Some culinary businesses are based on an old family recipe. In the case of Barnstable Bisque, the focus is a new family recipe.
Linnea Allen’s family enjoyed going to The Chart Room restaurant in Cataumet, where her father’s favorite dish was the baked stuffed lobster topped with Newburg sauce.
“It just started from there, working on a recipe to make a lobster bisque,” she said. “It’s my dad’s favorite thing. When there’s a holiday or a birthday, he wants that there pretty much all the time. That’s kind of where my recipe came from – trying to emulate something that I had had out several times. So, I guess I can thank The Chart Room for that.”
Allen first started selling Barnstable Bisque at the Osterville Farmers’ Market in the summer of 2023. “It turned out to be a nice thing because my dad and my stepmom would come and they’d work with me,” she said. “My dad would be the plastic bag separator, and my stepmom would help setting up and with little odds and ends. It was a nice way to all get together on Fridays.”
She also sold the bisque at winter farmers’ markets in Falmouth and Plymouth, the Sandwich Christmas Stroll and pop-up markets in Hanover and Kingston. Last year Barnstable Bisque came in second place at the 1st Annual Cape Cod Beer SOUPer Bowl . “We had a couple people say, ‘I’ve never really liked lobster bisque.’ But then they tried it and they were like, ‘Oh, I should have been paying more attention to this.’”
Linnea and her husband, Jeff, who live in Marstons Mills, have extensive but different culinary backgrounds, giving them a range of skills that have proven necessary in launching the business.
“My family was definitely a ‘live to eat,’ not ‘eat to live’ family,” she said. “My grandfather took great pride in what he cooked for holidays and other gatherings. Growing up, I spent a lot of time on weekends with my grandparents, and cooking with him was a way to make him happy.”
After high school, she spent a year working for the food service management company at Jordan Hospital (now Beth Israel Deaconess Plymouth) and then went to Johnson & Wales University. “I never had the confidence of a chef to be flipping sauté pans on the line. That scared the s— out of me. So, I went into institutional food service and worked my way through Johnson & Wales while still working at Jordan.” She earned an associate’s degree in culinary arts and a bachelor’s in food service management. Eventually she became the food service director at Jordan.
“Jordan is where I learned the management side of things,” she said. “It was a unique situation. I went from being a staff member to being everybody’s boss, which had its goods and bads. If there was something I needed to review or discuss about budgets and stuff like that, they knew that they could trust me. But when I had to discipline somebody that I had worked with for ten years and they were the longest-term employee in the union, that was not one of the most fun parts of the job.
“I always had cooking in me, but not the drive of a true chef,” she said. “I do all right, but my husband Jeff is the one who’s the chef in the family. He’s the kind of guy that you can tell there’s nothing in your fridge and he’ll find a way to make a ridiculously great meal.”
Linnea and Jeff met and became friends at Johnson & Wales, where he also earned an associate’s degree in culinary arts. He worked as a staff chef and ultimately worked his way up to the role of executive chef at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Cambridge before diving into a food sales career. He’s on the board of the Boston Fisheries Foundation, which runs the annual Boston Seafood Festival.
“Life kind of took us in different directions after Johnson and Wales,” she said. “He married the girl he was dating at the time, and I married the guy I was dating at the time.” After she got divorced, she decided to give him a call. Following a first date at a taco place in Kingston, they’ve been together for 21 years.
Linnea left food services when she “got tired of 60-some-odd people’s problems and responsibilities being mine to manage.” Asa single mom, she needed a job with a more user-friendly schedule (“If the 5:00 am breakfast cook called in sick, what was I going to do with a three-year-old?”) and became a dental hygienist.
Years later, she and Jeff got to talking about a way to make a little extra money. Her lobster bisque seemed like the best option. “We thought we would give this a go and maybe control our own destiny a little bit,” she said. (He’s recuperating after a heart attack in May 2024 and a heart transplant in January.)
Linnea is planning to return to the Osterville Farmers’ Market this summer, with hopes of getting a wholesale license in the future. The bisque and clam chowder (using Jeff’s recipe), which they produce at the Cape Cod Culinary Incubator kitchen at KAM in Hyannis, also can be ordered by email. They hope to expand the product line with other soups and specialty seafood spreads.“ Our lobster bisque works well as a Newburg sauce over seafood casserole and as a sauce for pasta with the addition of sautéed seafood,” she said. “We’re not reinventing the wheel here. We’re just making really good wholesome products that have a lot of flavor. Lobster bisque and clam chowder certainly aren’t anything new to Cape Cod, but I think people like the fact that it’s freshly made the day before they buy it and they’re supporting local people.”
Barnstable Bisque
BarnstableBisque.com
Cape Cod Culinary Incubator
CapeCulinary.org
