ENFIELD — As of last week, customers at Bark & Bevy, the restaurant, bar and indoor dog park on Route 4, will have to find somewhere else to let their pooch run around while they have dinner.
After five months in business, wife-and-husband owners Anne Chapin and Marshall Banks have decided to shutter the restaurant in light of financial challenges.
Business had slowed greatly since Mother’s Day and it was becoming difficult to make payroll, Chapin said.
“It was all very sudden,” she said, noting that the restaurant’s sales dwindled to “like $2,000 in a week.”
JENNIFER HAUCK / Valley News
Chapin attributes the decline in sales to steep living costs, including high gas prices, which might have cut into people’s budgets for dining out.
Another Enfield restaurant, Brick & Barrel, also opened in early May, which could have eaten into Bark & Bevy’s clientele, Chapin said.
The May 31 closure has been hard on Chapin and her husband. Launching the restaurant took pulling from their retirement savings, Chapin said. She declined to disclose how much it cost to open the business.
“We’re saddened that we had created jobs, and that was a wonderful thing,” Chapin said.
At the time of the closure, Bark & Bevy had seven employees. Almost everyone has found new employment or was working at the restaurant part-time, Chapin said.
Chapin and Banks leased Bark & Bevy’s space, located at 330 Route 4, from owners Mickey and Darcy Dowd, who are now looking for a new tenant to take up the mantle.
Several people have thrown their hats in the ring, and Mickey Dowd is even thinking about bringing back a version of Mickey’s Roadside Cafe, which the couple ran for about 17 years before selling it to Gusanoz Mexican Restaurant owners Nick Yager and Maria Limon in 2021.
Yager and Limon ran Mickey’s under several different names before eventually converting it into a Gusanoz in 2024.
The couple shuttered the restaurant months later amid financial difficulties, and the Dowds bought the building back the year after, according to town property records.
As business owners, Chapin and Banks were “energetic and hardworking,” Mickey Dowd said in a phone interview. The restaurant’s closure was “kind of a shock to us,” he said.
Chapin and Banks got the idea for Bark & Bevy after visiting a restaurant and indoor dog park with their daughter in North Carolina about five years ago. Now that Bark & Bevy has closed, the couple are planning to move to Raleigh, N.C., to live closer to their daughter.
Bark & Bevy included a designated area for dogs to play, a self-service dog bathing station and an upstairs bar area and outdoor seating. The restaurant offered casual lunch and dinner fare of sandwiches, salads, nachos and baked potatoes as well as beer, cider and cocktails.
Before opening Bark & Bevy in January, Chapin had a 30-year career in banking. Running the business cemented her passion for hospitality and event planning, and she hopes to find similar work after the couple moves. Banks, who works in maintenance at Mt. Ascutney Hospital and Health Center, plans to find comparable employment in Raleigh.
Even though Bark & Bevy has closed, Chapin and Banks have maintained the friendships they’ve formed while running the restaurant. On Sunday night they even went out to dinner with a pair of customers, Chapin said.
Launching Bark & Bevy “was a dream and we took our shot, and we’re glad we did it,” she said.
