Owner of Sur Lie and Gather opening a cafe in Biddeford

The restaurateur behind Sur Lie in Portland and Gather in Yarmouth plans to open a breakfast and lunch spot called Catface Cafe in downtown Biddeford in March.

The new cafe will be located at 17 Alfred St., now occupied by the specialty market and casual eatery Part & Parcel, which is set to close on Dec. 23.

Gather and Sur Lie owner Krista Cole said a Part & Parcel owner reached out to her in the fall to see if she knew anyone interested in taking over a turnkey operation. Cole and her partner in the Catface Cafe, Tyler VanScoy, checked out the property in October.

“I’ve been following what (Part & Parcel has) been doing since they opened, and I just love the Biddeford area and where that community’s food scene has gone in the last three or four years,” Cole said.

Cole and VanScoy hope to open Catface on March 1, which they feel is a manageable timeline because the space won’t need renovation work, just new furniture and aesthetic changes.

Cole said the cafe’s name is a nod to Biddeford’s logging industry history: “Cat face” is a lumber term referring to a healed wound in a tree or log, because the scarring looks like cat whiskers.

The 2,800-square-foot space can seat about 15 right now. But Cole said they’ll boost capacity to more than 30 seats by removing the retail market area that takes up about half of the interior at Part & Parcel. The cafe also will offer outdoor seating on a back patio in warmer weather.

Catface will be open for breakfast, lunch, and weekend brunch. Cole said Gather and Sur Lie Chef Mimi Weissenborn is developing the Catface menu, which Cole said will be seasonally based, offering “elevated, modern” dishes.

Cole said Catface will have an espresso machine so it can offer a variety of specialty coffee drinks, and it also will sell beer, wine, and cocktails. Cole and VanScoy said they want Catface to be community-oriented, adding that the space will be available for private and corporate events.

“This is a place for people to gather in Biddeford, versus just popping in for a coffee and leaving,” said VanScoy, a corporate scientist who is transitioning back to the hospitality industry, where he’d previously worked for more than 10 years. “We want people to pop in for a coffee and sandwich and hang out for a while, talk to their neighbors, talk to us. We want to make people feel warm and fuzzy when they come in – it’s really that personal experience that we want to bring to the table.”