Bob Bittar with one of his own paintings
decorating a room of his Maine bistro.

A couple driving through the town of Readfield, Maine on a summer night some years ago emerged from a dark country road to find what looked like a row of buildings on the side of the road sparkling with lights. Bright colors showed through the windows. A shop? Open at night, at this gloomy crossroads?

Thus was discovered the Emporium, a most unusual bistro, art gallery, and, yes, shop, with imported women’s summer clothing and accessories at thrift shop prices. On Main Street at the intersection of Routes 17 and 41, the Emporium was established by a largely self-taught architectural designer, builder, painter and chef who is also an international businessman.

Bob Bittar, the genial host, opened the Emporium in 1981 with his wife Helen. Bob had persuaded the town, with some difficulty, to allow him to purchase a vacant derelict building to convert to a true emporium, a commercial establishment offering food and merchandise at modest prices, with performance space for local musicians. The structure on the property had replaced three stores that had burned down. Three doors on the street side leading to the Emporium's three dining rooms give the impression of three buildings.

The Emporium's three adjoining dining areas
and gallery brighten the scene in Readfield, ME.

Bob's purpose in establishing the Emporium was to fill a need that he saw for an evening gathering place for local residents – and to provide an outlet for his creative energies, after retirement from a career in teaching and installation of computer systems. He did not envision the Emporium as a money-maker, and the prices on the menu are modest. It’s almost as if Bob and Helen are giving parties for the community Tuesday through Sunday evenings through the summer, and maybe beyond.

At the Emporium, Bob offers pizzas of his own devising and invites patrons to make up their own from a list of add-ons. In accordance with his usual modus operandi, Bob taught himself to make pizzas with the help of an instruction book, but he developed his own recipes over time. Recently Bob has added other dishes to the menu that attest to the presence of an imaginative chef in the kitchen.

Paintings adorn the walls of the Emporium's first
room, with large wooden booths for large groups.

Bob did most of the rehabilitation and reconstruction of the Emporium buildings himself, with help from his sons. He and Helen have two sons and two grandchildren. Son Alexis is a noted designer of costume jewelry, with a factory in lower Manhattan (note: not China) employing about 350 people, and he was the winner of the 2010 Accessory Designer of the Year Award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Paintings, sculptures and a violin adorn the walls of the main dining room, which is illuminated with tiny lights in branches. The room has several tables of varying sizes and three large wooden booths with maple-topped tables for large groups. Helen is often to be found in one of these booths with family and friends.

Bob did an extensive makeover of the Emporium recently, and the room adjoining the main room now boasts a wine bar at one end and a bandstand at the other. The Emporium's license to serve beer and wine was acquired recently, and Bob offers a selection of wines and beers, including local brews.

The wine bar that Bob constructed in a second
dining room; beers served include local brews.

The bandstand is raised and partially enclosed, and on and around it various instruments are displayed. On quiet nights, Bob encourages patrons and, especially, their children, to play his collections of instruments, including an electric keyboard, a violin, guitars, a trombone, and a set of drums. A Celtic band has frequently performed, and Bob and Helen frequently line up other performers.

Shelves of gift items in this room and a selection of elegant but moderately priced women’s scarves continue the gift-and-clothing-shop tradition. A stairway leads to the art gallery upstairs, with comfortable seating areas, sculpture, and paintings (not for sale) that are mostly by Bob’s father, Anthony Bittar.

A band of Celtic music enthusiasts frequently
overflows the bandstand, usually on Sundays.

Bob’s father was first a pharmacist and later a stockbroker running his own firm, Bittar Securities. In his final years he and Bob's mother ran a custom dress shop on Atlantic Avenue in Delray Beach, Florida. He took up portrait painting, and lived much of the year in a house he built himself in Ocean Ridge, Florida. Bob bought a house near his and did an extensive renovation job there too. Of his father, Bob says, “He was an extraordinarily happy and interesting man. He was creative till he died,” at 96. Bob’s grandparents were Arabic Christians from Syria.

A third, quieter, dining area has antique items
and many of Bob's large paintings displayed.

The Emporium's third room, previously the site of a shop and now "Le Kitchen," contains additional tables, two of them with wooden garden benches back to back giving the effect of booths. This room displays many large paintings that Bob did recently. His attention to artistic detail and craft work is evident in all the rooms of the Emporium, in features such as crafted lighting fixtures, antique objects that are part of the décor, and carved animals on some of the tables.

Last year Bob bought a vacated two-story building next to the Emporium for Helen’s use. This building, too, he gutted and rehabilitated, doing the design and most of the work himself. Before that, he spent about three years designing and building additions to the remarkable house he and Helen have in North Monmouth, Maine, not far from the Emporium.

The gallery has a collection of art works, with
inviting seating arrangements here and there.

“My father-in-law gave us a tiny piece of raw land in North Monmouth, across the road from land that bordered a lake,” Bob said. (Since then he has purchased 40 acres of surrounding woodland, some of it fronting Lake Annabessacook.) “Then I saw an ad in the Times for a wood water tank for sale for $500 in Westchester. It was 25 feet in diameter. We bought it, spent two and a half weeks dismantling it, loaded it in a truck and drove it up to Maine.”

Bob had help from his brother and several friends in putting the water tower together again, and he installed electricity and plumbing. “When almost anyone sees someone really sincere and working hard to be effective, most people will stop and say ‘Let me give you a hand,” he says. “This is how I learned.”

Thus it was that Bob and Helen and their two sons become summer residents of Maine in 1970. For a while, the family lived in the renovated two-story water tank, but the space seemed too limited when the boys began bringing friends over, Bob says, and he started on his additions. Currently, the striking circular living and dining space in the water tower section leads on the left to a sitting room overlooking the garden, and on the right to an entryway with a staircase to the second floor and to a splendid kitchen.

The most striking recent addition was a walkway Bob built, with his sons’ help, from the kitchen to the master bedroom. The flooring is made of old, wide pine boards that were about to be thrown away, from a barn that was being torn down. Inspired by the “garden walk” at the Frick museum (although Bob does not claim to have matched that splendor), the walk has a series of large windows on one wall and a garden bench on the other. The windows overlook the garden, and, in the winter, a snowy scene. Bob’s aim was to provide a walk to the master bedroom that would have the feel in all seasons of a walk outside (except that an unobtrusive heating system ensures that it is never too chilly).

The "water tower house" that Bob built, with
many additions, in North Monmouth, Maine.

Another of Bob’s reconstruction projects was the restoration and renovation of a three-story Federal-style townhouse he had bought in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, New York. With help from his sons he did a major redesign and reconstruction job, creating, he says, an architectural gem. Subsequently the land became part of a development site and he was obliged to sell.

Not all of his projects come to fruition. A few years ago he wanted to restore a large vacant property on the Kennebec River in Augusta as a performance hall for the Augusta Symphony. He needed an abutting owner’s parcel for parking, but each time a deal was near the owner raised the price. Bob abandoned that plan.

Front of the lower room in the tower,
showing part of the circular ceiling.

One of Bob’s more creative projects was the business he established in Bulgaria in 2003. He had come to realize, he says, that many small companies in developing countries could prosper by selling to a broader market than is open to them. To reach it they needed internationally recognized credentials attesting to the quality of their goods and services. Bob wanted to establish a business to provide them with those credentials, at reasonable cost. But how could he get his own company the standing to do this?

The world's largest developer and publisher of international standards is the International Organization for Standardization, ISO for short (not an acronym, since the acronym would be different in different languages). ISO is a network of the national standards institutes of 163 countries, with a Central Secretariat in Geneva. To apply ISO standards and certify compliance, a company needs governmental accreditation itself, as a Registrar.

Other half of circular ceiling over the
dining area in the rear of tower room.

For a company to get accreditation as a Registrar, it must be evaluated by an authorized government agency to ensure that the company, its work, its processes, its employees, comply with all relevant international regulations. The regulations are complicated and rigidly applied. No guidance is available on how to comply with them, and the government agency is prohibited from providing any assistance. The agency simply either makes a determination that a company has been established as a "perfect" organization, or denies accreditation. In that event, the company is informed that there is a problem, with no guidance as to what the problem is.

For seven months Bob traveled in Europe and Central America, trying to get governmental intermediaries to help him in this project. The effort paid off in Bulgaria. Doors were opened for him by George Soros’ “Open Society” organization, through which he met and impressed the chairman of the Bulgarian Agency for Small and Medium Enterprise, Angel Despotov, who helped him set up an employee-run company. Nevertheless, the inspection, evaluation and final accreditation of Bob's company took years.

The staff of Bob's company, the International Quality Association Certification Center, annually evaluates and certifies corporations in Eastern Europe with respect to compliance with certain ISO and Occupational Health and Safety international standards, and Bob travels intermittently to Bulgaria to monitor its progress. Bob takes none of the company revenue for himself, and permits the employees to divide the profit through bonuses at the end of the year.

“I want to promote it here in the United States,” Bob says, but to do that he must first win accreditation from the regional accreditation body of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in Washington, D.C.

The "garden walk" to the master
bedroom, an addition to the tower.

Bob – Robert Anthony Warren Bittar – was born on February 21, 1941, in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn. He went to P.S. 94 in Brooklyn, Fort Hamilton High School, and Rutgers University, majoring in history. He took a year of law school at Brooklyn Law and shifted to graduate school in history for an M.A. and doctoral work at New York University (NYU). In 1985, an M.S. in Computer Systems from Baruch College of the City University of New York (CUNY) completed his education. By then he was married to Helen Alcock, an elementary school teacher who, with Bob, got an M.A. in history at NYU, and an M.S. in Computer Systems at Baruch College. Helen got a Ph.D. in history at NYU. Their two sons came along in 1964 and 1967 respectively. Bob needed work.

He found it with the Department of Social Services, managing 80 cases in Brooklyn and the Bronx. With a friend’s help in the early 70’s he got a job teaching history in high school, first at Taft High School in the Bronx and later at Thomas Jefferson and New Utrecht High Schools in Brooklyn. Then, in 1977, he was laid off.

Times were tough in those recessionary years. “I couldn’t find a job,” he says. He noticed in the classified help-wanted ads that most of the available jobs were in the computer field. He decided to learn about computers. He enrolled at a technical college, but not intending to get a degree. Instead, he took the final course in several categories, earning 21 credits in six months, and went job-hunting. An ad in the New York Times led him to the Insurance Service Organization at the World Trade Center, which handled computer installations at large insurance organizations.

“Five people interviewed me, asking arcane questions,” he said. They hired him to lead a team that prepared an 80-page software program for the mainframe computer of an insurance company. Working 18 hours a day, he finished it on time. “The salary was great,” he said. But in the 80’s, worn out by large projects, long hours and commuting from Maine, he took a cut in pay, and went back to teaching in Brooklyn.

Subsequently, Bob served as Director of Computing, with a staff of 60, at Kingsborough Community College, a unit of CUNY, in Brooklyn while also chairing a committee that reviewed computer policies at 17 CUNY campuses. Since his retirement from CUNY, he has worked for a Massachusetts firm, Cambridge Technology Partners, in a highly remunerative job as project manager for installation of large corporate computer software systems. Income derived from this work in the public and private sectors has in large part made possible Bob's ventures in reconstructing buildings and running a bistro.

The Bittars have been spending winters in Maine in recent years, although they plan to spend some time in a small Manhattan apartment that they own. In the summer, when they are not at their “water tower house,” they are at the Emporium, where Bob prepares the pizzas and other entrees that he has created, trains a few chefs, and chats with guests.

“The Emporium is an extension of our home,” Bob says. “Being creative and building something that other people will enjoy – that’s my motivation.”

Back to Top