WILLOW CREEK — The boat shed at Thorne’s Bend, where the last vessel of the Thorne & Sons shipyard was launched in 1882, has found a new purpose.
Dean Moreau, 41, returned to Willow Creek this spring to open The Dry Dock, a farm-to-table restaurant in the renovated boat shed that has stood empty for more than a century. Sixteen years after he left town in a pickup truck loaded with kitchen knives and ambition, Moreau is back — and he brought everything he learned with him.
“I left because Willow Creek did not have a restaurant that would let me do what I wanted to do,” Moreau said, standing in the open kitchen of his new establishment. “I came back because I realized that the only way to have that restaurant was to build it myself.”
The Dry Dock is not a typical Maine small-town restaurant. The menu changes weekly based on what is available from local farms, including the Farr Family Farm and O’Flaherty’s Maple. Moreau sources his seafood directly from Stonington fishermen and his produce from a network of Aroostook County growers he cultivated during his Boston years.
“This is a destination restaurant,” Moreau said. “I am not trying to compete with the diner in Houlton. I am trying to give people a reason to drive to Willow Creek for dinner.”
The building itself is a significant restoration project. The Thorne & Sons boat shed, built in the 1840s and last used as a storage building in the 1920s, was renovated over the course of eighteen months. The original timber frame was preserved, the wide-board pine flooring was refinished, and the massive sliding door that once faced the river was restored to working order.
“Dean Moreau has done something remarkable,” Clara Winslow wrote in a six-page feature. “He has taken a building that represented the end of one era — the last ship launched, the last rope coiled, the last door closed — and turned it into the beginning of another. The Dry Dock is not just a restaurant. It is a statement that Willow Creek is ready to be discovered.”
Within its first year, The Dry Dock was written up in Down East magazine, drawing diners from as far away as Bangor and Augusta. The emergence of culinary tourism in Willow Creek had begun.