes Maine Maine. The independence, the seasonality, the creativity.
And now The Well has been part of that community for 15 years. Jason: It’s really refreshing here that things are still chef-owned, smaller scale, a lot of integrity. I feel super proud of it now, 15 years later, you know, it’s been a labor of love. I worked so—I’ve never worked so hard at anything in my life, really.
But it’s been—it feels good now, you know. People are celebrating years and years and years of anniversaries, of birthdays. Yeah, it feels great. I mean, what more can you ask for?
In the hospitality business, you know, to feel that love back. It’s really nice. Kelly: Who knows? If there’s a reboot of Great Chefs Great Cities, Jason and the other restaurants that have sprung up in and around Portland, Maine might make the cut this time.
Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. This episode was produced by Katie Thornton. Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Sirius XM Podcasts. The people who make our show include Dylan Thuras, Doug Baldinger, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Amanda McGowan, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming.
Our theme music is by Sam Tyndall.
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