Brother Donald Paul Martel, a Franciscan friar, chef and brewer who for decades served eastern Maine as both a culinary and religious figure, died this week at age 65.
For nearly 25 years, Mainers knew and loved the food and beer made by Martel, who through the eateries he ran with his fellow friar, Brother Kenneth Leo Soucy, brought community, humor, spiritual guidance and heaping helpings of heartfelt homemade food to Bangor, and then, for the last five years, Bucksport.
After years spent cooking in restaurants across Maine, Martel felt a spiritual calling, and joined the Franciscan Brothers of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, an Episcopalian subset. In the 1990s, brothers Don and Ken moved from Lynn, Massachusetts, where they both worked at Holy Angels School, to Maine, where they founded a friary atop a hill in Bucksport and, in 1999, opened Friar’s Bakehouse on Central Street in Bangor.
In an era where downtown Bangor was sleepy and run-down, Friar’s was a culinary bright spot. Martel’s steaming pots of hearty soups and stews, massive sandwiches served on home-baked bread and pastry case stuffed with fist-sized muffins and famous whoopie pies became local lunchtime legend. Martel, a classically trained chef, was the force behind it all, always in his plain brown robes and sandals.
The brothers blasted liturgical music over the stereo. It was cash only. Martel was quick with a joke, and enforced a no cell phone policy with a stern finger-wag — though always with a twinkle in his eye. Lawyers and professionals ate alongside homeless people. All people, regardless of background, were welcome.
“It was a sanctuary. It was almost subversively peaceful. You also saw the humanity of it all. People who didn’t have anything went in and were fed for free,” said Eric Mihan, owner of Bangor Wine & Cheese Company, who helped Martel launch his craft brewery in 2013. “And at the back of the room there was this machine of a man, making and baking and just being there for people. He exuded that kind of purpose in everything he did.”
After 19 years in Bangor, Martel and Soucy had grown tired of the commute from Bucksport, and had also become equally interested in brewing beer, spurred on by Maine’s quickly growing craft brewing scene. After launching Friar’s Brewhouse, a “nano-brewery,” in 2013, the pair decided to move the entire operation to Bucksport, opening Friar’s Brewhouse Tap Room on Main Street in 2018.
Beer, bread and brotherhood — for Martel, they all came from the same glorious tradition of monastic life and ministry.
“It’s a great monastic custom. There’s centuries of brewing behind us,” Brother Don said in 2013. “And if you drink two liters of nine percent beer, you will have conversations with the saints as well. They’ll show right up in your living room and sit down and chat with you.”
In Bucksport, Martel expanded his beer offerings, and also began to offer a dinner menu alongside bread and pastries, from their cozy dining room overlooking Fort Knox and the Penobscot Narrows Bridge. It kept going even through a major health scare in 2019, when Martel had emergency quadruple bypass surgery, closing the business for two months. According to the Facebook message announcing Martel’s death, the restaurant is now closed for good.
Always a man with a curious palate, Martel wasn’t afraid to experiment, adding things like an unorthodox but delicious take on a Vietnamese banh mi sandwich to the menu. When Brother Stephen arrived from South Korea to join the friary, he and Martel began to make kimchi. When he traveled, he delighted in sampling the cuisine of the places he visited.
But it was French Canadian food that was always nearest and dearest to his heart. Martel was born in Biddeford, to a large family of French Canadian heritage. On the family farm, food was everything — sustenance, work, love. The Quebecois and Acadian dishes he grew up eating were staples on his menus, from ragout boulettes to cretons to tourtiere, the beloved pork pie.
For Martel, however, food was just another way to minister to people, religious or otherwise.
“You would be amazed at how much ministry goes on here,” he told Downeast Magazine in 2019, of his restaurant. “And when I say ministry, I don’t necessarily mean in the religious sense. Sometimes it’s just human contact.”