A Boston Globe Writer Just Found What North Yarmouth Already Knew

In mid-August 2026, the Boston Globe ran a full feature on a restaurant that seats one table at a time, inside a former video store at the corner of Walnut Hill Road and Route 9. The chef has seven James Beard nominations across her career. The dining room fits a handful of strangers who eat the same five-course lunch together, elbow to elbow, while she works a wood-fired brick oven three feet away. None of this happened last week. Most of it happened over the past decade, in North Yarmouth, in a town of roughly 3,800 people that most outsiders drive through on the way to somewhere else.

The Globe was catching up. The Village Center wasn't waiting around for the discovery.

The reservation you can't get until fall

Chef Krista Kern Desjarlais opened The Purple House in 2016 in a 544-square-foot building at the intersection of Routes 9 and 115, the same crossroads that anchors North Yarmouth's Village Center. It started as a bakery, known mostly for Montreal-style bagels baked in that wood-fired oven. Three years later, Bon Appetit named it one of the year's fifty best new restaurants in America, an odd honor for a building smaller than most suburban living rooms. Then came the pandemic. The Purple House went dark in 2020 and, aside from occasional pop-ups and private catering, stayed that way for five years.

It reopened on December 18, 2025, and it did not come back as a bagel shop. Desjarlais rebuilt it as a ticketed, reservation-only lunch series she calls "fancy luncheon," a multi-course tasting menu with nonalcoholic pairings and a BYOB option for wine. Tickets for December through February sold out before the first plate went out. Reservations for March and April opened February 1 and moved fast enough that the restaurant is now booking in short seasonal windows rather than a standing weekly schedule.

Here's what a resident actually needs to know about the current format:

• Open Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays for lunch service only, by reservation
• The tasting menu is entirely gluten-free, built on French, Italian, and Spanish technique, paired with nonalcoholic selections
• Guests sit together at a single communal table while Desjarlais cooks in view, in the same brick oven she installed in 2016
• The lunch service pauses over summer while Desjarlais runs Bresca & the Honeybee, her seasonal ice cream shack on Sabbathday Lake in New Gloucester, and the tasting menu is set to return this fall
• The address hasn't changed: 378 Walnut Hill Road, the same crossroads corner it's occupied for a decade

The detail that says the most about this town: when the Globe's food team profiled Desjarlais, they weren't writing about a Portland restaurant that happened to be nearby. Portland Food Map's own August 2026 roundup of the region's standout bakeries put The Purple House on a short list alongside Portland institutions like Standard, Scratch, and Tandem, all cited in the same Globe bakery feature. North Yarmouth doesn't have a downtown restaurant row. It has one building at a crossroads, and that building keeps getting mentioned in the same breath as kitchens with a dozen times its square footage.

The rest of the crossroads didn't wait for the write-up

The Purple House is the loudest story at the Village Center right now, but it isn't the only one, and the others tell you something the Globe piece doesn't: this isn't a town suddenly discovering ambition. It's a town where the same handful of businesses have been quietly getting more capable for years.

Toots Ice Cream has run its seasonal "Caboose" stand at the Village Center for years, open only in warm months. According to reporting in Mainebiz earlier this year, Toots is now building out a year-round location at the same site, renting space from Construction Aggregate, with the new footprint set up mainly for production and a small storefront rather than a full seasonal walk-up. The summer caboose isn't going away. It's just no longer the only version of Toots that exists.

North Yarmouth Variety and Stones Cafe & Bakery round out what Mainebiz described as the legacy anchors of the Village Center, the businesses that were there before any of the current construction started and that the newer development is being built around rather than instead of. None of these are new arrivals chasing a trend. They're the fixtures that make a five-minute stretch of Route 9 function as an actual center of town rather than a pass-through intersection.

The room where all of it actually meets

If the restaurants are what North Yarmouth talks about, Wescustogo Hall & Community Center at 120 Memorial Highway is where the town actually gathers. Built by Portland-based Barrett Made, the hall can hold anywhere from 30 to 300 people, and the town rents it out for birthdays, bridal showers, graduation parties, and wedding receptions, provided you book at least three weeks ahead. It's also where the town holds its own public meetings when something matters enough to need a bigger room than the town office allows.

That range, from graduation parties to select board business, is the point. In a town this size, there isn't a separate venue for civic life and a separate one for private celebration. There's one hall, and it does both, which means the newest family on Rangeway Lane and the family that's been here three generations are booking the same calendar.

More houses than tables

The Village Center's food scene has stayed roughly the same size for a decade. The housing around it hasn't.

That's at least 41 new housing units landing within a few hundred yards of the same Route 9 and Route 115 crossroads, according to Mainebiz's reporting earlier this year, on top of new rental townhouses already built on Memorial Highway and a new Averill Insurance office at 19 Memorial Highway, built by Construction Aggregate, the same firm building out Toots' year-round space. A town of 3,800 people is adding rooftops at a pace that would be notable anywhere. It is not adding restaurants at anything close to that pace.

Growth without addition

Put those two facts side by side and the shape of this town becomes clearer than either fact tells you on its own. North Yarmouth's Village Center isn't expanding by multiplying its options. It's expanding by deepening the ones it already has, while the housing stock around it grows several times faster.

The Purple House didn't respond to five years of closure by reopening bigger or more accessible. It reopened smaller and stranger, a single communal table, a seasonal pause, tickets that sell out before most people hear about them. Toots didn't franchise. It just finally got a building that lets its seasonal stand exist year-round. The Village Center's population is climbing across three separate developments, and the businesses meeting that growth are the same three or four names that have anchored the crossroads for years, each one working a little harder rather than each one duplicating itself down the road.

For a resident, that means something concrete: your neighbors are multiplying faster than your options are, and the options you have are getting more particular rather than more plentiful. That's an unusual kind of growth for a town to have, and it's the reason a Boston reporter drove up to a former video store on Walnut Hill Road two weeks ago to write about something that had been true here for a decade.

If you're watching how North Yarmouth's Village Center keeps evolving, whether from a porch on Rangeway Lane or from further away, Emilie Cole tracks these shifts as part of her ongoing coverage of the towns around Portland. Reach out anytime you want a longer conversation about what's changing here and what it might mean for you.