At the intersection of Routes 9 and 115 in North Yarmouth sits a 544-square-foot cottage that used to rent VHS tapes. Today it holds eight seats around one communal table, a wood-fired brick oven, and a reservation list that outsiders have been fighting to get on for the better part of a year. This is The Purple House, and what's happening inside it says something specific about how this town's daily life has changed. Not that North Yarmouth is growing. Everyone already knows that. What's changed is who's driving in to eat here, and what that means for the people who already call this Village Center home.
Chef Krista Kern Desjarlais opened The Purple House in 2016 as a bakery, known first for Montreal-style bagels baked in that same brick oven. It closed during the pandemic in 2020 and stayed mostly dark for years, save for occasional pop-ups and private catering. Then, in December 2025, she reopened it as something else entirely: a reservation-only, multi-course "fancy lunch," served Thursdays through Saturdays, built around French, Italian, and Spanish influences tied to Maine ingredients, with non-alcoholic pairings and a BYOB option for wine. It is, by design, a tiny operation. It is also, by result, sold out.
What "Sold Out Through February" Actually Tells You
When Desjarlais opened ticket sales for the relaunch, the Portland Press Herald reported that reservations for December through February sold out almost immediately, with a waitlist forming on the restaurant's website and new dates for March and April not even released until February 1. That is not a local café filling its usual morning rush. That is demand outrunning eight seats at a single table, three days a week, in a town of roughly 3,800 residents.
By August 2026, the story had traveled well past North Yarmouth's borders. The Boston Globe profiled Desjarlais as one of New England's most acclaimed restaurateurs, describing a chef with seven James Beard nominations across her career, from her Portland restaurant Bresca to her seasonal ice cream shop Bresca & the Honeybee on Sabbathday Lake in New Gloucester, all converging on this one wood-fired room in North Yarmouth. The tasting menu, gluten-free start to finish, returns again this fall.
Here's the part that matters if you actually live here: a chef with that resume and that track record chose this intersection, twice, over a Portland storefront or a Freeport tourist strip. She could have built The Purple House anywhere. She built it at Routes 9 and 115, in a former video store, with room for eight chairs. If you want a table now, you are competing with strangers who read about it in a Boston paper, not just your neighbors down Walnut Hill Road.
The Café That Isn't There Anymore
For a long stretch, the actual daily gathering spot in the Village Center wasn't The Purple House at all. It was Stones Cafe & Bakery, a few hundred yards down Walnut Hill Road, tracing its lineage back more than 35 years through a series of names: Fran's, then Stones Grove Restaurant in 1989, then Stones Cafe & Bakery starting in 2006. In 2019, a restaurant-consulting partnership called Salt + Zest bought the real estate and business for $465,500, with plans to add a liquor license and dinner service on top of the muffins and cinnamon buns the place was known for.
That expansion never fully took hold. By the summer of 2021, Stones had closed for good. It is worth sitting with that, because it complicates the tidy version of this story where every Village Center business is simply riding a wave of new rooftops into permanent success. The café that functioned as the town's everyday hub for over a decade is gone. What replaced it, at least in terms of national attention, wasn't another casual breakfast spot. It was a reservation-only tasting lunch that most residents will eat at a handful of times a year, if they can get a seat at all.
That's the actual shift. North Yarmouth didn't just add a new restaurant. It swapped a walk-in, everyday café for an occasional, hard-to-book destination, and the difference changes how you plan a Thursday.
Two Ice Cream Windows, One Farm
Not every Village Center story runs through scarcity, though. Toots Ice Cream, the family-run shop that started in 1998 when the owner's mother converted an old rail car into an ice cream stand on the family farm, took the opposite approach. Rather than staying small, it expanded. The original Caboose location on Walnut Hill Road remains seasonal, open Friday through Monday from noon to 6 p.m. But in 2021, the family opened a second, year-round location at 21 Memorial Highway, a mile and a half away and just down the road from North Yarmouth Variety, so the scoop case stays open long after the Caboose shuts down for the season.
Two locations from one family business, in a town this size, tells you something the restaurant math doesn't: demand here isn't limited to a single chef's national moment. It's broad enough to support a farm stand turned two-shop operation that didn't need a magazine profile to justify doubling its footprint. If The Purple House is proof that outsiders will now drive into North Yarmouth for something rare, Toots is proof that the town itself has enough people, old and new, to keep a second scoop counter running through the winter.
The Building Boom Behind the Counter
None of this happens in a vacuum. According to a January 2026 Mainebiz report on the Village Center's growth, the area around the intersection of Routes 9 and 115 has absorbed a real wave of new rooftops in the past three years: Rangeway Lane, twenty single-family homes built by Gravier Homes that sold in the high $300,000s to low $400,000s according to listings; Stone Post Lane, seven single-family homes valued in the high $400,000 range; new rental townhouses on Memorial Highway; and Village Center Estates, a 14-home development still in progress on the opposite side of Route 115. Averill Insurance built a new office at 19 Memorial Highway. Wescustogo Hall & Community Center, the town's civic anchor at 120 Memorial Highway, was built by Portland-based Barrett Made. It's the kind of building that hosts both holiday craft fairs and, this past April, a public meeting where residents weighed in on what qualities the town's next manager should have.
That civic hall matters here because it's the one constant. Restaurants open and close. Ice cream shops expand. But Wescustogo Hall keeps functioning as the actual gathering point for the parts of town life that aren't about a reservation list, from birthday parties to town governance. It's worth knowing it's there, and worth knowing it can hold anywhere from 30 to 300 people if you're the one planning the next gathering.
What This Means If You're Already Here
Put it together and the picture isn't simply "North Yarmouth is growing," which is the version every roundup already tells you. It's that the character of what's available in the Village Center has changed shape entirely. The daily-use café that anchored the corner for a generation is gone. In its place is a nationally covered, eight-seat tasting lunch that sells out months ahead, sitting a few hundred yards from a two-location ice cream shop built on decades of unglamorous consistency, all of it circling a community hall that keeps doing the unglamorous work of holding the town together.
If you live here, that means planning further ahead for a seat at the table everyone else is now reading about, and appreciating the ice cream window that never asked for a magazine feature to stick around.
If you're weighing what a home near this corner of North Yarmouth is actually worth to you, that's a conversation grounded in exactly this kind of detail, not a median price pulled from a portal. Linda MacDonald and her team work this stretch of Cumberland County closely enough to know which changes are noise and which ones are signal. Request a complimentary home valuation and let's talk about what's actually happening on your street.
