Chase’s Daily

Farm work carried to the counter

Produce sets the pace before the pass does. Addison Chase, chef at Chase’s Daily in Brunswick, carries farm work into a restaurant, bakery, and market rhythm shaped by Maine soil. He and Penny Chase moved to Maine in 1969, taught school, bought land in Freedom, built a house, and started farming. Since 1970, that land has been the beginning of the method: one acre and one season at a time, with continuity treated as labor rather than sentiment. Since 2000, Addison has also been co-owner and operator of Chase’s Daily, moving between the field and the front counter with the same standard of usefulness. Penny Chase, executive chef at Chase’s Daily, holds the kitchen side of that continuity. Her public biography stays spare, but the shape is clear enough: one chef, one restaurant, one room whose pace she knows from the inside. Together, the Chases make a place where the farm is not a decorative source line. It is the first station.

A vegetarian kitchen fed by the farm

The program works through a small, direct menu: breakfast, lunch, brunch, pizza al taglio, soft serve, baked goods, produce, and vegetarian fare built around what the farm can supply. Home fries have their own discipline here, sliced thin, browned at the edges, tender inside, and flecked with parsley. Pizza, custard tart, muffins, masa quesadillas, sandwiches, and hot chai sit in the same practical frame, food made for the counter rather than plated into distance. Produce arrives from the Chase family farm on Tuesdays and Fridays after 10 AM, and the market takes that arrival seriously: vegetables, herbs, and flowers become part of the room before they become part of a plate. The beverage program is minimal, which suits the house. The emphasis stays on the bench, the oven, the griddle, the produce table, and the day’s bread. Addison’s own language for the work is plain: “It's a real honor. I mean, we're not a very professionally trained group so it's a little unusual for my perspective but we tried to make good food and have value when people come here.”

The room as market and kitchen

The room keeps several kinds of work visible at once. There is the counter, the bakery case, the produce display, the art on the walls, the open movement of a casual cafe, and the kind of conversational noise that comes when people are eating and also choosing what to take home. Plants soften the brightness. The layout lets the market and dining room overlap without making either feel staged. In season, the back deck and covered outdoor area extend the work beyond the counter, but the center remains the same: farm goods moving through hands, into bags, onto plates, and back into the daily habits of the town. Chase’s Daily does not separate hospitality from supply. It lets the carrots, herbs, flowers, pizza al taglio, and custard tart occupy the same field of attention.

The next standard is the same one

Nothing here asks to be read as reinvention. The house matters because it keeps land, bakery, market, and restaurant in one operating loop, with Addison and Penny Chase still tied to the daily standard. Land on the thin-cut home fries at Chase’s Daily, browned at the edges and flecked with parsley.