Dana Street just won a James Beard Award. Pre-COVID, we supplied the lobster for every one of his restaurants. Felt like a win for the whole coastline.
Dana Street giving his acceptance speech at the James Beard Awards on Monday. PHOTO / SCREEN SHOT
On Monday night, in a ballroom in Chicago, Dana Street walked up to accept the James Beard Foundation's award for Outstanding Restaurateur. If you don't know the name, and have ever been to Portland, Maine, you've probably eaten his food anyway — Fore Street, Scales, Street & Co., Standard Baking Co. He's been quietly building Portland's reputation as a food town since 1989, one restaurant at a time, long before "Portland, Maine" and "destination dining" showed up in the same sentence in a national magazine.
I wasn't in that ballroom. But I felt something reading the news anyway.
Dana and I buy our fish from the same place. Same docks, same boats, same early-morning calls to see what came in. And pre-COVID, we supplied the lobster for all of his restaurants — every claw that hit a plate at Fore Street or Scales had probably come from us at 48 Union Wharf.
There's something about that I can't quite get over. Not because I think anyone owes Get Maine Lobster credit for someone else's award — Dana built what he built with three decades of obsessive, unglamorous work, and the Beard committee got it exactly right. But because it's a small, real reminder of how this whole industry actually works. It isn't really separate companies competing for attention. It's one ecosystem — the boats, the buyers, the dock guys who know your order before you say it, the restaurants, and the people like me trying to get that same fish to a kitchen table eight states away instead of a dining room two miles up the road. We're all pulling from the same water.
When someone in that ecosystem gets recognized at the highest level — and "Outstanding Restaurateur" is about as high as it gets — it's a win for everyone who touches the supply chain underneath it. It's proof that the stuff coming off our docks is good enough to build a James Beard-winning career on. That's not nothing. That's the whole pitch, actually, for why Maine seafood is worth caring about in the first place.
So: congratulations, Dana. Genuinely. Forty years from now, somebody is going to write the same kind of post about whoever's doing the next great thing with what comes off this coast, and they'll probably mention you the way I just did — as proof that it was possible.
In the meantime, I'll be down at the wharf at 5am, same as always, making sure the next batch is as good as the last one you bought.