The village of South Strafford includes an elementary school, a general store, a consignment store, a handful of residences and a building owned by the Masons. Over the years, the first floor of the Masons’ building has been home to a series of restaurants.
The current occupant, Hattie’s Kitchen, opened on Memorial Day weekend. For the first few months, Pat Hackett, the face of the new business, focused marketing efforts on those living and working in Strafford, a town of 1,037 residents, according to the Census Bureau.
In the past month or so, as she and her employees have established a routine, she has expanded her listserv postings to include the neighboring communities of Norwich, Thetford, Royalton, Tunbridge and Sharon.
“Strafford, itself, I don’t think is able to historically support this place,” Hackett said. “A little bit from all the surrounding communities (and) we would be able to survive.”
The obstacles to establishing a successful restaurant in a small town are many. It’s tough to find a price point and menu that will make everyone happy. Staffing levels can also be tricky. Unable to find workable business models, proprietors of three restaurants that used the space previously have closed. But, the desire to have a place to sit and enjoy a meal with friends in South Strafford persists, and Hackett hopes to outstay her predecessors.
“We have really busy days (and) kind of slow days,” Hackett said, during an interview one morning at the restaurant in late September. At the beginning of the day, it’s hard to know whether it will be busy or slow, she said.
Though Hackett’s nephew William Wilkinson owns the business, he lives in Newport, and works full time as a custodian. Hackett runs the restaurant.
For fall, the orange-colored walls were decked with leaves and a poster of sunflowers. A witch figurine sat on the floor.
Named in honor of Hackett’s great-aunt Hattie, who lived on a farm in Richmond, Vt., the restaurant’s ambiance is “homey; not pretentious,” Hackett said.
Strafford is also home to Stone Soup, a fine dining restaurant, which according to online reviews is a popular dinner destination for out-of-town visitors.
The menu at Hattie’s Kitchen features “traditional comfort foods,” she said. Pot roast with mashed potatoes and squash for dinner, fried Brussels sprouts as an appetizer and apple pie for dessert, for example.
Hackett, a West Hartford native who studied culinary arts at York Community College in Wells, Maine, enjoys baking.
Scones, muffins and cinnamon rolls are common offerings in the morning. Many of the sandwich breads — wheat, white, seven grain — are homemade.
The customers seem to have caught on to Hackett’s intended “homey” atmosphere. Seated at one table waiting for their breakfast were Reeve Williams and Sandi Anderson, of Norwich. They smiled as people walked in the door and chatted with customers at other tables.
The couple, retired Hanover High School teachers, is loyal to Isabell’s Cafe in East Thetford, but it was closed while the owners were on vacation. Williams and Anderson had heard about Hattie’s from the Norwich listserv and were glad to have made the trip. The two planned to make Hattie’s their regular spot for breakfasts on Sundays and Mondays, when Isabell’s is usually closed.
“It’s so nice to have a breakfast place,” Williams said. “It allows people to get together for a short time.”
Williams, who ordered French toast with crispy bacon, said he particularly appreciated the unobtrusive quality of the service at Hattie’s Kitchen. Coffee is self-serve and the waitstaff keep an eye out for customers’ needs without hovering. Anderson ordered a breakfast sandwich, also with crispy bacon.
Hattie’s Kitchen is at least the fourth restaurant to try to make a go of it in the South Strafford space.
Former Strafford resident Sheldon Novick, now of Norwich, worked to convert the first floor of the Mason’s building to a restaurant space in the early 1990s. Previously, the Masons used the space for social gatherings. At the time, their membership was in decline and they were enthusiastic about reviving the building, Novick said.
“We were still new in town,” Novick said, in a phone interview recently. “It was a very difficult time. There were a lot of bitter quarrels between the older families and the new arrivals.”
He saw the cafe as a way to bring together people of diverse backgrounds who lived in the same community.
“I very strongly felt that we just needed a place where, number one: People could get acquainted and have a … feeling of community,” he said. “People wanted a place to have a cup of coffee or have a meal. It’s one of the things you want to have in your town.”
Where others had been thwarted by a burdensome permitting process, Novick, an attorney who had worked previously for the Environmental Protection Agency, said he felt he was up to the task.
“Perhaps unwisely, I thought I could deal with the regulatory obstacles,” said Novick, who has written biographies of Henry James and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
In collaboration with the Masons, Novick and a group of community members drilled a well and installed a septic system, plumbing and electric wiring. They worked to make the building fire safe and handicap accessible.
Regulatory authorities thwarted early attempts to try to control costs by installing old plumbing fixtures without a licensed plumber, Novick said. They also nixed an idea to put in composting toilets, he said.
Despite the challenges, Novick and his collaborators completed the renovations, which also included planting trees and creating a parking lot.
“We got over all the hurdles and hoops,” he said.
The group organized the Strafford Community Association as a nonprofit parent entity in 1994. The following year, the South Strafford Cafe opened as a business, with Novick as the proprietor. The first floor of the Masonic hall has two rooms. Novick used one for the cafe and the association used the other as a meeting space.
The cafe — staffed by Strafford residents — served bacon, eggs and breakfast sandwiches in the morning, Sunday brunches with pancakes and waffles, and sandwiches and salads for lunch. Dinners on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights varied. Novick recalled hosting a Mexican night. There was music, and beer and wine was bring your own.
While the cafe received a “very warm response,” it was a struggle to keep it going, Novick said. “It is a very small community to support a restaurant.”
Winters were particularly tough, and Novick decided to close the cafe for the months of January and February.
While he felt the cafe helped to bring the community together “in a modest way,” it wasn’t as successful as he would have liked.
“I think it was viewed as a flatlander project, even though the landlord and the staff were very much old families,” he said.
In the late 1990s, the endeavor changed hands.
“After a while, I kind of burned out on it,” Novick said. He sold the cafe to another community group.
Strafford resident Margo Baldwin led the Community Cafe Association, which received nonprofit status in 1999.
Baldwin’s group aimed to “make it into a real community cafe,” she said in a phone interview. They focused on events and music. She recalled a particularly successful Fourth of July strawberry shortcake celebration and themed meals including those inspired by an opera performance and by a local couple’s trip to Cuba. Weekend breakfasts were popular, and a Mothers’ Day brunch once attracted 150 people, she said.
Though the group did attract some grant funds, they found it difficult to make ends meet, Baldwin said. Like Novick, Baldwin’s group found the winter was a particular challenge. Cutting back the hours the cafe was open only reduced the group’s income, she said.
Though the people who did the cooking were paid, Baldwin worked as a volunteer and that wore on her.
“It was a volunteer activity (and) it took on a life of its own,” she said. “I think its impossible to keep a small restaurant going in a town this size without having memberships or something that was an auxiliary income.”
She estimated that she lost about $20,000 of her own money in the endeavor.
“The restaurant business is a brutal business,” she said. “You need to understand the money and the cost structure of buying food … preparation; staffing. It’s not for the faint of heart.”
The cafe closed in 2001. A Lebanon nonprofit took over the association and planned to move it to Lebanon, but never ended up doing so, Baldwin said.
The Masons then rented the hall as office space for about a decade until Al Wright, who runs a gym and auto body shop in neighboring Sharon, opened Cafe 232 in 2012.
Wright had always dreamed of running a restaurant, he said in a phone interview. His best sellers included ribs, fried chicken and sandwiches, he said. He would also make people whatever they wanted for breakfast, he said.
“That’s what you’ve got to do for customers,” he said. “The better you take care of them, the more customers there are.”
He gained an education in his more than three years of running the cafe, he said. If he were to do it again, something he says he would like to do, he would make some changes.
He would prefer to own the space, buy used equipment and try to find more efficient ways to prepare food quickly with fewer people, he said. In addition, he would like to find a building where the restaurant wouldn’t be the sole source of income. Perhaps he could lease out adjacent apartments to help support the business, he said.
“I always have ideas in my head,” he said.
The space sat vacant until Hackett heard about its availability through friends and decided to make a go of it.
“I hope it works,” said Vince Robinson, the Mason’s lodge master. “I just don’t know if we have the traffic through, especially in the winter.”
If Hattie’s doesn’t work out, Robinson said he figured the Masons would convert the space back into two offices.
Despite the challenges, Melvin Coburn, co-owner of Coburn’s General Store in South Strafford and the Masons’ treasurer, said he hopes Hackett is able to keep the cafe going.
“I think it’s something the town really needs,” he said, in a phone interview.
When Coburn has friends come to visit, it’s nice to have a place to go out to eat without having to travel, he said.
In addition, the store and the restaurant can complement each other, he said. The store doesn’t have a deli and though it sells pre-prepared sandwiches, it’s nice to be able to point down the road to give customers another option, he said.
To improve on Wright’s model, Hackett said she aims to focus on good service and affordable prices. She is also buying local food when possible from area farms.
She is open to suggestions from community members. As a result of such suggestions, Hackett said she is sure to offer a vegetarian option for the weekend dinners.
Also with a mind to the community, Hackett said she tries not to compete with other events such as church suppers.
Options for the future include expanding the baked goods to include cakes, and hosting events such as birthdays, baby showers or group meetings.
Hackett, who currently rents in North Pomfret, would also like to move closer to her workplace.
Hackett is working with Rachel Claffey, who used to work in the kitchen at South Strafford’s Newton School and occasionally helped Wright at Cafe 232.
While there is a lot of support for the cafe, Claffey said what has been missing in the past is a workable business model. The town has both low and high income residents and it can be tricky to find a price point and meals to suit both groups.
“We try to go in the middle,” she said.
More information about Hattie’s Kitchen can be found on the restaurant’s Facebook page.
Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
Correction
The Strafford Town Office and the Stone Soup restaurant are located in the upper village of Strafford. Their locations were incorrectly described in an earlier version of this story.
