la fin.

July 20, 2024

I’ll admit, we have cried, more than a little bit. 

I am trying my damndest - Laura and I both are - to see the light; to sit in this moment of truth, even though it’s uncomfortable, and appreciate the moments we’ve had in our little home-away-from-home at Sugarloaf.  Occasionally though, when the universe puts it so simply and so directly in my line of sight, the feelings can be overwhelming and I do shed a few tears.  They are sometimes sad tears, sometimes relief, sometimes frustration, sometimes anger.  Today though, they were a welling up and overflowing of the memories we have made; me, Laura, and you, our community.  

At this moment, it feels a bit like Laura and I are standing, winded, at the bottom of what was a long, exciting, wild, thrilling, bumpy mogul run.  Bubblecuffer, really.  We have the opportunity now, standing here before we go sliding over the next headwall, to look up the mountain at the run, the sun, and the sky - to just take it all in.  To appreciate it, to evaluate it, and to be relieved that we made it down in one piece. 

Over the last couple of months, we have gone round and round about how to be concise enough for social media but still tell you the whole truth of our closing… and we found it to be impossible.  So, if you’ve come to this page to read a little more, thank you for taking the time.  We feel that it is important to share with you, our community, why we are now choosing to close our doors and head down a different trail.  It has been an honor to be a part of this community for the last 6 years, and we want you to understand just how many facets there have been to this decision.

Entrepreneurship is … interesting.  You dream, and you wish, and most of all, you work.  You kick down the door between dreams and reality and bring your idea to fruition by sheer force of your own will.  Anyone who has operated their own business knows this, it’s not new information.  So, we wished, we dreamed and oh, did we work.  Alice & Lulu’s emerged into the light in October of 2018 ready to spread its wings..  You, our Sugarloaf community, embraced us and our fledgling idea with what I can only describe as incredible vigor.  Before we could blink, dinner reservations were sold out every night, and we had an army of regulars with standing reservations, kind, open smiles and big hearts.  We finished our first season exhausted but excited, and celebrated by buying our first house and taking a holiday in France.  Sure, we had our growing pains in that first season, but it felt like we were rolling.  We were on our way to truly “living the dream.”

As the next few seasons rolled along, we learned, and worked, and learned, and worked some more.  We had great snow seasons and seasons that were lackluster.  We had a couple of extraordinary long-term staff members, and some that came and went a season or even a few weeks at a time.  We had successes, and we made mistakes.  We learned a lot about ourselves, about our ability to adapt and our inability to accept failure.  We found ourselves fortunate to be at the helm of a flexible format in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, but in hindsight failed to recognize the ongoing personal (physical and mental health) and financial (both personal and business) toll it would take on us. We tested our resilience and that of our few devoted staff members and pushed ourselves to an unhealthy pace of work. We found ourselves perpetuating the norms of a flailing industry, even as we purported ourselves to be above the fray.  The difference was that we weren’t abusing our staff, we were abusing ourselves.  We had become the problem, and it wasn’t okay. 

In the wake of Covid-19 (which hit us at the tender mark of 18 months in business), our world has shifted.  More, I think, than many people realize.  The service industry experienced a sudden and significant reckoning with its sustainability - both the financial sustainability of the business models and the quality-of-life sustainability of its employees.  Big, famous, award winning restaurants closed one after the other, unsustainable and even abusive labor practices came to light left and right, the cost of goods began to rise, the cost of labor rose, and the business models of average restaurants were no longer financially sustainable. 

While we as an ownership team had always sought to treat and pay our staff fairly and had already been paying above the average rate for both servers and kitchen staff, we had to raise our pay rates significantly.  A  dogged (maybe ill-advised?) determination to keep our prices reasonable for our guests led us to make this shift in an unsustainable way; we kept our prices as low as we could and paid ourselves less. In the effort to not alienate our lower income local clientele while also paying our staff more and providing them enough hours, we took the hit personally.  

In the housing boom that rural Maine experienced during Covid (and continues to experience), we have constantly confronted the truth that we wouldn’t be able to pay our staff enough to live in Carrabassett Valley, Kingfield, or any of our reasonably close surrounding towns long term.  Short term “air-bnb-type” rentals were making owners more money, no one wanted long term contracts, and our potential staff members repeatedly couldn’t even get their foot in the door.  So, year after year they turned down our offers, and we struggled.  Laura and I worked six and seven days a week, anywhere from 8-12 hours or more a day, for nearly four years on end after that first season and a half.  

By April of 2023 (the close of our 5th season), I (Lex) was exhausted & burnt out.  We were not just bodily exhausted but financially broke.  We had missed innumerable birthdays, holidays, celebrations, and even a few funerals.  I was done with cooking for other people, done with the idea of “making it work.”  I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was supposed to get easier as you became more successful, not harder.  You were supposed to grow and move forward, not feel constantly like you were slipping backwards.  Why had I missed that funeral, that birthday, that graduation?  Suddenly, crushingly, I realized that my love for the food was long gone. Instead of thriving as a Chef/Owner I was simply surviving - a broken human trying to get through every day. For the last months of A&L, I wore noise cancelling headphones to work, listening to ocean sounds to fight off the panic attacks that felt like heart attacks when I walked in the restaurant doors.  That year, the business tallied more gross sales than ever before, and I felt defeated instead of elated.  

Please don’t take me the wrong way - it certainly wasn’t all bad (though Laura tells me that I sometimes make it sound that way).   We had some extraordinary moments in the time that we operated as Alice & Lulu’s.  Alongside a beautiful and ever changing cast of patrons we celebrated births & birthdays, cheered for accomplishments, provided listening ears and warm hugs in times of heartache and loss, witnessed engagements and participated in weddings … we high-fived and bought rounds of crepes for victories and team USA selections on the hill for our younger regulars, and commiserated with their losses and injuries.  We watched our customer’s children grow into young adults.  We have taken great joy and pride in the community we built, we cherish the regulars who have become lasting friends.  We have been positively thrilled to have had a venue within which to promote other local small businesses, and dollars to spend with local artists and artisans.  Though it may not serve us anymore in the way it once did, A&L is (here is another one of the hundred truths) on the whole, the single thing in our lives that we have been the most proud of.  Truly, it did not belong just to us, but also to everyone that trusted us to feed them. 

As we pivoted last fall to what we anticipated would be a slower-paced and easier to manage format in Cork & Rind, we did our best to continue the legacy of what we had built with A&L.  

With the renovation and re-opening we continued to bring in quality products from all over Maine and the world, unique wines, beautiful cheeses, all of the housemade goodies that we had been serving alongside our cheese and charcuterie boards all along, just in a take-home format instead of dine-in.  We shifted our hours, and continued to serve simple lunches made from great products.  Here’s the rub: while a small group of people was excited about the new format, it wasn’t enough.  Sure, there were busy lunches and weeks where the ends almost met, but most of the time, they didn’t.  While I convalesced with my torn ACL, Laura valiantly shouldered the weight of our world and fought tooth and nail for it.  She worked tirelessly to find a way to make it work at a pace that was dangerous to both her physical and mental health.  In the end though, there was no amount of effort that would have been enough.  The numbers weren’t there, and that’s the bare lightbulb in the room, the harshest truth.  The math just didn’t add up.

In the end we don’t see it as a failure; overall the response was positive.  With a little bit of time and distance we can see now that it was just the wrong place at the wrong time, a big change and a bad winter.

One more hard truth: from the outset, as much as we thought we were, we were not prepared to own our own business.  When we look back, we should have hired a business advisor - someone to help us navigate the ‘surge and recede' nature of operating not only a small restaurant, but one in a seasonal area in a volatile time for both the restaurant and the ski industry.  Sure, we had managed kitchens or restaurant programs before, we knew how to do basic accounting… but knowing how much debt to take on, when, and how to project what it would really cost to hire that one more person or buy that refrigerator long term… we should have asked for help.  It would have taken some of the pressure off of both of us, having a more clear plan and process.  But you know, asking for help is hard.  And sometimes it’s expensive.  But here’s the takeaway: it’ll not only cost less but also hurt less in the long term to ask than to not.   

Okay, now for some positive truths.  Enough of the tough stuff. 

Firstly, we have loved the challenge of bringing something unique to our little corner of Western Maine.  While our brick and mortar space on the ‘Loaf is no longer the right space for us, we look forward to the flexibility of being untethered.  We still LOVE creating experiential events centered around local food, wine, and overall wellness (catch us at Harvest to Huts in September, at Maine Huts & Trails!).  We will see how that continues to play out in the future.  

Secondly, we are keeping the farm going in Kingfield, and to that end we look forward to welcoming you to Ferme Louis when the time is right.  What will that look like? Well, right now, it looks like a little self service farm stand on the side of the road.  What does the future hold? We can’t look any further than this growing season just yet, but the summer squash, cucumbers and tomatoes are already starting to show themselves and we are embracing that little slice of joy for now along with bare, dirty feet, the feeling of grass between our toes and extra time with our dogs, bikes and nature.

Finally, we have learned.  Full stop.  The overarching thing here, the most positive truth we can tell, is that over the last 6 years, we have learned.  Our efforts were not without reward.  What can be more vital than learning?  We have learned from successes and failures.  We have learned how to persevere, to be flexible, to be kind when maybe we may not have been before. We have learned about ourselves and each other as individuals, about ourselves as partners, about our staff members, about your families and our community.  We have learned to better trust our instincts, and when to listen to our minds instead.  Maybe more importantly than anything, we have learned just how important self-care is, even when you’re trying so hard to care for everyone else.

Now, the time has come for us to step back, and do some of that all-important self care.  We are going to take some time to lay in the grass and re-center ourselves so that when the time comes, we can move into the next phase of our lives rested and energized. 

Until the time comes that we meet again: stay well, spread joy, and most of all be kind.  We love you and we will miss you.