Recipe for Success | Bresca & the Honeybee

When a renowned Maine chef opened lakeside snack bar Bresca & the Honeybee, her admirers followed.

The oldest structure on Maine’s Sabbathday Lake is a 600-square-foot clapboard shack painted butter yellow. It sits on a piece of land first used by the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing—better known as the Shakers—for a private swimming hole in 1783, the same year that Great Britain conceded American independence. Beyond the shack—past the picnic tables and pool noodles, across the basin of the lake—you’ll find only modest houses with spare lawns. There are no mammoth waterfront estates, or billboards, or speedboats upending the peace. And it’s here, in the old yellow shack, that one of the state’s most lauded chefs “blew up my career,” as she puts it, to run a snack bar.