Cape Porpoise has never been a big place. It is a fishing harbor with a handful of streets, a lighthouse offshore, and for most of its history one obvious spot for a lobster dinner. Over the past decade that changed, but not the way small coastal villages usually change. No wave of outside investors bought up the waterfront. No single restaurant group franchised its way in. One chef built four different ways to eat here, one at a time, inside buildings that were already standing.
His name is Germán Lucarelli, and if you have eaten anywhere in Cape Porpoise in the last three years, you have probably eaten his food without realizing how much of the village now runs through him.
The Building That Used to Be Two Different Restaurants
Start at 77 Pier Road, at the end of the pier past Atlantic Hall. Until a few years ago, this address held Pier 77 and The Ramp, and The Ramp sustained damage in a storm. The prior restaurant closed at the end of September, and the property sat quiet.
Lucarelli had wanted it for years. He told the Portland Press Herald he had tried to buy the location before, without success, and that he had simply fallen for the spot. In mid-December he finally got the deal done and started major renovations on both levels.
The Kennebunk, Kennebunkport, and Arundel Chamber of Commerce noticed the sale immediately. Chamber director Laura Dolce told the Press Herald:
"Knowing the quality of food at The Lost Fire, and the incredible attention to detail found there, I'm sure German will have another success on his hands in Cape Porpoise and the people of the Kennebunks will have another delicious option for dining."
That confidence rested on a track record Lucarelli had already spent years building three doors up the road.
Before Pier Road, There Was Route 9
Lucarelli came to Kennebunkport in 2015 and opened Ports of Italy on Route 9 in Cape Porpoise. Three years later that restaurant became The Lost Fire Grill & Bar, built around Patagonian-style open-flame cooking, a style he'd picked up over a career that ran through Buenos Aires, Paris, London, Beirut, Istanbul, Miami, and New York before he ever set foot in Maine. A couple of years after that, he added LUCA, an outdoor patio behind the main dining room, so the fire cooking could happen in the open air.
By the time he closed on 77 Pier Road at the end of 2022, The Lost Fire wasn't a newcomer anymore. It was the reason people trusted him to take on a bigger, harder project.
Two Restaurants, One Roof, One Spring
The 77 Pier Road renovation wasn't one restaurant. It was two, stacked on top of each other, both opening within the same season.
- Casa Seventy Seven, downstairs, an osteria built around the comfort food Lucarelli remembered from his years in Europe, the kind of neighborhood spot where friends gather over simple dishes and don't rush the table.
- Ultramar, upstairs, a seafood grill and raw bar with an expanded bar and handicap-accessible dining, named for the mythical destination European sailors once sought across the ocean. Lucarelli brought in chef Alejandro Crespo to run the kitchen, a friend he described as sharing his approach to seafood.
The smaller of the two spaces opened first in April, the larger one in May. Both now overlook Cape Porpoise Harbor from the same building that used to house Pier 77 and The Ramp.
The Gelato Truck That Closes the Loop
In the summer of 2024, Lucarelli added a fourth piece: Dos Elenas Gelato, a truck named for his two grandmothers and built around traditional Argentine gelato-making. It's the smallest of his ventures and the most personal, a direct link back to the kitchen where he started helping as an eight-year-old.
Four stops now trace back to one person: The Lost Fire and its LUCA patio, Casa Seventy Seven, Ultramar, and Dos Elenas. All of them sit within a few minutes of each other by car, in a village that still has one main pier and one main fishing fleet.
What This Actually Changes for Anyone Eating Here Regularly
Dock Square, a few minutes north, keeps turning over the normal way. Restaurants change hands, get new names, and get run by new owners with their own menus and their own standards. That's a healthy, ordinary churn.
Cape Porpoise didn't get that. It got a single point of view repeated across four addresses. If you know what Lucarelli's fire cooking tastes like at The Lost Fire, you already have a sense of what to expect at Ultramar's wood-fired seafood, even though a different chef runs that kitchen day to day. If Casa Seventy Seven feels unhurried and unpretentious, that's by design, the same instinct that drove him to open a gelato truck named after his grandmothers instead of something flashier.
That consistency is worth knowing if you live nearby and haven't sorted out which of the four is which. Want fire-driven Patagonian cooking with a lively bar. Want a raw bar and harbor views. Want something quieter and closer to European comfort food. Want ice cream on a summer walk. All four answers point back to the same building or the same short stretch of road, which is unusual for a village this size.
The wider Kennebunkport dining calendar moved through its own moment this month too. Maine Lobster Week, sponsored by the Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative, ran September 19 through 26 and brought special lobster menus to restaurants across town, including The Burleigh in Dock Square. It's a reminder that the town's food identity isn't just what's new on Pier Road. It's also the older, established rooms that mark the season the way they always have.
What makes Cape Porpoise different right now isn't that it has more restaurants than it used to. It's that so much of what's new traces back to one chef's decisions about one small stretch of road, made over ten years and confirmed one building at a time.
If you're the kind of person who wants to understand a place by the way it eats before you ever think about the way it's zoned, that's exactly the sort of local detail Mary Libby Living keeps track of. Reach out if you'd like more of what's actually happening on the ground in Cape Porpoise, restaurant by restaurant, before you ever ask about a listing.
