Longtime Lewiston, Maine, Restaurant Says 2026 Will Be Last Year

If you've grown up in the Lewiston/Auburn area, there's a handful of restaurants that feel like they've been around for your entire life.

In some cases, they actually have been.

One of those restaurants is the Chick-a-dee, a family-owned spot that built a reputation around their fried seafood and many other homestyle favorites.

In a social media post last week, the Chick-a-dee Restaurant of Lewiston announced that 2026 would be their last year of operations with plans to close permanently in November of this year.

The Chick-a-dee Restaurant in Maine Has a Long History

The initial Chick-a-dee restaurant in the LA area was opened in 1935 along Route 4. That restaurant built a sterling reputation around fried seafood and was eventually sold to the Hird family in 1970.

The Hird family continued the excellence and despite a fire destroying the initial restaurant in 1991, rebuilt and expanded the building while keeping the crowds coming back.

According to the Lewiston Sun-Journal, that original Chick-a-dee restaurant closed in 2012, citing rising costs.

The Chick-a-dee Restaurant of Lewiston, Maine, Opened in 2007

Members of the Hird family split from the original Chick-a-dee to open the Lewiston, Maine, version in 2007.

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The Lewiston Chick-a-dee has been serving the community for nearly twenty years in the same way the original on the Auburn/Turner line did for nearly eight decades.

Despite its forthcoming closure, the owners behind the Chick-a-dee restaurant of Lewiston hinted that something else is in the works for the future.

They plan to announce those plans in the coming weeks and months ahead before the final days of the Chick-a-dee in November.