Maine-Inspired Recipes From Aragosta Chef Devin Finigan

Aragosta began its life as a harbor-view restaurant in the fishing village of Stonington, where Maine’s largest lobster catch is still hauled in every season (aragosta means “lobster” in Italian). Six years later, riding on a wave of critical praise, it moved to its current home on Deer Isle’s Goose Cove, a stunning sweep of bay and islands, spruce trees and granite ledges, where chef-owner Devin Finigan could welcome her growing audience into a larger dining room, with outdoor decks, guest cottages, and a glass greenhouse turned dining room.

Through all her years of cooking, and through off-season internships at restaurants in Italy and Spain, at Per Se and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Finigan kept up an internal monologue—notes for the book she would one day write about everything she was learning. “It’s been living in my head for years,” she says. “Not as a ‘someday’ project, but as something I’ve been quietly building with every season that passes.” After years of thinking, of being asked, “When are you going to write a cookbook?” she finally got to writing it all down.

It’s fitting that A Kitchen on Goose Cove: Recipes from the Heart of Maine should be so deeply rooted in this place she calls home. “In Maine, you do not cook the same way year-round,” she says. “The ingredients don’t let you.” The book’s 75 recipes are designed to let those ingredients shine: blueberry pavlova, sweet corn chowder, grilled swordfish steaks with summer salsa. Her goal? To teach readers to cook with confidence. “I want readers to feel that Maine seasonal cooking is something they can actually own,” she says. “Not special-occasion cooking, just cooking with clarity and intention, guided by what is fresh. I’ve watched friends and guests light up when they realize lobster does not need to be intimidating, or that mussels can be a weeknight dinner, or that the best meals are often the simplest ones when the ingredients are real.”

Meanwhile, the restaurant continues to grow beyond the kitchen and dining room. This summer, Finigan plans to offer guests deeper experiences of Goose Cove: yoga on the beach, guided kayak tours, a new champagne-themed beach bar. “Salt air, great bottles, and food that tastes like exactly where you are,” she says.

Finigan hopes the following recipes, all excerpted from A Kitchen on Goose Cove, remind readers that Maine is not one flavor. “It is a coastline, a working culture, and a rhythm,” she says. “Lobster, oysters, local fish, yes, but also the farms, the people who pull food from the sea and the soil, and the way the seasons shape everything. If someone finishes the book feeling inspired to cook Maine cuisine and feeling connected to where it comes from, then it’s doing what I wrote it to do.”

This feature was originally published as “Maine Courses” in the July/August 2026 issue of Yankee.

Maine Cookbook Recipes from Aragosta Chef Devin Finigan

Haddock Fillets with Deer Isle Succotash
Sweet Corn Vegetarian Chowder
Littlenecks in Smoky Spicy Tomato Sauce with Linguine
Blueberry Fool Pavlova

Amy Traverso

Amy Traverso is the senior food editor at Yankee and cohost of the public television series Weekends with Yankee, a coproduction with GBH. Previously, she was food editor at Boston magazine and an associate food editor at Sunset magazine. Her work has also been published in The Boston Globe, Saveur, and Travel & Leisure, and she has appeared on Hallmark Home & Family, The Martha Stewart Show, Throwdown with Bobby Flay, and Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Amy is the author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, which was a finalist for the Julia Child Award for best first-time author and won an IACP Cookbook Award in the “American” category.

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