Sous chef Megan Labbe, left, chef Jeb Charette, and line cook Halena Stone prepare meals in the open kitchen at River House in Damariscotta. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer Years ago, I taught a college course that made me question myself. The subject of the class isn’t important here; what matters is that I was hired to take over from a retiring professor who had created the course, and for 25 years, he had taught every single cohort that took it.
No pressure, or anything. My first time through, I took his syllabus, course notes, slides and every bit of advice he could give me, including a few nuggets I didn’t completely agree with. I even asked my predecessor to sit in on the first several classes.
“You’re doing great,” he told me at the end of the second week. “It’s just like I would have done it.” The following term, however, I was on my own.
No mentor, no safety net. I made a few big changes but did things generally the same way, and it was mostly a success, but the course seemed to have lost its coherence. My tweaks had improved some elements and broken others.
Suddenly, the class was neither my mentor’s, nor mine. It took yet another semester before I stopped trying to navigate by two North Stars, and I wrangled the class into submission. Well, not “the class,” but “my class.
” At Damariscotta’s charming River House, a hyperlocal, sustainability-focused restaurant at the waterfront base of the Two Villages bridge, head chef Jeb Charette finds .
