How constant change helped build one of Minneapolis’ most celebrated restaurants

Snow fell outside as a Mazzy Star soundtrack played low overhead. A night inside Restaurant Alma unfolds at a distinctive pace: small snacks, a booklet to study available wine pairings should you choose, thoughtful moments with unhurried but intentional service centered around exceptional food.

On the cutting edge of Minnesota fine dining, Alma is an experience that exists in the moment, but also a place that stands the test of time as the last of its farm-to-table generation. Twenty-five years after chef/owner Alex Roberts opened the restaurant in a neighborhood that wasn’t near much, it has risen to be both a shining star of Twin Cities dining and an example of how constant change can build a foundation for long-term success.

“We were just trying to find a small restaurant that we could cook in,” Roberts said. The James Beard Award-winning chef leaned back into his chair in Alma’s dining room, flanked by his wife and partner Margo Roberts. “It seems funny now, but this was a new kind of cooking that was almost unidentifiable back then. No one woke up in the morning and said, ‘I want contemporary American food today.’”

The menu at Alma changes several times a year. To create its current offerings, executive chef Maggie Whelan pored over Alma archives, absorbing its history. “Whenever I talk to Alex about food — or anything, it could be leadership — I always take notes,” said Whelan. Like the menus and the leadership methods, it seems everything Roberts does carries a certain weight of intention.

Roberts and founding business partner Jim Reininger opened Restaurant Alma with a purposely spare room: concrete floors, benches built by Roberts' brother and a kitchen that’s been lovingly described as “the size of a dining table.”

It was the early 2000s; the bestselling “Kitchen Confidential,” a fed-up cook’s manifesto that gave hungry readers a glimpse inside restaurant kitchens, was making the rounds, marking a shift from cooks seldom being seen outside the kitchen to chefs celebrated as heroes of a food movement. Using small farms as food sources was a revolutionary idea that had finally made it to the breadbasket of America. Restaurant Alma was purposefully Minnesotan, but also part of a restaurant movement sweeping the country.

“Up until then, if you talked about a restaurant, people would mention the maître d’,” recalled Doug Flicker, who was a contemporary at Auriga at the time and part of the same wave of chef/owners. “It was the beginning of people learning to trust the chef, and once the public put their trust in you, that was when you could really push those boundaries.”

“He was the first local [chef] who went away, got an education and the training and came back,” said Rick Nelson, former restaurant critic and reporter for the Star Tribune.

Roberts studied at the French Culinary Institute in New York City and cut his teeth working in bold-name restaurants with Michelin stars beside their names. He honed his culinary techniques inside David Bouley’s restaurants. He observed a new kind of hospitality from Danny Meyer. And he worked with Tom Colicchio at Gramercy Tavern.

Then, he made the remarkable decision to leave that culinary epicenter to return to Minnesota. “He absorbed all of that and brought it back here,” said Nelson. “No one had really done that before.”

But first, he had to get people to eat their vegetables.

“It’s crazy now that deep-fried Brussels sprouts are on just about every menu nationwide,” said Roberts. His early menus featured a Portuguese-style stew with housemade sausage, beans and robust kale. No one even wanted to order beans because of the assumption they would be poured out of cans.

“I remember in March of 2000,” said Roberts. “It was a freezing cold Wednesday night and we had like six or seven reservations on the books. I do remember thinking, ‘How do we do this?’ ” The goal was adjusted from making a profit to just breaking even — and even that was hardly a given.

He moved from allowing diners to choose individual dishes to presenting the meal as a whole in the form of a tasting menu, which resulted in a discovery of beets. “We roasted them until their jackets all but melted off,” said Roberts. The finished dish was spritzed with orange juice while the beets were hot, mingling the natural sugars of both. (The dish is back on the menu, still converting sworn beet haters with Badger Flame beets that glow like embers in the low dinner light.)

But those who took that leap of faith found much to love. That included a young nursing student. Margo first met Alex Roberts at the coffee shop adjacent to the restaurant. She dined at Alma’s bar with an Italian friend. Roberts remembers that she ordered well, diving into parts of the menu that had been a harder sell to some.

Margo remembered the chicken liver pâté, a combination of New York and Italian techniques her friend recognized immediately. The friend gasped, “You have to date this guy.”

She did.

“One of the things we did when we first met was to get coffee in the morning. Then we’d drive to pick up all the produce and meet the farmers,” said Margo. “It was so cute because he just had to open every box and look at every single piece of produce.”

The two would soon marry.

Just before the 10-year mark, a time when many restaurants fade, Roberts and Alma were hitting their stride. And the national press took note.

“We were really starting to hit and in the dining room were a bunch of people wearing hockey jerseys,” Alex said of the pregame diners. “That was the first time that I felt like we’ve really got something. They get it.”

In 2010, Roberts won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Midwest. “It faces the kitchen to scare us,” he said of the medal.

That night he thanked his staff, who listened to the announcement over the phone, and his wife in the audience. Margo came dressed in a black cocktail dress, carrying on her chest the couple’s 3-month-old daughter Nia, who was wrapped in matching material. She was their first daughter and the youngest of their three children.

“It was surreal after the awards and, you know, we’re in the room and there’s Jacques Pépin cooing over Nia. Lidia Bastianich came over when she saw the baby. I had the hardware, but those two were the main attraction,” Alex said.

Margo released him into the New York night while she and Nia turned in. Alex went out with a cadre of other chefs, following José Andrés, “because he never stops moving and he’s always on his way to somewhere.”

Returning to Minneapolis, the stakes were even higher. The stage was set and diners would be coming into the restaurant with raised expectations. “We decided to get through the scrutiny with hospitality,” he said.

The staff dug into service, offering more, listening to guests and continuing to evolve the restaurant. Alex sought leadership coaching and developed workplace standards that he shares with other up-and-coming chef/owners; many of them are still in practice.

As chef and restaurant owner Ben Rients prepared to open his new restaurant Lynette early last year, he spoke to Roberts about his concerns of balancing the work with being a good dad to his young son. “I was worried that I barely see him,” recalled Rients. “Alex said, ‘Just get down on the floor and play with him every day. They remember that.’ I can’t tell you how much that meant to me.”

Alma also was on the early side of offering more balanced benefits packages for employees. “It’s a really important part of our history,” said Roberts. “There’s opportunity in learning and development, more than income for income’s sake.”

And the long-term staff is one of its best resources. Chef Whelan has worked with Alma for 13 years; director of operations (and Whelan’s spouse) Lucas Rosenbrook has been with the restaurant 16 years. Beverage director and wine expert James Hirdler counts a remarkable 24 years. “We’re lucky to have James,” said Margo. “He loves teaching.”

That’s part of the secret to Alma’s success. It appears simple, but in the background are years of hard work and a dedication to excellence that never wanes.

“Alma lived through 9/11, through the financial collapse of 2008 and COVID,” said Flicker, who now operates Bull’s Horn in Minneapolis. “Every seven to 10 years I get bored or decide to move on. There was a time where I felt bad for Alex that he’d been there for 15 years. And now it’s 25.”

From 2013 to 2016, Alma launched an era of unprecedented growth, from adding a full bar to designing a first-of-its kind boutique hotel.

Behind the scenes, Roberts was lining up major business changes to make it all happen. He bought out his original partner and in 2013 was able to purchase the building that housed Alma. After visiting boutique hotels in other states, he and Margo devised a plan to build a few rooms upstairs for a unique setting and place to stay.

Next door, the coffee shop where the couple met would become a casual cafe with breakfast sandwiches that reminded Alex of the bodega classics he’d order in New York and featuring all-day pastries and breakfast treats from Alma’s pastry chef, as well as sandwiches, burgers, salads, cocktails and more.

Margo worked to expand the brand’s retail opportunities, giving home cooks access to ingredients used in Alma’s kitchen. She also began creating signature seasonal scents and a line of bath and body products that extended the feel and aroma of the brand into a new realm.

However, rezoning to make all of their dreams happen was a multiyear challenge. “Little Alma was kind of bursting at the seams and this building was zoned as residential,” said Roberts.

Until 2015, many Minneapolis neighborhood restaurants were barred from offering a full bar. Changing that city ordinance was step one.

Next, they wanted to add a tiny hotel upstairs. “When we first approached city officials with the idea, hotels could have no less than 100 rooms,” Alex said. At best, he was told he could get a variance for 50. Hotel Alma debuted in 2016 with seven.

At its opening, hotel guests were greeted by rustic yet elegant Nordic decor and beguiling seasonal scents that have become a Margo Roberts signature.

“A really important part of our history is that the forward motion isn’t just growth for growth’s sake,” Alex said. “There’s always an opportunity for learning and deeper development.”

“It seems like there’s always this balance of what we can do as a business and what customers desire,” said Margo. “We try to find that balance and that often means leaning into changes.”

The business changed again during the pandemic, leaning into those pantry sales and being one of the first restaurants to offer meals packaged for at-home preparation. The restaurant as they knew it would have to pause, but the hotel and retail forethought — and their fast-casual Brasa restaurants — carried them through.

When the cafe and restaurant reopened for business, the hours would remain purposefully limited. Work-life balance was built into its current era.

But perhaps what’s been the most constant in Alma’s history is that the restaurant, which began with a daily-changing menu, is wired for constant evolution. Even in looking back, the restaurant demonstrates how forward-thinking it’s always been.

The main entree on the “Almaversary” menu is duck two ways: a slice of breast shrouded in skin so crisp it crackles like winter snow underfoot, and confit that melts like false spring, including melted foie gras pools beneath. It’s a stunning dish that might hark back to those early days, but right now tastes like the peak of modern Minnesota fine dining.

Our server Esther leans over conspiratorially, “Isn’t this just the best?”

Alma: A fine-dining restaurant, casual daytime cafe and boutique hotel under one roof. 528 University Av. SE., Mpls.; almampls.com

Alma Provisions: A curated selection of handcrafted goods for the kitchen, bath and home, including items used in Alma’s kitchen. There’s also coffee, pastries and sandwiches for takeout. 812 W. 46th St., Mpls., almaprovisions.com

Brasa: The Robertses opened the first of its fast-casual restaurants serving American-Creole food in 2007. There are now locations in southwest Minneapolis, E. Hennepin Avenue, St. Paul and Hopkins; brasa.us