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Blueberries and Talk, Talk, Talk at Jordan’s
Things don’t
change much at Jordan’s Restaurant. After all, Billy Keane has sat
in the same counter seat there since 1955. He also has told the same
story for years. But more about that later.
At 80 Cottage
St., nearly across from the town offices, Jordan’s is where you can
go for a cup of coffee and plenty of company at 5 a.m.
That’s Billy
Keane, left, in the same seat at Jordan’s Restaurant that he has
claimed every morning, 5 o’clock, since 1955. David Paine,
Jordan’s owner and chief cook since 1976, hears everything that
his customers talk about at the counter. |
The summer
tourists enjoy Jordan’s for its wild blueberry pancakes. At least,
that’s the pitch on the paper placemats.
But for the rest
of the year, when tourists aren’t coming off Cadillac Mountain after
seeing the sunrise, hungry for David Paine’s pancakes, Jordan’s is
the place to take the pulse of the town—according to the locals.
“Oh, we have a
great time here,” said Paine, Jordan’s owner since 1976 and the one
who works the griddle each morning, sometimes starting at 3 a.m. to
prepare for the first rush. “You hear a lot of sarcasm here.”
That’s because
most everyone who goes there enjoys the comfortable familiarity of
knowing most everyone else.
Paine’s own
family roots in Bar Harbor go back five generations. And he takes
the lead in knowing who sits at the counter and who likes to take a
booth. He says he knows most of the locals—the older ones, at least.
But so many newcomers to Bar Harbor in the last five or 10 years,
makes knowing absolutely everyone an impossible task.
Still, Paine,
56, can tell you that while Jack Perkins, the A&E television
personality who lives locally, comes in occasionally, decorating
doyen Martha Stewart—who also lives locally—sends over her crews for
food and coffee to go.
While it would
be something to talk about if Martha Stewart ever turned up herself,
that hasn’t happened yet. Nothing really exceptional ever happens
at Jordan’s, actually. The one thing that Paine can count on,
though, is just that a whole other bunch of regulars turn up at 9:30
a.m.
Their arrival
mid-morning is as consistent as the batter for Jordan’s
island-famous pancakes. On a busy day in summer, Paine goes through
as many as 30 gallons of the batter he makes from scratch.
Paine likens his
regular customers to a family—especially the early-rising ones.
“They talk about
anything from girlfriends to politics, whatever a family talks
about,” he said.
“I hear a lot of
talk about the town’s issues, and sometimes I speak up myself. But
usually I find that my customers are on so many sides of the issues,
I tend to shut up.
“Some people
talk about the newspaper, and other people talk about their health.”
Paine’s
counter-sitters also talk about that no-headed rooster. That is
actually the signature story around Jordan’s. It is particularly a
favorite story among the 5 a.m. folks, Billy Keane most of all.
“Poor Billy,”
Paine said. “He put up with our teasing for at least a dozen years,
because no one believed him.”
Keane can
actually fend for himself these days. He now carries in his wallet a
Denver Post clipping from 1999 about the rooster, who survived the
chopping block, brain stem intact, in 1945 in Fruita, Colo. (Fruita
now has a “headless rooster festival” in its honor, which is how the
Denver Post came to revive the story and give Keane some overdue
creedence among his buddies).
Keane actually
saw the rooster when it toured around (until it choked, dying on a
corn kernel), which is why he was so big on this story. And the fact
that Keane wasn’t making it up all those years still makes enduring
conversation—over Jordan’s coffee.
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