WEST LEBANON — For the past 35 years, the Shorey family has owned the Four Aces Diner, and for much of that time, Leann Briggs and Steven Shorey have run the place.
But everyone’s working days come to an end. The diner, open on and off in West Lebanon since 1952, is for sale.
“We talked to a Realtor a year ago,” Briggs said. A couple of months ago, “we decided, time’s up.”
The asking price for the business and property is $1.2 million.
A buyer would get one of the busiest and best-loved establishments in the Upper Valley. On the weekends, there’s often an hourlong wait for a booth. According to Shorey, the diner goes through about 500 dozen eggs a week.
“We’ve worn out a few chickens,” he said.
Shorey and Briggs are siblings; he’s eight years older. Growing up, there were three other siblings and 15 foster kids in their family’s West Lebanon home. Frank Shorey, their late father, was in real estate. He bought the diner as an investment not long after then-owners Phil Mans and James Burnham moved Worcester Lunch Car No. 837 down the hill from the corner of Main and Dana streets to clear the way for a bank branch. Mans and Burnham had an apartment building torn down to make room for the diner, and built around it the structure that’s still there today, Briggs said.
“It was her idea to open it,” Shorey said. Briggs said she opened it in 1991. Shorey had a lot of food service experience, his sister none.
“We ran out of food the first day at noon,” she said, an event that left her in tears.
The diner’s previous owners — Dot Gomez, who ran it from 1965 to 1985, the most notable among them — had built up a steady clientele, and people were glad to have the diner open again.
Briggs left the business in 1996, after her son, Rob, was killed as he walked home on Route 5 in Hartford from his girlfriend’s house. The crime remains unsolved. From 1998 to 2007 or so, the diner was leased to Rick Clark.
After a subsequent operator couldn’t make a go of it, Briggs and Shorey planned to sell the diner in 2010. They were told that the business would be worth more if they opened it back up and sold it as a going concern.
When they reopened in 2011, they didn’t tell anyone and still served dozens of patrons (recollections differ) on their first day. Rather than sell it, they kept going.
“Personally, I like the place,” Shorey said.
His memories are here. When the Valley News started its Saturday paper, which came out in the morning instead of the afternoon, as the weekday papers did, Shorey delivered up and down Main Street. By the time he was heading home, he was chilled, and he stopped at the Four Aces, then still on Main Street, for a hot chocolate.
Friday morning at the diner, he pointed to the elbow marks on the counter. “If you get down where the popular seats are, these get really deep,” he said. Seventy years of elbows will do that.
The fundamentals of running a diner haven’t changed much. The backs of the T-shirts worn by staff say “Food That Pleases, since 1952.” Homemade doughnuts and corned beef hash, liver with bacon and onions, vinegar pie and other Yankee staples are all there, along with the omelets and burgers.
For “70 years it’s been doing what it’s doing and we’re still serving approximately 2,000 people a week,” Shorey said.
The two are hopeful that whoever buys it will keep the diner going.
“If it was up to me, I’d be here forever, but I just can’t do it anymore” Shorey said. “I would hope they would keep it as a diner.”
Briggs added that “I think it would be a huge mistake for them to try and do anything different.”
Seated near the end of the counter Friday morning, Cindy Danner agreed.
“I love everything here,” she said. “We celebrate birthdays, me and my girlfriends, we like to come here. The booths are roomy.”
Danner knows whereof she speaks, having run Cindy’s, a pizza and grinder shop, on Pleasant Street in Woodstock in the 1980s.
On Friday she had come to West Lebanon from her home in Enfield to shop, and the diner is part of her routine.
“I get the same thing, a waffle and a side of bacon, stuff I don’t cook at home,” she said, adding “the food is always good.”
Like most diners, the Four Aces has had its ups and downs. It has always served breakfast and lunch, but efforts at dinner service made for long days. For a time, the siblings tried to keep it open 24 hours.
“I was going home and taking naps between shifts,” Briggs said.
Even within the limits of breakfast and lunch, a diner can be hard to keep up with.
“This is a small business, but it’s a huge business,” Briggs said. On the weekend, 500 people might pass through the diner’s doors between the hours of 7 a.m. and 2 p.m.
The Four Aces has 17 employees, including the two owners, Briggs said. “Everybody chips in and gets the job done,” she said, noting that no employees have left since the place went up for sale. In the current environment for finding workers, a new operator will need them, she said.
Whoever purchases the business will own all the equipment, recipes, dishes, silverware, decor and the building.
“It’s all or nothing” Briggs said, calling it a “turn-key” operation. There have been several inquiries but no serious buyers just yet.
Briggs and Shorey decided to put The Four Aces up for sale after taking a hit through the COVID-19 pandemic. Shorey began experiencing health complications that curtailed his working hours. The burden fell on Briggs, who was then faced with staffing shortages.
Currently the diner is closed on Wednesdays because of hiring shortages.
“We’ve given up, in the summer, a couple hundred covers a day” Shorey said, because they could not fully staff the kitchen, outdoor seating and the to-go portion of the business.
Briggs said her hope is, “For somebody to come in and continue. ... If you change it up too much you’re going to be closing the doors pretty quickly,” she said.
On Dec. 6 the Four Aces will celebrate its 70th birthday with retro pricing for hot dogs (25 cents!), hamburgers and fries.
“It’s pretty special,” Briggs said. “Every town has a McDonald’s, but there’s only one town that has a Four Aces.”
Laura Koes can be reached at laurakoesjournalism@gmail.com.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.