Creating Community Through Food
Anna Hymanson ’12 finds pleasure in the “regular”
BY LARRY CLOW
For Anna Hymanson ’12, there are few things better than being a regular. It’s a simple pleasure, dropping into a café or bar where you know the folks behind the counter and they know you (and your favorite drink).
“I love ‘regular culture,’” she says. “I love being a regular, and I loved having regulars when I worked in restaurants all through my 20s. It feels really good.” One of those places, where Hymanson was both a regular and had regular customers, was Martha, a Philadelphia bar. When she was off work and needed to get out of her tiny studio apartment, she’d walk across the street to Martha to grab her usual spot on a comfy couch, knowing a good meal and chance encounters with friends awaited.
It’s a feeling she looks forward to creating for others in Waldoboro, Maine, where Hymanson and a business partner are on track to open the Dayboat Café in spring 2026. The business is a “daily store,” she says, a place where residents can get a cup of coffee or a bottle of wine, pick up the local newspaper and a dozen eggs, and see friends and catch up on the latest town gossip.
“There are a lot of ways to create community,” Hymanson says. “And I think food is such an easy way to do that — everyone loves a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich.”
She sees the café as the next logical step in her career. In 2023, Hymanson began a consulting business and advised restaurants on the hard and soft skills behind hospitality. Creating an atmosphere where customers feel welcome and cared for is complex and involves everything from designing a space and choosing the right staff to knowing how to budget and set prices that are affordable and keep the restaurant in business.
“My career has been about gathering as many superpowers as I could,” Hymanson says. Whenever she encountered an aspect of the industry that she didn’t fully understand, she found a way to develop those skills with direct experience.
Hymanson grew up in York, Maine, and knew that she wanted to return to her home state after college. She studied neuroscience and public health at Tufts University, focusing on the connection between access to food and public health. It’s a topic with an almost endless number of threads to follow, according to Hymanson, and rather than pursuing just one thread, Hymanson wanted to explore the idea of food systems broadly and deeply. To do so, she worked at nonprofits and community health centers, farmed vegetables and apprenticed at a butcher shop. “I wanted to learn what a sustainable meat industry looks like, and I accidentally fell in love with the subject,” she says.
That path brought her back to Maine, where she managed the butcher shop and local foods market at The Rooting Pig at Broad Arrow Farm in Bristol. There, she built the skills she would eventually apply to her consulting business: determining goals to drive profitability and efficiency, sourcing products, creating marketing strategies, and hosting private dinners and large-scale gatherings.
At Broad Arrow she saw up close how food systems are intimately intertwined with — and deeply influence — communities. “If every person in a supply chain is someone local, it can be a beautiful thing. When I know who grew my food, or know the truck driver who brought it from the farm to the co-op, if I know the person who packaged it or who cooked it and put it on a plate for me, it strengthens the community both economically and socially,” she says.
Hymanson credits her time at SPS with fostering her sense of community — a direct influence on her vision for her café. “St. Paul’s really taught me about the importance of leaning on people in your community for support,” she says. “Everything from borrowing a dress for Seated Meal or asking teachers for help with homework, it was all an important part of my time there and has carried on through my life.”
Hymanson is looking forward to using the superpowers that she’s honed and shared with others in her own space. “I’m excited to get my friends and the whole community involved, and I’m excited to welcome people.”