Grindstone Neck of Maine means pride in product

By Captain D


IT'S REFRESHING to talk with a man who takes immense pride in what he does. You walk away from a conversation with Carl Johnson with a sense that near perfect quality is not just obtainable, but also well worth whatever hardship one might encounter obtaining it.Although Johnson's company, Grindstone Neck of Maine, has been around for just a year-and-a-half, it has established itself as a premier supplier of fine smoked seafood.

This all got started five years ago when Johnson couldn't find smoked seafood that suited his purposes for his Fisherman's Inn Restaurant in Winter Harbor. He says that while there are good products in Maine, he needed seafood that was "chef oriented"—which meant slabs of fish that would hold together when sliced and shrink very little when cooked. He also wanted a decidedly smoky taste, and he wanted it affordable

When none of this was forthcoming, he called into service a stainless steel smoker he had designed 20 years earlier. He had to modify it a bit for cold-smoking seafood, but it didn't take him long to work out the kinks.

"It takes a real knack to get cold-smoking the way you want it," he points out. "Seafood has to be cooked at between 75 and 85 degrees to get the right mouth feel, the proper translucency." Johnson says he was taught the art of cold cooking by an old Mainer whose family had been smoking seafood for three generations.

Grindstone Neck buys fish from all over the world. This includes wild sockeye salmon from Alaska, organic salmon from Scotland, and New England farm-raised Atlantic salmon.

Johnson is in the business with Roger Billings, a long-time friend. "Rober is the brains, I am the brawn," he jokes. Among other things, Roger runs the shipping department.

Johnson says that from day one his company has refused to accept anything but the finest fish. In the early going he says he had to return several large shipments. Today, Johnson says, wholesalers have learned to appreciate his high standards, and seldom send anything other than top grade.

Johnson says he got very early encouragement when the State of Maine ordered 300 pounds of his product for Governor Baldacci's inauguration. Grindstone Neck had been in business just a few months, and had done no advertising. Somebody important in Augusta had tried the product and liked it a lot.

Today, Grindstone Neck smoked salmon is found mostly in health food stores, alternative market, and independent gourmet retailers along the Eastern seaboard. Johnson prefers placing it in just one shop per small community. He says that so far he has stuck to his game plan, and that soon he will begin moving inland. He says he has no interest in placing product in major supermarkets since this could lead to a loss of control.

Johnson says that potentially he could market nationally. At full capacity, his state-of-the-art smoking facility can process 15,000 pounds of fish weekly.

Although Grindstone Neck was profitable its first year, Johnson is hardly an overnight success. He has been an executive chef for 40 years, and has bought seafood for much of that time.

A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, he did formal training at the five-star rated Hotel Regency in New York City. For most of his career he worked in restaurants in the Northeastern United States for European chefs. For a decade, he was executive chef at the Bar Harbor Motor Inn. He has been named "Maine Chef of the Year" by the American Culinary Federation.

Four years ago, Johnson decided to strike out on his own, and bought the Fisherman's Inn. Immediately, he began using locally raised foods whenever possible. He says he wants eating at Fisherman's Inn to be a real Downeast dining experience.


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