Struggling White River Junction restaurants hoping to serve up outdoor dining this summer could be facing an al fresco fiasco.
After seeing their businesses pounded by the pandemic last summer, downtown restaurant owners are frustrated over plans by the town of Hartford to proceed with a $5 million infrastructure project that will tear up the street through the heart of the village and force them to shut down on-street dining for the second half of the summer.
The decision to move forward with the infrastructure project, which seeks to address aging water and sewer lines, amounts to a double whammy for businesses along South and North Main streets that have struggled to draw customers through the pandemic.
“We were just was getting back on our feet,” said Justin Barrett, co-owner of Piecemeal Pies on South Main Street, who is worried how the infrastructure project will keep customers away. “Maybe a pandemic year is not the best time to do this.”
Unhappiness among White River Junction restaurant owners comes as Lebanon and Hanover have moved aggressively to shore up their restaurant market by again setting aside parking spaces and sidewalk spaces for outdoor dining tables.
Introduced to help restaurants stay open when indoor capacity was limited due to COVID-19, the move turned out to be wildly popular among restaurant operators and patrons alike, drawing customers jittery over dining indoors to tables set up under tents in what are normally parking spaces.
“Outdoor dining made us a whole restaurant,” said Nigel Leeming, owner of Murphy’s on the Green in Hanover.
Murphy’s could serve 60 people in front of the South Main Street tavern last summer, and Leeming this week is opening a new restaurant, impasto, also in Hanover in the former Market Table space.
“Outdoors made people feel safe,” he said. “It was huge.”
Although White River Junction’s infrastructure project has been in the works for years and was even postponed from last summer because of the pandemic, village businesses contend that the coming disruption from construction coincides with the small window they have to recover revenue lost during the pandemic because customers stayed home.
“We have only done 30% of the business in the first quarter we had projected to do and lost $110,000 over the past 14 months,” Piecemeal Pies’Barrett said of Piecemeal Pies. He called on-street dining “the one chance we have to get back to something like normal.”
The issue of how Hartford would handle on-street dining this summer boiled up during the May 4 Selectboard meeting where Piecemeal Pies and Tuckerbox were seeking to renew their permits to serve alcoholic beverages to on-street patrons.
Although both the on-street serving space and alcohol permits were quickly approved last year, recently appointed Hartford Town Manager Tracy Yarlott-Davis raised several potential glitches during the meeting, warning that last year’s arrangements might not have complied with government regulations — she noted that the barriers to cordon off the on-street dining space didn’t “conform to federal standards” — in addition to relaying her staff’s concerns over safety, liability, impact and cost.
Hartford’s town departments, including the fire marshal and Public Works, brought forth several potential issues with on-street dining, Yarlott-Davis said, from hindering access to fire hydrants and building occupants’ ability to exit in the case of a fire to the burden of added customer capacity on the town’s sewer system.
“Technically, an increase in occupancy must be accompanied by a wastewater allocation permit from the state,” she noted, warning “there is only so much wastewater we can put in our system and still maintain compliance with our clean water standard.”
Although Yarlott-Davis emphasized that she was merely relaying the concerns raised by town staff and did not give a formal recommendation on-street dining, she nonetheless scheduled the topic as an “informational item” for the Selectboard’s consideration because staff had been receiving inquires about the town’s plan’s.
Tuckerbox owner Jackie Oktay said she has been frustrated over what she said has been Hartford’s slow response to businesses seeking clarity on-street dining in White River Junction. She called on-street dining this summer “a matter of survival” for the restaurant that she and her husband, Vural Oktay, have operated for eight years.
“There are a large number of people even still to this day who will not go inside,” she said. “Every day I get guests asking why we haven’t set up outdoor seating.”
Yarlott-Davis said the slow start is partly due to the town’s order of a $4,000 “clamp” to move and place the concrete Jersey barriers that mark off and protect on-street dining spaces. Crews were out Thursday morning setting them up.
Still, she said, the town would permit on-street dining only until “phase two” of the infrastructure project, set to begin in late July or early August, out of safety concerns for outdoor diners.
“It’s going to include extensive heavy equipment as we dig into the road, and we’re talking sidewalk-to-sidewalk, down multiple feet of road” and the “proposed on-street dining spaces (will be) at risk from debris, noise and dust,” Yarlott-Davis told the Selectboard.
In a phone interview last week, Yarlott-Davis said the infrastructure project cannot be delayed because doing so would jeopardize state funding to help pay for the project.
“We could lose this funding if we put it off. The money comes with constraints. We have to do it, unfortunately,” she said.
Oktay said she is “not against” the infrastructure project, just the timing. “I know it needs to get done,” even noting there have been times when problems with the antiquated water and sewer lines have led to the restaurant’s water being cut off while the issue was fixed.
Meanwhile, the situation in outdoor dining is markedly different in Lebanon and Hanover. Officials in both municipalities moved quickly to make sure on-street dining in the heart of downtown would be open by early April — and restaurants responded.
“Last year we had two weeks to get ready,” said Lebanon City Manager Shaun Mulholland about finding such things as vinyl fencing and barriers to create the spaces for dining outside restaurants (they were purchased from a supplier in Arizona).
For this year, city officials began meeting with restaurant owners last fall to discuss tweaks and improvements to outdoor dining, which Mulholland said he sees becoming a permanent feature going forward.
This summer, in addition to Salt hill Pub and Three Tomatoes Trattoria again setting up tables on the Lebanon Mall and under a tent on Court Street, Lalo’s Taqueria, which took over the space of the former Lebanon Diner, will place tables on the mall, and Mulholland said he expects Village Pizza to do the same once the rail tunnel construction that has disrupted the area is completed.
“We’re going to have a much more lively mall than we’ve had in the past that’s going to create a whole new vibe of al fresco dining,” Mulholland said. Among the moves under discussion to add “more life and vitality” to the scene is to have an artist paint the pavement on Court Street where Three Tomatoes sets its tent.
And across from the northeast corner of Colburn Park, Lucky’s Coffee Garage has erected a tent and greatly increased its outdoor dining from picnic tables by adding four-seat tables to accommodate up to 40 customers, owner Deb Shinnlinger said.
Lucky’s inside space has been closed during the pandemic and customers have been ordering online, but ordering at the counter will open in June — masks required — although a reduced online menu will continue for people uneasy with entering the cafe.
“We will keep with outside seating exclusively for the foreseeable future,” Shinnlinger said via email. “At some point we will likely get back to inside seating, but we don’t know when we’ll feel comfortable with that … an expanded patio seems like a happy and safe medium as we all navigate this transition.”
Hanover is perhaps the Upper Valley downtown that’s taken the concept of on-street dining the furthest and baked it into the town’s plans to support restaurants.
After 14 months in a pandemic that felled many of its eateries — Morano Gelato, Salt hill Pub, Skinny Pancake, Noodle Station and Market Table — the town is seeing a spurt of new restaurants opening: In addition to impasto, Dunk’s Sports Grill and The Nest are emerging as well.
Rob Houseman, Hanover’s director of planning, zoning and codes, said he is drafting a ordinance to go before the Selectboard perhaps as early as next month that would set out regulations to make on-street dining a permanent seasonal feature of the town.
The on-street tents and tables in parking spaces are already erected along South Main Street for Murphy’s, Lou’s and Boloco and sidewalk tables for Molly’s. This summer, Still North Books will add four dining tables on the sidewalk of its storefront on Allen Street, doubling the four tables it had last year on its patio.
“With our food menu up and running again and beer and wine hopefully not too far behind, we are seeing the patio fill up, so I’m looking forward to having more seats to offer,” Still North Books owner Allie Levy said. “I hope we’ll have the sidewalk seating ready to go by Memorial Day.”
Houseman said the proposed Hanover ordinance envisions creating “parklets” that will take into account the specific location of each restaurant, and whether there are parking spaces on the street in front or if there is only a sidewalk.
“Our initial reaction to the pandemic last year was to make sure we ensured the economic viability of South Main Street,” Houseman said. “As the experiment matured, we realized there was an opportunity to go beyond the pandemic and enhance the community.”
Hanover’s approach is also being driven by long-term trends that have seen retail stores, once the prime reason for visiting downtown, disappear in the age of online shopping.
Houseman noted that making seasonal on-street dining a permanent fixture downtown dovetails with the town’s review of how to help South Main Street evolve for the post-retail economy. Last year town officials presented various options to the Selectboard for consideration, including one that would make sidewalks flush with the street to make it easier for restaurants to have outdoor dining tables.
“My hope is the proposed ordinance will allow the individual vendors or restaurants to display their unique character by formalizing outdoor dining and expanding our outdoor living room, which is Main Street,” Houseman said.
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.
