New book and TV series brings Lost Kitchen owner’s intimate moments to light
Approximately each and every obstacle that has been thrown Erin French’s way about the study course of her life has finished up getting an opportunity for her — even if those people curveballs ended up, when they had been occurring, unbelievably emotionally and even bodily painful.
That journey from compact city child in Waldo County to operator and chef of The Dropped Kitchen area, her nationally renowned cafe in the city of Flexibility, just a few miles down the road from in which she grew up, is instructed in vibrant, intimate element in her new book, “Finding Independence: A Cook’s Tale,” out Tuesday by using Celadon Textbooks.
“I hope this e-book is one thing that will lift up folks growing up in rural Maine,” mentioned French, now 40. “It can really feel like an uphill fight to do points that you sense proud of, when you’re residing in a compact town. But I am here to show the place that anything at all is probable, even if you feel it is hopeless and you are helpless.”
Foodstuff fans know her for The Lost Kitchen, the place she and her all-female team generate very simple but exact and wonderful dishes from hyper-regional substances, housed in a 19th-century repurposed gristmill, and wherever they only take reservations via mailed-in postcards.
They also may well know that prior to the Liberty place opened in 2014, French ran a non-public supper club held in several areas in Belfast in 2010 and 2011, which at some point turned into a brief-lived cafe, also referred to as The Shed Kitchen, which operated in downtown Belfast between 2011 and 2013.
But those people people today who journey to rural Waldo County for a coveted food at the 40-seat cafe almost certainly don’t know that in advance of she was a James Beard-nominated chef, she was a one mother having difficulties with scientific despair and an addiction to prescription drugs, out of work and broke after divorcing an abusive ex-husband.

While French hadn’t always tried out to conceal the painful specifics of her life from any person, by 2019, she began to sense the urge to put her tale on paper. The ensuing e-book is a memoir about foodstuff, really like, resilience and smaller-town dwelling. Although it is French’s daily life that is the center of the tale, her scene companion is additional normally than not the cities she’s lived in and loved in Maine: Belfast, Knox, Independence, Blue Hill and so on.
Composing the book ended up currently being a therapeutic work for her, French claimed.
“I required to purge this story, in a perception,” she explained. “I’ve been hoping to fail to remember, alternatively of forgive. And I preferred to share it, way too, simply because I believe these are items that several persons can link with, whether it’s heartbreak, addiction, reduction, concern. There had been situations in my everyday living when I couldn’t see the light at the end. But I would not be right here if it wasn’t for all of people times.”
As she was ending the reserve in 2020, two other existence-altering factors occurred: she began work on a Television docuseries for the future Magnolia Community and for the Discovery+ streaming services, and a world wide pandemic closed her restaurant and tens of millions of other folks all in excess of the entire world.
The Television set collection, “The Misplaced Kitchen,” now obtainable to view in its entirety on Discovery+, finished up getting a various switch from what it was initially slated to be. In its place, it confirmed how French and her staff coped with a calendar year when indoor dining was not feasible, and the ways in which they adapted to the pandemic.
To that close, French and organization started offering an on line farmers market, wherever patrons can buy foods and decide on it up at the cafe. When the weather warmed, they also supplied out of doors lunches on the weekends, and started constructing on-web-site cabins to accommodate long term guests who want to shell out the evening right after experiencing their meal.

“We just experienced to choose it working day by day. Probably the major lesson I uncovered from all of this is to allow go, and be Ok with whatever transpires,” French explained. “We have reinvented ourselves a dozen moments. I in some cases feel like I’m on my ninth daily life as a cat.”
For now, French said she does not system to make any bulletins as to when the restaurant will reopen for standard dining until she and her employees really feel fully relaxed carrying out so.
“I am not putting any stress on returning to indoor dining,” she mentioned. “We’ll be again when the minute feels appropriate. Between now and then, we’re just going to concentration on what we can do outside. In a perception, it normally takes me back to my beginnings, with the supper golf equipment.”
“Finding Freedom” is out there now, wherever publications are offered. A digital reserve launch celebration is set for 7 p.m. Tuesday which will element a dialogue in between French and Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, as perfectly as food items writer Lidey Heuck. Tickets for the launch party are $28, and incorporate a signed copy of the book. They are available by way of the web site for Print: A Bookstore in Portland.