Applecroft
Chef-Driven. Shaped by Season.
Shane and Maria founded Applecroft to cook the way they live: outside, with fire, in conversation with the season. They work closely with farmers and fisheries through the Mid-Coast, building menus around what’s available now within a 40-mile radius.
The menu shifts. The fire changes. The light at dusk in September is not the same as the light in June.
Their cuisine is rooted in the belief that restraint and wildness can coexist. That elegance doesn’t require polish. That the best meals happen when you start paying attention to heat, to time, to the way the smoke moves through meat, to the moment something is ready.
On their land in Waldoboro, they’re shaping a working farm and event space. Not a venue. A place. Somewhere, where people can gather the way Chef Maria and Chef Shane do, around fire, under open sky, and with food that opens your heart and mind.
Applecroft is not a catering company in the traditional sense. It is a chef-driven practice built around fire, food, soil, and soul.
Chef Shane
Chef Maria
Shane cooks with fire and builds with his hands. Before Applecroft, he ran Harvest Moon and Maine Kebab, ventures that taught him how to feed people, move through a kitchen, and how to hold a vision without losing sight of the plate in front of him.
Now he’s clearing land in Waldoboro. Designing structures that feel native to the soil they rise from. Developing the farm slowly and intentionally, guided by weather, labor, and time. He approaches food the same way he approaches design, sketching plates in his notebook, painting dishes in watercolor before they ever reach the fire, building each flame as though it carries its own mood and meaning.
His work is visual, yet elemental. For him, food and place are not separate things, and everything he makes, on the plate or on the land, is shaped by that belief.
Maria’s path has moved through kitchens in New Orleans, Portland, and across Maine, working alongside her father, cooking in private homes, and leading catering operations that taught her how to hold a room, move with precision, and make something beautiful without compromising.
But her deepest knowledge comes from the land. She knows how to break down an animal with care and skill. How to read soil and weather. How to tend what’s wild and what’s cultivated with the same steady hand. She doesn’t cook to perform. She cooks from knowing where food comes from, and from carrying that knowledge all the way through. There is a quiet fierceness in the way she works, rooted in capability, respect, responsibility, and sustainability. Her food is grounded, and her cuisine is shaped by years spent outside, hands in dirt, fire, and muscle, understanding food not as an idea, but as a full arc.
From seed to plate. From pasture to flame.