Editor’s note: This story by Alex Hanson first appeared in the Valley News on June 18.
For weeks, Andrew Schain tried to find someone to run the Public House Diner, a classic diner in Quechee that he’s been leasing since 2017. His posts on Facebook were frequent and plaintive.
“Everything you need to open is here,” he wrote on May 4, the last post on the diner’s page.
By the last week of May, with a decision to make about whether to renew the lease, Schain opted out.
“We actually decided just this week to close down that diner,” Schain, who also runs the nearby Public House Restaurant, said in a phone interview. To open the diner up for the summer, he would need 20 to 25 people, a manager, cooks, waiters, dishwashers. Those people didn’t materialize, and Schain needs to concentrate on the restaurant.
“I didn’t have the ability to be in multiple places at one time,” he said.
That these are tough times for businesses in need of employees is by now well-documented. Restaurants, in particular, have struggled, and diners might have had it the worst. Small spaces that rely on heavy traffic and a friendly, hard-working staff, diners need the right ingredients to keep operating. Those qualities also made them the most vulnerable to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Diners originated outside the giant mills of Rhode Island more than a century ago and were meant to feed workers cheaply and quickly. Since then, they’ve held onto their working-class, democratic appeal, while evolving into places where patrons become regulars and find a sense of community as well as nourishment.
Where Schain has opted out, two diners that have had a rough go of it are hoping for a comeback with new ownership: The Tumble Inn Diner in Claremont, New Hampshire, which was shut down last July by an arson fire. and the Fairlee Diner, one of the Upper Valley’s oldest diners, which closed at the beginning of April.
Both have a lot of history behind them, and a lot of would-be customers eager for a return.
“I’m 73 and it’s been around since I’ve been here,” Fairlee resident Nancy Ward, a member of the family that owns Chapman’s General, said recently of the Fairlee Diner. The closing has had “a major impact,” she said. Fairlee has other restaurants, but the diner was the only breakfast place in town.
A tumble into hard times
Trucked up Route 12 from the Worcester (Mass.) Lunch Car Co., in 1941, Claremont’s Tumble Inn has been in the same spot ever since. Deb Kirby purchased it in January 1997 and added the name of her father’s diner in Hatboro, Penn., calling it Daddypops Tumble Inn Diner. True to its owner’s Pennsylvania roots, the diner might have been the only place in the Upper Valley that served scrapple.
To say that the diner has fallen on hard times would make Charles Dickens blush.
The pandemic took a toll, but even that global misfortune was overshadowed by one closer to home: the death of Cassie Carter, the youngest of Kirby’s three daughters, in December 2020. She was struck by a car in Arkansas, Fallon Carter, her eldest sister, said in an interview.
The death left Deb Kirby reeling. The insurance lapsed on the diner, according to Carter.
So when the diner was set on fire last July, Kirby tried to rebuild with help from the community and out of her own pocket.
“She went broke fixing it,” Carter said, adding that she helped her mother sell a car to pay an electrician.
Then Kirby had a heart attack and died and the money from selling the car paid for her funeral.
Fallon, 37, and her sister, Laura, 35, are trying to get the diner in shape to reopen. Fallon, who spent much of her teen years working at the diner, said she’d like to see it be a family business again.
“I’m really trying my ultimate best to stay focused and get this project up and running,” she said.
Ownership of the diner still has to move through the probate process, she added.
“Even if this doesn’t work out, it will increase the value of the diner,” Carter said.
No substitute for hard work
In the current environment, there are rewards for running a diner, but only if you put the work in.
That’s the assessment of Nicole Bartner, who opened the Hartland Diner in April 2013 and managed it through the pandemic. She’s the cook, the bookkeeper, the vice president for human resources and pretty much any other job title you could name. Her diner, a tiny space with a counter and several booths in Hartland Three Corners, is thriving, and she’s tired.
“The problem with the diner business is you’re selling eggs,” she said — restaurants make a lot of their money on alcohol sales, she noted. “And it’s the Upper Valley; it’s not like Manhattan. There’s not 8 million people.”
But even without 8 million people, the diner is busier than it’s ever been, she said. She recently compared her average daily sales through this point in 2019 with this year and “the increase is something like 40%.”
“If you want a full-service, sit-down breakfast, there aren’t a lot of options,” she said, perhaps because so many other diners are closed.
Bartner puts a lot of effort into her diner, both in setting out how she wants it to run, and in just flat-out working.
That includes staying active on social media. Her diner’s Facebook page features a mission statement that explains the diner and its alignment with the ongoing movement for social justice.
“I think you have to get on there and work it,” Bartner said.
‘The right fit here’
There aren’t many traces of the Fairlee Diner on Facebook or other social media sites, but it probably didn’t need the exposure. First established on the other side of Fairlee’s main drag in 1937, when a Worcester diner arrived, most likely by train, the diner quickly expanded and then was moved across and slightly up the road, where it sits next to a wide gravel parking lot.
Phone messages left for Ray Gilman, who operated the diner from 1996 until April, were not returned.
Janice Neil plans to reopen the diner as Jan’s Fairlee Diner. Neil lives in Topsham and runs the seasonal Thirty Trails Cafe at the Dartmouth Skiway in Lyme, New Hampshire.
There’s a lot of work to do to satisfy the state Department of Health, so the opening date is uncertain, Neil said in a phone interview. She’d been working her summer job in the kitchen at Lake Morey Inn when a colleague told her about the diner. She met with Gilman and is now in a lease-to-own agreement.
“He goes, ‘You know, I think you’re the right fit for here,’” Neil said.
Neil grew up in the Bradford area and her entire career after graduating from Oxbow High School is in food, starting as a dishwasher and working her way up.
“I just have a passion for food,” she said.
The diner will continue to serve breakfast and lunch, with hours from 6:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Once she gets it running smoothly, she might set up a dinner here and there.
Fairlee residents are eager to see it reopen. The diner dates to 1937, when Ernest and Evelyn Corpieri installed the Worcester diner. They sold it to Maurice Roberts in 1938.
He put a new roof over the diner and then removed the dining car itself from the building, and it was Roberts who moved it across Route 5, where it was a magnet for travelers in the pre-interstate era.
Roberts died in 1949, and his son, Maurice “Sonny” Roberts, then still in his late teens, took it over. Take this with a grain of salt, but Sonny was a town selectman for many years, “and much town business was done at the diner,” the historical society’s account says. The diner was sold to Tom McCarthy in 1989, and it’s unclear whether there was another owner before Gilman took over in 1996.
Residents miss it. Neil said six to eight cars stop by daily while she’s working on the diner, just to check if it’s open yet.
“It’s an amenity for the community,” selectboard chair Peter Berger told the Valley News.
Hiring staff hasn’t been a big challenge, Neil said. A line cook just walked in the door, she said. A Facebook post yielded 15 leads, from high school students up to seasoned pros.
Not ready to go
That other diners are being pushed toward reopening and the Public House Diner is not is an unfortunate anomaly. It’s one of the most sumptuous diners the Worcester Lunch Car Co., ever produced.
Built in 1946, the expansive “streamliner” diner operated as the Ross Diner in Holyoke, Mass., where it served workers at several large companies in a city that grew up around paper mills on the Connecticut River.
The diner moved north in 1990, first to Lebanon, New Hampshire, then, under the ownership of Gary Neil (no relation to Janice), to Quechee Gorge Village. Over the years it’s been known as the Yankee Diner, Farmers Diner, and since 2017, Public House Diner. Neil sold it, along with the rest of the development, to Burlington real estate investor Rick Bove in 2018.
Efforts to reach Bove were unsuccessful.
Schain called it “a diner’s diner,” but he also put a premium on local food. It served burgers made from local Cloudland Farm beef, and bacon smoked in the Upper Valley.
“2019 was like a great year,” he said. “We thought we were going to be successful over there.”
The coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent worker shortage did it in.
Flexibility is crucial for a diner, Gary Neil said. When he owned the Quechee diner, some of the operators struggled to staff up in the summer and then cut staff down in the winter, when tourist traffic died down.
The pandemic was another exercise in flexibility. Theresa Taylor, owner-operator of Dan’s Windsor Diner, often ran the diner solo, or with only her father, who bought the diner and then sold it to her in 2008, helping out.
“I don’t have anybody on full time right now,” she said.
As with the Hartland Diner, the Windsor Diner has been busy, now that people are eager to eat out again. The lunch crowd emerges at 11.
“People are trying to beat the lunch rush, because there’s nowhere to eat,” Taylor said.
Like other diners in the Upper Valley, the Windsor Diner is in transition, but it isn’t under stress. Taylor wants to sell it, not because she has to but because she wants to open a restaurant in Claremont, where she grew up and has other business interests.
“This diner is in phenomenal shape,” she said.
With other diners in the Upper Valley in distress, that’s a reason to be optimistic about the restaurant model’s future. Diner operators, and patrons, take heart.
