WILLOW CREEK — Dean Moreau, 25, has left Willow Creek to pursue a career in the culinary industry in Boston, the Gazette has learned.

Dean Moreau, 25, leaves Willow Creek to pursue a culinary career in Boston. His departure is noted in the community news section. Sixteen years later, he will return to open The Dry Dock at Thorne's Bend.
Dean Moreau, 25, leaves Willow Creek to pursue a culinary career in Boston. His departure is noted in the community news section. Sixteen years later, he will return to open The Dry Dock at Thorne's Bend.

Moreau, who grew up on Mill Pond Road and graduated from Willow Creek High School in 1987, has spent the last five years working in kitchens in Bangor and Portland, most recently as a line cook at a French restaurant on Congress Street. He has accepted a position at a North End restaurant in Boston.

“Willow Creek does not have a restaurant that would let me do what I want to do,” Moreau told the Gazette before his departure. “I want to work with local ingredients, with Maine seafood, with produce from small farms. That is not a business that exists here yet. Maybe someday it will.”

The departure is noted in the community news column, one of a dozen such notices each year documenting the steady outward flow of young people from Willow Creek. The 1990 census showed a modest recovery to approximately 1,850 residents, driven largely by the mill reopening and trail construction, but the town still struggles to retain its young adults.

Dean Moreau will spend sixteen years in Boston, working his way from line cook to sous-chef at a James Beard-nominated restaurant in the North End. He will learn the farm-to-table movement from its practitioners, develop relationships with New England farmers and fishermen, and save every dollar he can.

“I will be back,” he said as he loaded his pickup truck on the last day of April. “This is my home. I just need to learn things that cannot be learned here before I can come home and do what I want to do.”