SOUTH ROYALTON — To the unknowing passerby walking down Chelsea Street last week, RB’s Delicatessen may have looked like a business on its way out of town.
A large dumpster outside the store was filled to the brim with garbage and discarded odds and ends, while inside, Brenda Cohen, the building’s owner and RB’s original founder, was busy cleaning out the deli with the help of a handful of friends.
“This was overwhelming. There was no way we were going to let (Cohen) tackle it on her own,” Mike Barnaby, a Tunbridge resident who’s known Cohen since he was a kid, said while using a razor blade to scrape a Monster Energy decal off a store window.
But in spite of appearances, RB’s isn’t going anywhere. It is, however, getting a new owner. Daisey Darling, who had owned the South Royalton deli since 2014 with her now ex-husband Anthony Salls, decided to close the business in December as the pair went through a divorce and the business struggled to be profitable.
After closing the deli, she asked Cohen to “take the store back,” Darling said. It wasn’t long before Cohen found a new person to take up the reins. Cohen declined to name the new owner because she said the person wasn’t ready to be identified publicly.
Cohen and her late husband Roger Cattabriga opened RB’s on South Royalton’s main drag in 1991. Over the years, the store has become a reliable spot to get a quick lunch, a carton of cigarettes or a pack of beer.
Darling, a Royalton native, got a job at RB’s when she was 18. When she found work in construction soon after, she kept the job at RB’s to tie her over during the winter off-season.
When Cohen decided to retire and devote her time to her dream of raising her Irish Setters for national competitions, Darling and Salls purchased the business for $200,000.
“I was excited to own something and contribute more to the community,” Darling said.
When Darling took over RB’s, she was no stranger to life in a family-run business. At age 7, she started helping out at her parents’ sawmill on Waterman Road in Royalton. Working there was “always so fun,” Darling said.
Running RB’s gave her an opportunity to give back to her hometown.
Pam Levasseur, a member of the Royalton and Area Lions Club, said Darling used her connections with a purveyor to secure discounted ingredients for the club’s burger booth at the town’s annual Old Home Days.
“She did so much for the community,” Levasseur said.
Darling also ran a pay-it-forward system at RB’s where customers could buy a grocery item such as a carton of milk or a can of soup, and leave a note indicating that it had been paid for so someone else could take it home for free.
Open until 9 or 9:30 p.m. depending on the day, RB’s also was a reliable place to get the odd ingredient or household item when other stores such as the nearby South Royalton Market had closed for the day.
RB’s “has been a staple here for years,” Sherri Michaud said while cutting hair at Sherri’s Headquarters Ltd., the salon she runs two doors up from the deli.
The ready-made meals such as spaghetti and Shepherd’s pie became Michaud’s “go-to” when she needed a quick lunch between seeing clients.
The deli also offered a menu of coffee, sub sandwiches, salads, fried food, and in the summer, ice cream served out of a window at the front of the store.
Even though RB’s was a beloved spot in town, turning a profit wasn’t easy, especially after Dollar General, a discount retailer chain, opened in late 2024 on Route 14, a few minutes’ drive from the village center, Darling said.
After the store opened, she noticed a decline in sales of grocery items such as milk, but she couldn’t afford to match Dollar General’s prices.
Several Upper Valley general stores have closed their doors in recent years, including Erin’s General Store in West Fairlee, which shuttered in 2024 after reopening under a new owner four years prior. Other Upper Valley towns where general stores have closed include Brownsville, Canaan Village, Cornish, Grafton, Quechee and Taftsville, the Valley News reported in 2024.
Darling estimates she made a net profit of $700 last year, after paying staff and bills and buying product for the store.
The divorce added additional strain. “It really went downhill when we split and there was no heart left,” Darling said.
Since closing the deli, she’s found new work which she declined to detail.
More than anything, she’s going to miss the high school kids she employed. “I love kids. They don’t judge you,” she said.
Now Cohen and her friends are focused on getting RB’s ready for a professional deep clean and giving the deli a paint job in advance of a tentative opening in early April.
“Time for (the store) to get cleaned up and get a new start,” Barnaby said.