Life in the restaurant business, to borrow a phrase coined in another context, can be nasty, brutish and short.
All three could apply to short-lived Isaac B’s Diner that for a brief five months occupied the former farmhouse location of Ariana’s on Route 10 in Orford.
As the Valley Newsreported earlier this month, the 28-seat eatery opened in March and dished up an “exuberant fusion menu” that included Bluetine — a take on poutine except the french fries were covered in blue cheese — and quickly gained notice by Upper Valley foodies with a menu that spanned breakfast staples like eggs and hash to lunch and dinner platters inspired by global cuisine.
On July 7, less than a week after our story ran, Isaac B’s closed.
So what happened?
Not surprisingly, the answer depends on whom I ask — the owner of the restaurant, Hal Covert of Peaked Moon Farm in Piermont or the chef-couple he employed to operate Isaac B’s, Dave Eagle and Melanie Gregg.
One thing both parties agree on, however, is that it was Covert’s decision to end the relationship.
“We were shut down by our employer on 7/7,” Eagle said in a text response when I reached out to him about the sudden closing of Isaac B’s. “All I’ll say is we had ongoing issues with him. There are legitimate gripes on both sides but I don’t think it’s appropriate to go into any further detail.”
Eagle and Gregg relocated to Orford from California after responding to an ad on Craigslist that Covert had posted looking for restaurateurs to take over for chef Martin Murphy, who decamped Ariana’s to the Lyme Inn last year.
Covert apparently had some issues with Eagle and Gregg as well.
He confirmed in a telephone interview that he showed up that Sunday afternoon after the lunch shift to pull the plug.
“It was a disaster,” he said of the short-lived venture. “I chose poorly.”
Covert leases the 165-acre property, now named the Bickford Homestead, from Bradford, Vt., dairy farmer Paul Knox.
He said he is now regrouping with Knox to decide whether and how to try again with another restaurant at the Isaac B’s location, which a carriage house on the property next to a red brick farmhouse.
The sunlight streamed into the bright and airy dill-green interior of the corner shop in downtown Hanover as workmen finished building shelves and freshly laid carpeting muffled footsteps.
Welcome to Hanover’s first store for organic plant-based health therapies and CBD products, AroMed Essentials, opening Aug. 3, in the former location of crafts store Folk on Allen Street and the latest in a cluster of new retail shops sprouting downtown after several mainstays closing in recent years.
“I’ve always liked Hanover and the vibe of college towns,” said AroMed Essentials owner Lauren Andrews, a former psych nurse who launched a second career as a plant-based health and organic products entrepreneur. “When I saw the old Folk space was available, I knew I had to be here.”
Patrons of Folk won’t recognize the inside of the store, which was squeezed with craft merchandise and is now awash in natural light thanks to the uncovering of a long-blocked-out bay window on the west side of the building.
Andrews, a Barre resident who opened her first AroMed store in Montpelier in 2013 and her second store in Berlin Mall last year, said the new Hanover store will sell a variety of essential and aromatic oils, lotions and plant-derived health and beauty products along with CBD topicals, tinctures and “vapes” that are intended to treat everything from pain to anxiety, stress and depression.
“A lot of people are seeking CBD products, but most sellers don’t have the educational background to address the questions that come our way,” said Andrews, who holds a professional certificate from the University of Vermont’s online Cannabis Science and Medicine program. “When people come to us, they will get the correct information.”
Unlike her stores in Vermont, however, the Hanover location will not sell CBD-infused edibles or beverages, which are banned in the Granite State.
“That is really unfortunate because a lot of people get great pain and stress reduction” from CBD edibles, Andrews said.
Andrews’ retail store, online and wholesale CBD business has grown so quickly that she’s opened up her own production facility in Montpelier where she compounds CBD sourced from organic Vermont farms with essential oils into products such as tinctures, massage oils and bath bombs.
AroMed Essentials also includes a corner of the store for some of the craft products that Folk sold, such as Indian tapestries, handbags, jewelry and artwork in addition to AroMed’s gemstones, yoga and meditation supplies.
Although many people have pronounced retail stores a dying business, Andrews said that is not her experience.
“I’ve probably had 12 people walking past and poke their head in here in the past four hours to ask what’s going on,” Andrews said last week while getting things ready in her Hanover store. “That’s very encouraging. I have a good feeling about this,” she said.
The Upper Valley Music Center, which relocated into the historic Kendrick-Wood House facing Colburn Park in Lebanon in 2017, unveiled a new logo and redesigned website pegged to the music education organization’s 25th anniversary.
The new logo — which features two red dots symbolizing students at weekly lessons placed next to the silhouette of a house to represent UVMC as a “home” for music education, was developed by students in the design program at School of Visual Arts in New York City overseen by the brand identity firm Chermayeff, Geismar & Haviv.
Melissa Lientz, an Edward Jones financial adviser, has opened a new office at the Scytheville Row business plaza on Newport Road in New London. Lientz, who has been affiliated with Edward Jones since 2000 and moved to New London from Colorado three years ago, was previously operating out of her own home and said the new space will heighten the visibility of Edward Jones and allow for “more professionalism” in providing service
Two South Royalton former educators, Elisa Latreille and Myra Hudson, have banded together and launched Kiteroas, a marketing communications firm that produces one- to three-minute custom hand-drawn “whiteboard” videos that “take complex ideas and break them down into a simple message to attract customers.”
Kiteroas, which began as an editing company for technical briefs, already has produced storyboard sketch videos for such clients as cloud service providers Datatility and Cloudistics, among others.
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
Correction
Martin Murphy is the chef of Ariana’s Restaurant in Lyme. His first n ame was incorrectly reported in the Bottom Line column in the Sunday Valley News.
