A popular downtown restaurant that has served up comfort food for several years will soon be closing up shop.
After nearly six years in business, The Cheesy Pickup will be closing its doors on Jan. 20 as owners Graham and Helina Stark look forward to retirement.
With a 30-year career as a firefighter, as well as six years in the restaurant business, Graham said he and his wife feel it’s the appropriate time to step back as restaurateurs.
“When we set out, we wanted to have some fun and we wanted to offer good food at a reasonable price. I think we accomplished that,” he said. “Basically, we're going to sit back and take a little … more time to ourselves.”
Despite consistently good reviews on its variety of creative grilled cheeses and other offerings, Stark also noted the restaurant business, broadly, has not recovered as well from the pandemic as he had hoped, with food prices consistently climbing over the past few years.
“Our premise was to offer value and then a good fair price, and now things are just getting so expensive that it's difficult to hold the prices down to a reasonable level,” he said. “We are not unique in those challenges.”
That said, the business has been able to overcome the challenges thrown its way.
“We've certainly not been without our challenges here, from a truck driving into the front door, to COVID, and numerous issues, shall we say, that have arisen over the years, but we've managed to overcome all of those,” he said.
Looking back on his time running the business, Stark said the customers are what he will miss the most.
“We’ve had some fantastic customers — we have customers that are thoughtful and they bring in things for us,” he said. “We like to banter, and when we're not busy we're chatting back and forth with them. It’s those interactions that we'll miss the most.”
Though there have been challenges, Stark said that, at the end of the day, running The Cheesy Pickup has been a worthwhile endeavour he would likely do again if the clock turned back.
“We've had a blast,” he said.
“Would we do it again? We have talked about it, and we probably would have,” he said. “There's things we would have done differently. I had zero experience in this business, and I was basically learning on the fly.”
