Susan Ferro, an artist, has cooked for ten years in the restaurant she started in the midst of culinary wilderness. Her customers will be grateful when the doors reopen in the spring.

"I thought I was going to shape the food I served," she said with a laugh. "My customers have shaped my business." She serves up some entrées, for instance, with a cream sauce people dote on.

Her paintings are part of the décor in the pretty, small rooms of her building on a hill on the way into Machias, and the artfully arranged meals could put you in mind of their colors and design. But if that doesn't, the sandwich menu served at lunch will, with its choice of the Impressionist (sliced chicken with pesto mayonnaise on a baguette, $6.50) or the Surrealist (grilled and undoubtedly dripping Swiss cheese, with fresh garlic and dill butter on two slices of the anadama).

You could order a lemon square ($1.50) or an oatmeal chocolate-chip cookie for dessert, likely portraits of what the regular lunch crowd rightfully admires from the kitchen.
Ferro gets her bread shipped up from Boston but makes a few special loaves herself. The likely problem of her baker's business being bought and the bread losing its quality troubles her as she strives to serve the best quality food she can both afford and find. She gets her haddock from Campobello, serving it one week sautéed with bread crumbs and a mix of summer squashes, red peppers, and shallots, along with a tomato salad and homemade tartar sauce.

Her roast turkey dinner comes with a piece of homemade sausage made by Joe Parisi, one of the many people she has found to work with, a local version of the slow food movement that's improving the dining Downeast. Farms provide some vegetables, like those in the caponata, made with eggplant, tomato, onions, and olives, that accompanies her thin breaded veal chop ($24), a perfect version as tender as you can wish for. Kris Pinot Grigio ($5 a glass, $15.99 a bottle) make a perfect drink with it.

She and her customers have long agreed about the gingerbread ($6), with its sliding topping of really fresh whipped cream. The tiramisu, chocolate gâteau, and cheesecake (all $6) are sometimes part of the dessert menu. And the coffee is just as strong as she likes it, even if that's something some customers might object to.