About
The room, the fire, and the two people who opened it.
Tern & Table opened on Water Street in the spring of 2017. Forty-eight seats, one wood fire, and a menu short enough to be rewritten on a Tuesday afternoon.
The kitchen
One fire, and nearly everything off it
The fire is most of the kitchen. There is a flat top for eggs on a Sunday and one induction ring for sauces; the rest — fish, birds, bread, vegetables, the steak — happens on coals, under a grill Maren had built to fit the hearth that was already here.
It is slower than a range and it forgives nothing. It is also the reason a plate tastes the way it does here and not somewhere else.
The pass is open to the room. Sit at the bar and you can watch the whole thing, and you are allowed to ask what that is.
Who cooks
Two of us signed the lease in 2017, and both of us are still here most nights.
Maren Holloway
Chef, and half the lease
Maren runs the fire and writes the menu, usually on the afternoon it is served. She cooked in Boston and then in Portland for eleven years, the last four of them on wood, and came back up the coast to do it in a room she can see all of from the pass.
Ask her what came in that morning and you will get the name of the boat as well as the name of the fish.
Dev Achterberg
Front of house, and the other half
Dev takes the bookings, pours the wine and decides who sits where, which is a harder job than it sounds in a room with forty-eight chairs and one door.
He kept the book at a much larger restaurant for six years and wanted a smaller one. He is the person who calls you back about a table, and the person who remembers that you do not eat shellfish.
- 48
- seats, and that is the whole room
- 2017
- the spring we opened on Water Street
- 6
- nights a week, Tuesday to Sunday
- 1
- fire, which cooks nearly all of it
What people say
We came for an anniversary and got put at the bar because I had booked the wrong Saturday. Best mistake I have made. You watch the fire the whole evening and somebody hands you a taste of whatever they have just opened.
The chowder is the one thing that never comes off, and I have made my mother drive up from Quincy for it twice. Everything else on that menu I have had exactly once, which I think is the point of the place.
Nine of us at the back table for my father's birthday. One menu, carried out on platters, and nobody had to decide anything all evening. Dev called me twice beforehand about what two of us could not eat.