Hard Telling Not Knowing each week tries to answer your burning questions about why things are the way they are in Maine — specifically about Maine culture and history, both long ago and recent, large and small, important and silly. Send your questions to [email protected].
Earlier this year we wrote about five long-closed Bangor restaurants that people loved and still miss. The response was so positive that we thought we’d highlight a few more defunct eateries that still loom large in people’s memories.
Are there other beloved Maine restaurants that you miss? Shoot an email to [email protected] with your memories.
The Oronoka, Orono
Generations of University of Maine students could rely on the Oronoka for lots of things. A massive plate of food good for two extra meals as leftovers. A giant glass shaped like a boot filled with beer. And, in the 1980s and 90s, a place to catch a cool local band — or even a touring band, like Phish, which played one of its first Maine shows there in 1989.
When it finally closed in 2003, the Oronoka — the ’Noka, as it was informally known — had been a Bangor-area staple for more than five decades. The restaurant, housed in a cavernous building on Route 2 in Orono, across the street from Penobscot Valley Country Club, was loved by local people. It was perhaps less loved by the Orono Town Council, with which its owners continually butted heads.
The Oronoka was the sort of place where vibes were everything. The food wasn’t anything special, but it was good enough and there was a lot of it, and it was served with genuine hospitality. It wasn’t afraid to let college students party, but it also happily hosted families, birthday parties, fundraisers and visitors alike. It was the stuff of local legend.
In 2014, nine years after it closed, the Oronoka building was torn down, and Penobscot Valley Dermatology built a new building in its place. For many years, however, UMaine’s International Student Association has called its annual spring get-together the Oronoka Party, in honor of the long-defunct restaurant that hosted them before.
Howard Johnson, Bangor
This restaurant was a national chain that, at one point in the 1970s, had more than 1,000 locations in the U.S. mostly associated with Howard Johnson hotels. Definitely not local.
But the Bangor location was special, not least because it was in operation for more than 50 years, originally opening in 1966. It was famous for its affordable, family-friendly comfort food, like fried seafood, burgers and hot dogs, as well as its own brand of ice cream. The Bangor HoJo’s was on Odlin Road, or “The Bulge,” a section of road in the city that was created to connect two separate ends of Hammond Street, which had been cut in half due to Dow Air Force Base’s runway expansion in 1956.
What really made the Bangor Howard Johnson special, however, was the fact that when it finally closed in 2016, it was one of just three remaining HoJo’s in the country at the time, and had been for nearly a decade. The last location, in Lake George, New York, closed in 2022.
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The Howard Johnson company also started the Ground Round chain of restaurants, and opened a location for that chain in Bangor, also on Odlin Road. While at its peak there were more than 200 Ground Rounds across the country, today there are just nine operated by the now independently owned and Freeport-based Ground Round company, including the Bangor one and another in Hallowell, with the rest in the Midwest.
The Ground Round no longer features free bowls of unshelled peanuts. Nor does the chain employ the services of Bingo the clown, an actual human clown that surely was the cause of many toddler meltdowns and future adult nightmares for those that grew up in the 1970s and ’80s.
Perry’s Restaurant, Bangor
There is absolutely no trace left today of Perry’s Restaurant, a longtime eatery on Main Street in Bangor. That’s because where Perry’s once stood is now Shaw’s Supermarket. When the massive grocery store and parking lot was built in 1996, developers razed an entire city block — including Perry’s.
But for decades prior, the no-frills restaurant and bar was the sort of place where you could have a beer and catch up with your neighbor — and tuck into a plate of its “world famous” fried clams. It attracted an eclectic mix of bikers, professionals and families. Though the recipe was semi-secret, the Bangor Daily News has it on good authority that the fried clam batter was made with a brand-name pancake mix.
In an echo of the eminent domain battles of the 1960s and ’70s during Bangor’s urban renewal era, Perry’s and other adjacent property owners were informed in 1994 that Shaw’s was planning to build its largest Maine supermarket yet on the site. Perry’s filed a lawsuit against the city to attempt to prevent them from taking it by eminent domain. After nearly a year of legal wrangling, the property developers ended up paying the Perry family $160,000 for their property, more than double their original offer. In 1996, Perry’s closed and the building was torn down.
