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.
A chef-driven era
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.