Nervous Nellies Jams & Jellies

Mountainville Cafe

Nervous Nellie met Razzie on her journey from the land of tomorrow to the land of the new morning sun. He was the proprietor of Razzie's Cantina, at the trading post, where the long trail country begins at the foothills of the Empty Mountains. He sang a song for his strange and varied guests, and Nervous Nellie, listening, learned more about the place that she was searching for. Today Razzie keeps the Mountainville Cafe, serving coffee, tea and homemade scones in a many-windowed room between the sunlit meadow and the cool spruces.

The Cafe, named after the area of Deer Isle where we live and work, serves as a sales and sampling room for Nervous Nellie’s Jams and Jellies from May-October. A new addition includes hand-hewn posts and beams recycled from a recently-dismantled machine shop on the waterfront. Homemade scones (with plenty of jam!), brownies, and linzertorte are served with tea and coffee every day. We also have real iced tea and iced coffee, S & OK sodas such as sarsparilla and wild raspberry--bottled here in Maine.

The Nellie Bird, a 6-foot red wooden bird with a bright yellow beak greets all visitors and overlooks the proceedings with a proprietary and benevolent eye. Colorful painted tables, set with fresh flowers, overlook the old apple orchard. Whimsical sculptures dot the meadow and peek out from under the towering spruces. It is a great place for children to play and explore. They can’t resist trying out the cymbal hanging from the old apple tree, or spinning the ship's wheel on the deck outside the Cafe.

Each summer thousands of people come to Nervous Nellie’s. Many stumble onto it for the first time or, having discovered the jam, are drawn to visit the source. For some it is an annual pilgrimage: to buy the jam from the people who make it, to meet whatever new sculpture characters were created over the winter, and to experience again the feeling of magical place on a faraway island.