SOUTH ROYALTON — When Ellen Trottier was 16, she took a job at RB’s Delicatessen, the deli and convenience store on Chelsea Street in the center of town.
Years later, her daughter, Lyndsey Stender, now an 18-year-old senior at White River Valley High School in South Royalton, worked at the deli, too.
After RB’s latest owner Daisey Darling closed the store last December amid some personal challenges, Trottier became interested in taking up the gauntlet.
“I love making sandwiches; I love people,” Trottier, 50, said in a recent interview.
Now the mother-daughter duo are teaming up to reopen a new-and-improved version of deli.
LJ’s Scoops, an ice cream window inside the deli, is set to open on May 2, with the rest of the store, renamed Royalton Deli, scheduled for unveiling on May 18.
“Really in my mind (the deli) is about the community,” said Trottier, who teaches business and accounting at Vermont State University.
Trottier inherited the impulse to serve her community from her dad who ran two John Deere dealerships while she was growing up — one in Royalton and one in Hartland.
Her dad never did much marketing for the dealerships; his welcoming attitude was enough to keep customers coming back, Trottier said.
From her dad, she learned “how important it is to treat people in the community well,” she said.
“I’m excited to have my own legacy to give Lyndsey.”
She likened the collaboration with Stender to Lorelai Gilmore and her daughter, Rory, in the early 2000s TV show “Gilmore Girls.”
“That’s a mother-daughter team,” Trottier said in a recent interview. (A shot of South Royalton also features in the show’s opening credits.)
While Trottier handles the deli, Stender, who isn’t interested in starting college at the moment, will manage the ice cream window.
Trottier envisions LJ’s Scoops as a way for high school students to gain some work experience. She plans to offer jobs to about four of them.
Trottier, who will move to part-time hours at VTSU after the store opens, expects her decades of experience in finance and accounting will come in handy when running the deli.
Her skills may be necessary to navigate a business in which margins can be tight. While RB’s has been a staple in town since Brenda Cohen and her late husband Roger Cattabriga opened the store in 1991, turning a profit hasn’t always been easy, particularly since the discount retail chain Dollar General opened a couple years ago on Route 14, a few minutes’ drive from the deli, Darling told the Valley News earlier this year.
In the months since the closure, Cohen, who owns the deli’s building, has been fixing up the store with the help of her friends and family. She’s cleaned and painted the walls and added new LED lighting, Trottier said.
“It’s nice to have a clean slate to work with,” said Trottier, who’s made her own changes, too, such as removing a couple of the store’s coolers. She’s also done away with the lottery tickets and tobacco, and some of the other grocery items.
“This is more of a true deli than a convenience store,” she said.
The menu of subs, soups and pizza will remain largely the same as when Darling was running it, with sandwich prices starting around $7.99, Trottier said.
“We need affordable to-go items,” especially for older people who struggle to cook for themselves, she said.
She’s holding off on installing a fryer for now, but plans to offer baked mozzarella sticks.
The deli’s hours will be 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Sunday through Thursday and 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.
Soft serve and hard ice cream will be sold out of the ice cream window seasonally, May through October, from 3 to 7 p.m. on Monday through Thursday, 3 to 8 p.m. on Friday and 1 to 7 p.m. on weekends.
