A Chef of Two Cites
I’m seated for dinner across from a well-established food writer and editor. We've just met and I've shared what I'm working on: this article. By chance, her second home is in Maine, near the restaurant about which I’m writing. Then, she speaks with such open disdain about the Alna Store that it takes me aback. Perhaps it shouldn't. After all, I pitched this story based on exactly this type of attitude toward one restaurateur’s attempt to open a business in the place where she grew up.
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“I think a place can change a person,” says restaurateur Jasper Ludwig. In 2014, she cut her teeth building a local institution with 5 Points, a community-favorite restaurant and market in Tucson, Arizona. But she dreamed of opening a spot rooted in the nostalgia of her childhood home—one that offered what she felt the area was missing.
In December 2022, her dream led to the Alna Store, a restaurant and market that quickly became a New York Times top-50 restaurant and a James Beard Award semifinalist in small-town Alna, Maine, population roughly 700. And just as the Alna Store is having an effect on the future of dining in Maine, Alna is influencing Ludwig, who grew up in Newcastle, the next town over. “I know being back home is changing me,” she says.
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“We really had no business opening a restaurant,” Ludwig recalls of opening 5 Points with her partner, Brian Haskins. The young couple were low on funds but hardworking and mutually passionate about food systems and the culinary world. In Tucson, they survived by developing local support and thrived by spearheading a business built on living wages and intentional sourcing.
After twenty years away, though, and building a life in the desert, “I yearned for the forests and the lakes and the rivers and the ocean,” Ludwig says. “The siren’s call home” came to her as an urge to share her success and experience “with the community that raised me up,” she remembers.
“I am, without a doubt, a different person than the girl who left Maine at 16, eager to see the world,” she says. Lincoln County, meanwhile, is “almost exactly the same.” Having moved back into her family’s farmhouse, Ludwig has appreciated being again in community with folks she grew up with and witnessing the next generation growing up together the way she and her peers did, swimming in the river and playing in the forest. “There’s something really comforting about it,” she says. “There’s something that feels really small about it too.”
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In opening the Alna Store, Ludwig says her biggest goal was bringing something different than what had been previously available in Midcoast Maine. She didn’t want to open another pub or fried seafood spot; she wanted to create a globally inspired, seasonally rotating, farm-driven menu like the one she’d made at 5 Points. She wanted the quality of coffee and wine she’d become accustomed to drinking. “I wanted to bring my experience to my home,” she says. “A culmination of my travels and my work over the twenty years I was away.”
But while Maine has a robust agricultural industry and maker scene, Ludwig faced difficulties sourcing what she needed in a rural setting. When the Alna Store opened in 2022, “I had to drive to meet trucks, and drive to ten to twenty different farms a week to supply the kitchen.” She describes using her days “off” to catch up on restaurant responsibilities including collecting vegetables, flowers, and grains across the state. “There must’ve been a lot of adrenaline,” she notes, “because I can’t imagine how I did it.”
In that way and many others, Ludwig says, opening a restaurant can be like becoming a parent. On the plus side, that means she was a lot better prepared for the challenges of raising a second restaurant. She says she’s smarter, a better boss, and has designed the Alna Store with a much more efficient layout. Meanwhile, she says, her first child is in a rebellious teen era.
Some adaptations inspired by the Alna Store have been well-received at 5 Points, like the addition of dinner service, but other changes she saw as improvements, such as replacing a menu item, have upset 5 Points customers:“[People become] emotionally attached to elements of the businesses that we’ve built.” Bouncing back and forth between the two establishments means sharing inspiration and knowledge, but it also means struggling to maintain a connection to two different communities on different sides of the country. While Ludwig once ached to return to the flora and fauna of Maine, “I find myself missing the West, missing the canyons in the desert.” Similarly, “there’s a section of Tucson that feels we abandoned them,” she says.
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Back to my dinner companion. We're at a multicourse French wine dinner in a historic downtown venue offering a gold-beveled, white marble, stained glass backdrop to our conversation. She dislikes the Alna Store's menu prices in particular. I get the impression she considers the restaurant pretentious. Overall, I think she doesn't feel it's a fit for the region where she’s now a part-time resident. When I ask what restaurants she frequents instead, she names a pub that specializes in fried seafood.
It’s not the only disapproval Ludwig has faced in Alna, where “there is a group of residents who absolutely hate us and loathe our success. They see us as woke and fancy, a rip-off.” And yet, she expects it would be impossible rather than difficult if she weren’t a local herself, acknowledging, “Our iteration of the Alna Store is definitely a change for Alna, and it’s one that never would’ve worked if I’d been from away.”
Mainers are notoriously skeptical of outsiders. Depending on whom you talk to, this could refer to visitors “from away,” transplants, part-timers, coastdwellers, southerners (that is, Mainers from the more populous bottom half of the sprawling state), or prodigal daughters who return to open a restaurant. But they remain some of Ludwig’s favorite kind of people. “I feel like I can spot them in the wild,” Ludwig remarks. “Self-reliance might be the best word I could use.” That self-reliance at its best can preserve what she describes as generational knowledge steeped in efficiency and wisdom, the key to the highly skilled makers and farmers she loves sourcing from. And in Ludwig’s experience, “Mainers help one another up.”
So while the Alna Store has some detractors, by and large the community has embraced the business as its own, a homecoming story that embodies Maine values and supports the local economy. “If one can indeed ‘go home again,’ my circumstances are probably as close as you can get,” she says.
The Alna Store can also throw visitors for a loop, Ludwig says. It’s more than a gas station–style rest stop, as some expect it to be, yet less polished than the fine-dining destination others imagine from its national acclaim. It’s just a “funky general store,” Ludwig says, and “the vast majority of folks who sit down and give us a chance fall somewhat in love.”
By most measures, Ludwig’s is a story of success. 5 Points stands proud on a busy corner in downtown Tucson, continuing to attract and maintain loyal customers. The Alna Store is a beacon on an otherwise quiet stretch of route 218 farmland, consistently racking up national accolades and a steady stream of business. “I’ve been able to foster creativity, confidence, and independence for a number of very talented culinary professionals who have moved through my kitchen,” says Ludwig. She calls this communal achievement a triumph. And yet, sometimes she remains uncertain about her place in the world.
“I was absolutely terrified,” she says. “I still am terrified of judgment from my peers.”
Stasia Brewczynski is a New England–based drinks, food, and travel writer whose work is found in publications like Food & Wine, Full Pour Magazine, and Eater. She is a Cicerone-certified beer server, American Cider Association–certified cider guide, and a food and beverage judge. You can follow her on Instagram @StasiaBrew.
