Blaze Restaurant Wood Fired Cuisine

The Webster Treat block had been empty since 2010 — a six-bay Italianate brick building on West Market Square, built in 1869, when Bangor called itself the lumber capital of the world. Ervin Architecture spent close to six months stripping a century of patchwork out of it. Bathrooms, kitchen, basement, and wiring were replaced outright. The original timber framing, the peach and apricot load-bearing brick, and the historic tin ceilings stayed.

The restaurant was then built out of the town it sits in. Maine Heritage Timber recovered centuries-old logs from the bottom of Quakish Lake, a Penobscot tributary, and they became the blond paneling behind the dining room and the live-edge bar. Wide pine floors, face-nailed with antique cut nails. Two brick ovens laid up by mason Pat Manley from brick salvaged out of a Holden farmhouse fireplace, their chimney routed through the stairway so waste heat warms the floor above. The main oven runs near 800 degrees and drives most of the menu, burning close to a cord of red oak a week.

The lighting was drawn in-house. Branch and birch motifs went from hand sketches into CAD and onto the CNC mill at the University of Maine’s Material Science Lab, cut as stencils and backlit against a red panel behind the bar — shimmering, confetti-like leaves thrown across the room. Custom fabrication is usually the first thing to disappear from a restaurant budget. At Blaze it’s what people photograph.