My name is Michael Rossney, and along with my wife, Michelle Levec, I am the co-owner
of LL Free Holies.
LL Free Holies is my and Michael's idea of what a California-style taqueria is in Maine.
It's tiny, it has an abbreviated menu, and we make really big burritos.
A typical day during the summer starts with 9 o'clock in the morning.
We come out here, have some coffee, and we start prepping and building our menu item
by item so that we're ready to open by 11 o'clock.
Michelle, as the chef, is largely in charge of the food and does most of the prep, along
with some help from our sous chef and some of the folks that work with us.
I think about 50% of our customers get the name.
We've got probably 25% that can't get past the fact that the Spanish is wrong.
And they're stuck on that because they speak Spanish.
And then another 25% that I don't think ever get it.
And then the 50% that come in and laugh and groan all at the same time.
My aunt made the name up many, many years ago and it was such a great idea that it sort
of defined what we were going to do when we decided to move here and open a restaurant.
We knew for two years before leaving California, we were going to do this.
And so my poor friends ate a lot of Mexican food.
And I can tell you that my friends living in Seattle that are now filmmakers were the
ones that were like, the lobster burrito, total go.
You gotta do it.
And it was really fun to make that meal and to sit down to it and be like, wow, do you
think people would buy it?
It's kind of weird.
Do you think it's weird?
Because we'd never seen one on a menu.
But we knew that that was the thing.
We wanted to use ingredients that were around here and we're like, well, what are the things
we can use?
We have relations with several local farms that we refer to as our partner farms.
We're buying, I like to say, half of our food that's produced on the peninsula these days.
I love working with local suppliers.
I love knowing that I can call my farmer the night before and say, hey, what are you picking
in the morning and know that I've got something special to use?
The folks at Horsepower Farm that are planting black beans for us.
So that's how we can be probably the only taqueria in North America that's selling locally
grown organic black beans that are grown by trained horses in the next town over.
It's really exciting when people come in and they just get it.
They get what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.
And they want to be here and enjoy the food and talk about it with me.
That's the best part of it.
Fourteen, twelve, twelve, your food's ready, six, six, five, six, five, six, five, six,
five, six, seven, eight, seven, eight, nine, ten.
Music
Whistle
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