Aurora Provisions, which closed its West End market and cafe in September, has now closed down its catering business, as well.
Melissa Carr and her husband, Art Durity, owned Aurora Provisions for just over a year. In a telephone interview, Durity said the bank had taken back the building at 64 Pine St. in Portland, and he doesn’t know if it has been sold or leased.
A note on the door dated Nov. 9 says the locks have been changed, and the building is now under the management of Kevin T. O’Donovan. The note gave a Portland post office box address for O’Donovan and a phone number. A call to the number went to voice mail.
Durity said Aurora Provisions had completed all of its scheduled catering jobs before closing, and “didn’t leave any brides high and dry.”
“We’re sorry to not see the business work out,” he said, “but we’re pretty proud of what we did. We didn’t leave an employee or a customer standing without their pay or without their service.”
Durity declined to talk on the record about what went wrong. A statement Carr released in August simply said they “have had to face difficult economic realities.”
The business, founded by Norine Kotts and Cheryl Lewis in 1997, had been a fixture in the West End for more than 20 years. It expanded under Marika Kuzma Green, who bought it in 2001 and sold it to Carr and Durity for $1.8 million in 2017.
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