Lost Kitchen of Freedom, Maine, Booked a Year Ahead 

A restaurant named Lost Kitchen in Freedom, Maine is booked a year ahead. The Wall Street Journal’s Moira Hodgson explains (abridged):

Every year thousands of people enter a lottery hoping for a table at the Lost Kitchen, a 40-seat restaurant in the remote town of Freedom, Maine, population 719. It’s booked up a year in advance, the customers chosen by lottery each spring from around 20,000 hopefuls who mail in postcards requesting a table.

The restaurant’s chef and owner, Erin French, never went to culinary school. Her food isn’t fancy or cutting edge: no froths, foams, gold flecks or dainty garnishes arranged with tweezers. She writes that she likes dishes reminiscent of childhood, “humble as new potatoes, fresh from the ground on a hot early-July day, creamy and sweet, their skins so soft and tender that all you wanted was a pinch of good crusty salt and a pat of butter to melt over the top of them.”

The author of a bestselling cookbook (“The Lost Kitchen: Recipes and a Good Life Found in Freedom, Maine”), Ms. French has now published a memoir, “Finding Freedom: A Cook’s Story Remaking a Life From Scratch.” In the cover photograph she’s hiding her face behind a giant bouquet of red and yellow poppies. It’s a pretty image at first glance, but there’s also something unsettling about it. With reason, as it happens, for the story Ms. French has to tell is dramatic.

By Moira Hodgson