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It was the only Chinese restaurant in a town of 15,000 where the main attraction was the Corn Palace — a shrine to local agriculture with outsize murals of Elvis Presley and Willie Nelson made entirely of corn husks. The Cunningham family, which has owned and operated the restaurant for the past 40 years, announced in early August on its Facebook page that it was putting the property up for sale. In a statement, the family announced a recent flood and lingering impacts of the coronavirus pandemic had taken their toll. The updated proposal had not received final land-use approval from the Kittery Planning Board by the time Green & Company and the Cunningham family called off the purchase and sale deal. The 20-slip marina was later swapped out for a new lobster wharf after Green & Company’s review of town code, which calls for the site to maintain a working waterfront component, Green confirmed. On Monday, Cunningham noted that damage from the January storms has led to the flooring and carpeting being torn up and replaced.
Historic Maine lobster restaurant, damaged by storm, available for $4.9m - Undercurrent News
Historic Maine lobster restaurant, damaged by storm, available for $4.9m.
Posted: Tue, 05 Mar 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]
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No long-term timeline was available for the remainder of the approval process or when the restaurant would close, but the Cunningham family, in its statement, made clear that while it was selling the physical property, it retained the rights to the business itself. Green & Company Real Estate and the Cunningham family have mutually agreed to terminate a purchase and sale agreement regarding the Water Street property, according to both parties. The restaurant is currently working to reopen in a limited capacity, though questions remain for what the future holds for Warren’s. Warren’s has come a long way from that tiny, six-stool lobster stand in the days of 25-cent per pound lobster. Located on the southern tip of the Maine coast, Warren’s Lobster House features the area’s largest selection of lobster entrees along with great seafood, steak and chicken specialties served in a comfortable and casual family atmosphere.
“Good prices – good food”
We have made a commitment to serve only the highest quality foods in the most appetizing and professional manner possible. The restaurant was flooded in both the January 2024 storms and we are assessing the damage. “I don’t think my mom will ever retire,” she says, but when she does, Lau and her husband, Denby, who trained in the kitchen under Hua, are ready to take over the family business. Over the next two years, she and her mother would slowly make their way to California, by way of a refugee camp in Thailand, then through the Philippine Refugee Processing Center and later to Dallas before landing in L.A.’s Chinatown, where Lam began looking for work. Like many Cambodian refugees who came to this region before her, she found it in a doughnut shop.
Warren's plans limited reopening while property is for sale
All entrees on our extensive menu include the “Seacoast’s Finest Salad Bar” featuring over sixty items. She was so good at selling Hua’s recipes that the two opened their own restaurant, borrowing money from friends to start the original Newport Seafood in Santa Ana, not far from the Newport fish market where they shopped for seafood every morning. It was there in Orange County that Hua perfected Newport’s signature dishes — the house special lobster, clams with basil and bo luc lac, cubes of filet mignon dredged in enough black pepper to merit a red chile icon next to its name on Newport’s menu. Green & Company filed its original plan to demolish all structures on the Water Street site last summer, though it originally called for eight condominium units and a 20-slip marina to replace them. That rendition of the proposal was first reviewed by the town Planning Board in August. Green & Company has ended its bid to potentially redevelop the site with eight condominium units and a new 1,200-square-foot lobster pound, which would have occurred after the demolition of the 350-seat waterfront restaurant, the Chrissy D. Lobster Company and a duplex residence on the lot.
Wendy Lam spent several of her teenage years in a Cambodian work camp under Pol Pot’s regime before reaching a refugee camp in Thailand and later the U.S. The restaurant is located on Water Street, on the northern bank of the Piscataqua River in Kittery. The restaurant’s sign has been a perennial landmark to drivers on Route 1 coming over the Memorial Bridge from Portsmouth, N.H. “It was significantly more impactful than the one (over) a year ago,” Cunningham said of the January 2024 storm damage. Constructed on top of wooden pilings just feet above the mighty waters of the Piscataqua River on U.S.
Warren's Lobster House property for sale as first deal is called off: Here's what is next
If the plan had moved forward, however, only four units would have been allowed in accordance with town code, according to Green & Company. We have been able to clean and re-assemble the gift shop area into a cozy nook that we believe you will enjoy while we continue to figure out ‘next steps,’” a Warren's social media post reads. Between two and three feet of water stood inside Warren’s following the Jan. 13 storm that hit the region, which followed a Jan. 10 storm that had already brought several inches of water into the establishment, Cunningham said. Both Lam and Hua were born in Cambodia to Chiu Chow families with roots in China’s Guangdong province. Hua remembers eating prawns prepared similar to the lobsters at Newport as a boy in Phnom Penh, where he lived until 1970, when he and his family fled to Hong Kong to escape an escalating civil war.
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The decision was made in late February, according to Warren’s co-owner Scott Cunningham. Warren’s has been closed since early January, following flooding damage sustained during back-to-back storms that caused severe damage in coastal communities in Maine and New Hampshire. As many businesses expand, they often lose touch with the quality and small, personal touches that made them special.
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When Vietnamese soldiers liberated the camps in 1979, a medical unit realized Lam could speak the language and recruited her as a translator. She became the unit’s cook too; in exchange, the soldiers helped her find her mother, whom she reconnected with months later in a Vietnamese border town. Thirty years ago, Wendy Lam’s boss told her she would never make it as a waitress. So when she opened her first outpost of Newport Seafood a decade later in the San Gabriel Valley, she called her old boss and invited him to dinner.
The commercial fishing fleet at The Lobster House dock offloads and ships millions of pounds of seafood annually and supplies much of the fresh seafood served here. During most months, casual dockside dining is an incomparable way to enjoy both the food and extraordinary waterfront view. Watch the commercial fleet at work while enjoying freshly cooked seafood from the Take-Out, which is available to be eaten dockside or taken home, or from The Raw Bar which has both an indoor bar & dining room and its own individual menu. KITTERY, Maine — The Warren’s Lobster House waterfront restaurant property has been listed for sale at $4.9 million by its longtime owners, as a prior deal for a local developer to purchase, demolish and redevelop the site has fallen through.
Free valet parking service is provided “in season” and other special times throughout the year. Tables seat eight, 10 and 12 — it’s a place where people gather to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, but Lam never stops to commemorate the restaurant’s own milestones. From there, Lam followed food service opportunities from Inglewood and Pasadena to small towns in Nebraska and South Dakota, where she honed her hospitality skills serving chow mein and egg rolls to a mostly white clientele at a Long John Silver’s-turned China Palace.
It was a 10-day walk that marked the beginning of a brutal genocide, during which nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s population would succumb to starvation and violence under Pol Pot’s Maoist regime. Cunningham owns the restaurant with his wife, Claudia Cunningham, and their children, Brad Cunningham and Colleen MacDonald. The family has owned the business outright since 2006, though they had co-owned it with a partner starting in 1984. Last weekend, on March 2, the Cunningham family updated customers on the restaurant’s reopening efforts in a message on social media. “The entire seacoast from New Hampshire all the way up to downeast Maine was impacted and there was just so much severe damage that we’re still dealing with whether it’s going to be declared a (federal emergency) disaster,” he said. The Cunningham family listed the property for sale through Pack Maynard Real Estate last week in an advertisement that touts its potential for development.
Lam is perched on the edge of her chair, telling this story from one of the private dining nooks at Newport Seafood on Las Tunas Boulevard in San Gabriel, one of three outposts in a family-run seafood mini-chain. She is 57, but has the energy of a teenager, and you get the sense she might leap into action at any minute, like a coiled spring. Down the hall are floor-to-ceiling tanks swimming with enormous crustaceans — lobsters and king crabs weighing as much as 10 pounds — that star in the restaurant’s Chinese-Vietnamese-Thai-Cambodian menu. The iconic Warren’s Lobster House’s days in Kittery may be numbered following a sale announced last month, but the restaurant’s owners assured customers they are exploring other options, such as re-opening the longtime local eatery in another location.
The impact of the consecutive storms on the business and the coastline as a whole was “catastrophic,” he added. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, the dining room was nearly full when Lam’s daughter, Sophia Lau, arrived with her newborn. Newport Tan Cang still exists in Orange County, but Lam and Hua sold the restaurant in 1996 and relocated to a strip mall in San Gabriel. When the lines got too long, they expanded, first to Rowland Heights and more recently to Beverly Hills, where they opened a third location on the same block as Lawry’s the Prime Rib. The lines never subsided in San Gabriel, so they relocated to an old Marie Callender’s down the street, renovating the roomy diner with décor from Guangdong. “His family was rich,” says Lam, “but my family, no.” So she and her mother remained in Phnom Penh, where in April 1975 they were among the millions of residents ousted from their homes by the Khmer Rouge and marched at gunpoint into the jungle.
One of the most unique features of The Lobster House is the 130 foot-long authentic Grand Banks sailing vessel, the Schooner American which is moored dockside. The Schooner is an outdoor cocktail lounge offering a full bar, luncheon menu and Lobster House specialty appetizers during the evening. A destination in itself, the Schooner has an unrivaled waterfront ambiance and is the perfect spot to enjoy a cocktail before dinner while watching yachts pass by.
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