They first walked into Treats nearly 20 years ago. Now it’s theirs.

Sep 4

Nearly 20 years before Emily Hughes and Joe Swifka became the owners of Treats in Wiscasset, they walked through its doors as visitors.

At the time, the couple was living in New York and making trips to Maine to camp along the coast. Emily, who grew up in Southern California, had first visited Maine as a teenager. Years later, she brought Joe.

“We both thought, this is heaven,” she remembers.

Treats was one of the places they discovered along the way. They loved the bakery, but they also noticed the large back room and imagined something more for it.

“We always thought they should do a wine bar,” Emily says.

They had no idea they would eventually be the ones to do it.

Emily and Joe spent roughly three decades working in hospitality, from Seattle and New York to Los Angeles and Arizona, doing everything from dishwashing and pizza making to bartending, managing restaurants and working in kitchens.

For years, hospitality had been “the thing to do so that we could do another thing,” Emily says. Eventually, they realized it was the thing they actually wanted to do.

The couple tested that realization by opening a small cafe and organic farm in northern Arizona. The business struggled to find its audience, but the experience clarified what they wanted next: a community that cared about local food, farms, and the people producing it.

They found that in Maine, moving to Edgecomb in 2023. And when a mutual connection later suggested they reach out to longtime Treats owner Stacy Linehan, the possibility of owning another business suddenly felt different.

“Once this opportunity presented itself, it just felt like the right thing to do,” Emily says.

When Emily and Joe took over Treats in January, they inherited a longtime staff and loyal customers who cared deeply about the bakery. So they started slowly, keeping the croissants, cookies, scones, and other baked goods people loved while adding more freshly made sandwiches and salads and baking the sandwich bread in-house each day.

Then they turned their attention to that back room.

Today, it’s a wine bar, opening at 3 p.m. with eight to 10 wines by the glass and a small dinner menu that changes constantly based on what Joe can get from nearby farms.

“I work backward from what they have,” he says.

One week might bring corn, tomatoes, peaches, and shishito peppers; another will look entirely different. Most of the vegetables and proteins come from producers within about an hour of Wiscasset.

It makes Treats the kind of place that can fit into very different parts of a day: coffee and an almond croissant in the morning, a sandwich for the drive up the coast, or a glass of wine and dinner at the end of it.

Emily and Joe know exactly how they want each visit to feel.

“We want people to come in, have some delicious food and an amazing experience,” Emily says. “We want them to leave feeling like they had a really nice time.”

FAMOUS FOR:
Taking Treats from morning til night.

80 Main St, Wiscasset, ME | treatsofmaine.com