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Sea Dog restaurant’s taps run dry

Pub's abrupt closing leaves community suprised and 60 unemployed

By Aaron Plourde

Posted on Nov. 11, 2002, at 12:00 a.m.

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Normally a busy business, the Sea Dog restaurant in downtown Bangor is now a boarded up and deserted building. The Sea Dog provided a relaxed atomosphere with live music for eight years.

The sudden closure of the Sea Dog Brewing Co. in Bangor last Tuesday surprised members of the community and left 60 people jobless.

A ruling by U.S. Bankruptcy Court decided not to lower the amount of money the Sea Dog owed to it’s primary creditor, the WWN group. Owner Joseph G. Wortley decided at that point to close.

The court decision on Tuesday was so sudden it left little time to notify employees. Former assistant general manager Mark St. Germain said that he was called in to work on his day off. Not an unusual request, he said, but when he saw Zabatta Peters, former general manager, he knew something was wrong. She told St. Germain the restaurant was to close at 1 p.m., and that it was final, the Sea Dog was finished.

St. Germain called Sea Dog employees and told them of the closure.

“I couldn’t answer all the questions people had because I was trying to organize my own thoughts,” St. Germain said.

Many people he called Tuesday have families or children on the way, he said. Approximately one-third of the staff were college students and roughly 40 percent had families to support, St. Germain said.

Dave Maynes, a former Sea Dog bartender, is a student at the University of Maine. He said his primary source of income had been from the restaurant and that it will be hard to find another job that pays well and fits his schedule.

“There’s not many jobs in the restaurant business right now,” Maynes said.

“I could just as easily end up waiting tables as easily as I could end up going back into the position I held before,” St. Germain said.

There will be even fewer jobs in the restaurant industry for the Bangor region after Pilot’s Grill closes at the end of December. News of the Sea Dog and Pilot’s Grill closures came only one day apart.

But St. Germain and Maynes both agree that they have it easier than some other former employees.

“I don’t have a family or kids to feed,” Maynes said. “I pretty much just have to look out for myself.”

The effects on college students who worked for the Sea Dog will still be significant, according to St. Germain. He said that most of them, like Maynes, depended on the money they made at the restaurant to support themselves.

What upsets these former employees the most is that the decision seemed to neglect the people who worked there. St. Germain said that many employees worked at the Sea Dog for five or six years because they wanted to be a part of something special. He said the restaurant was a place where people worked hard because they wanted to impress one another.

“The atmosphere at the Sea Dog allowed people not only to come to work, but to want to do well at work,” St. Germain said. “That’s what really gets me, just the kids who tried so hard to make a difference in their lives and a difference in the Sea Dog.”

The Sea Dog had operated for eight years and is in the center of Bangor’s waterfront restoration project.

“That building won’t be vacant for long,” St. Germain said.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 11th, 2002, 12:00 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.