The Upper Valley is facing plenty of stress this fall: tax caps, school mergers, the rising cost of living. And possibly the biggest worry of all: Where will people get their weekend brunch?
During the fall, the lines at the area’s diners extend out the door. Some people give up on them. Others run out of time. Lou’s Restaurant & Bakery in Hanover closes at 2 p.m., and on a recent Sunday around 1, staff worked their way toward the back of the line to warn people they probably wouldn’t be seated before closing.
Ask people why they’ll wait in line for a diner, though, and the answer isn’t really about pancakes.
Anthony Simpson has been eating at the Four Aces Diner in West Lebanon for decades. The retired mechanic comes for the counter, a row of red-topped stools on chrome stems facing the griddle, where you take whichever seat is open, next to a stranger or old friend.
“This is the only place in the Upper Valley where you can sit and really have a conversation,” he said.
Which is why he skips one morning a week.
“The only time I don’t come in here is Sunday mornings,” he said. “I won’t come on a weekend.” Too crowded to get what he came for.
The rest of the week, what he comes for is on the menu and behind the counter.
“Regular, easy, everyday food,” Simpson said. “Known people who worked here forever.”
Doug Allard, who owns the Four Aces and the Fort in Lebanon with his wife, Stephanie, said that’s roughly what the places were built for: working people who need a fast meal, a few minutes at the counter and a quick trip back to the job.
“You’re in and out really quick,” Allard said. “And in our case, it brings you back to the ’50s and ’60s.”
Decades on, the fast meal is the least of it. Allard said he knows more than just his regulars’ orders.
“You know about their families and their kids and grandkids, and it just becomes a family,” he said. “I consider a lot of the people that come in all the time part of our family.”
That feeling is the product, and people who study diners say it’s specific to this part of the country. Randy Garbin, who published Roadside Magazine about diner culture, told the Valley News in 2007 that eating at one is “like eating in your best friend’s kitchen.”
Two of the area’s busiest, the Four Aces and Lou’s, sit about eight minutes apart. On a Sunday morning in Hanover, people line up for cruller French toast and a seat in a room that has been serving breakfast since 1947.
A line at the door
“I hate when I’m up at the cashier and I see people poke their head in and then turn around and walk out,” said Jarett Berke, who has owned Lou’s, on South Main Street, for eight years. “I wish we could serve them, but I get it. Some people don’t want to wait in line.”
Berke spoke from the back of the restaurant, near the kitchen. On weekends, that’s where the line ends, after starting at the front door and running the length of the room.
Lou’s turns 80 next year, and it serves only breakfast and lunch with 88 seats, including 13 at the counter. Round black stools line the counter next to glass cases filled with cakes, pies and cupcakes. Globe lights hang from a pressed-tin ceiling, and black-and-white photos from the restaurant’s past cover the walls. It smells like coffee, sticky syrup and sausage on the griddle.
One unique thing about Lou’s is the bakery in the basement, something most diners don’t have. About 30% of the restaurant’s revenue comes from it, Berke said, and “everything that we have here is baked here, including our breads. We try and do everything we can from scratch.”
There’s a line at Lou’s most weekends of the year, Berke said. But October is different.
In the summer, outdoor seating spreads out the crowd. Once that closes for the season, the crowds don’t shrink. He pointed to fall tourists, Dartmouth events and the hotels in town.
“We tend to have more lines and stuff like that when we get into October,” he said.
On a typical Saturday or Sunday, Lou’s serves somewhere in the high 500s to low 600s, including dine-in and takeout. About 200 more people stop in for coffee or something from the bakery. This summer, the kitchen hit about 650 plates in a single day.
A kitchen renovation about three years ago lengthened the cook line, helping the restaurant keep up. The goal is to get food to the table in under 20 minutes. Sometimes that means holding people in line a little longer.
“People are more willing to wait to be seated than they are to wait for their food once they order,” he said. “It’s a funny mental thing.”
The servers at Lou’s talked between tasks. They filled cups with orange juice, hurried off to a table, then came back to pour coffee and pick up silverware.
Jenny Hancock has worked at Lou’s for 17 years. When the line backs up, she’s the one telling them to move out of the way.
“I’m the yeller,” she said. “I’m loud, but I’m nice.”
Most people are patient, she said, and being in the way here is “all part of the experience.” She said she’d rather work busy days.
“I actually make way more mistakes when I’m not busy because I have too much time to think about my life,” Hancock said.
Behind the counter, general manager Craig Morley folded silverware into napkins as he talked. Morley, who has been at Lou’s for 11 years, called busy days “hectic, but enjoyable.”
“When it’s slow, it’s like watching paint dry,” he said.
New servers rarely start on the floor. They begin as cashiers or hosts, move to the counter and then take larger tables. Ally McCorkle started as a cashier in high school about six years ago and now waits tables.
Customers have gotten upset with her a couple of times, she said, but the managers back up staff.
“At the end of the day, you’re human, and it’s just food,” McCorkle said.
‘Those are the scary days’
Those busy weekends have to carry the rest of the year.
Business trails off in November. On weekdays this time of year, Lou’s serves about 400 people. From December through February, that can drop to around 200.
“Those are the scary days,” Berke said.
On a strong weekend, the restaurant might clear a couple thousand dollars in profit, he said. But many winter weekdays bring in nothing. “We do not turn a profit in December, January, February, and then we have our taxes due in March,” Berke said.
“Those first couple months of the year are super stressful.”
Costs keep climbing. He said beef prices are up, and suppliers are adding fuel surcharges of about $20 per delivery as diesel prices rise. Lou’s raises menu prices in small steps, updating the menu about once a month.
“I can’t be left holding the bag for the state of our economy right now,” he said. “I have to pay the 70 people that we have on our payroll and pay for our food.”
One thing working in his favor: he owns the space. He bought it in 2019 and locked in a low mortgage rate, which he said has helped the restaurant absorb spikes like last year’s egg prices.
Stand in that line on a Saturday and the obvious thought is that the Upper Valley could use another diner. Nobody who works in one seems to agree.
Morley said the college helps keep Lou’s busy, and that there are “a few more breakfast places around, but not that many.”
“I think there’s enough,” he said.
Berke said a new competitor would “certainly have an impact,” though he wasn’t sure how much.
“It’s hard to keep the service and the quality. It takes a lot of work,” he said. “I don’t know if anybody else is willing to do it.”
Worcester Lunch Car No. 837
Down the road in West Lebanon, Allard can explain why.
He and Stephanie bought the Four Aces on May 1 of last year. They already had the Fort, on Heater Road, which Stephanie’s father owned for years and left to her and her brother. Allard’s uncle, meanwhile, had owned the Four Aces and built the menu the diner still uses.
“My uncle was a master chef,” Allard said. “He created the menu, and we stuck with it.”
The diner he bought is a Worcester Lunch Car, No. 837, built in Worcester, Massachusetts, and serving West Lebanon since 1952. When it was moved down the hill to Bridge Street in 1986, a building went up around it.
“It’s literally enclosed, cocooned under a building,” Allard said.
The company that built it is long gone. Between 1906 and 1961, Worcester Lunch Car Co. built and trucked 651 diners to their sites, mostly in New England towns, before changing roadside eating habits put the firm out of business.
Five of them came to the Upper Valley, each one trucked up Route 12. The Four Aces arrived last, in 1952, the Valley News reported in 2007.
Four Aces is now the only one still running. The Tumble Inn in Claremont, the Windsor Diner, the Heritage Diner in Charlestown and the Quechee car that spent years as the Farmers Diner are all currently closed.
Inside, a barrel ceiling curves overhead, painted red. Red vinyl booths run down one wall, and a row of chrome-stemmed stools with red seats faces a counter that runs most of the length of the place, over a tile floor laid in small squares. A framed Coca-Cola sign hangs on the wall, an American flag hangs nearby, shelves of knickknacks sit above the griddle, and a Magic 8 Ball sits on every table between the ketchup and the sugar caddy.
On Friday morning, Daniel and Sherry Gervais stood outside waiting for the rest of their party. The couple had driven up from near Manchester, Vermont, to meet Cindy and Taylor Austin for brunch. A diner is where this family gets together.
None of them had eaten at the Four Aces before.
“We almost exclusively go to diners,” Cindy Austin said. “We prefer the food, and we like the atmosphere.”
Part of it is where you sit. When it’s just the two of them, the Austins take the counter.
“Being able to sit at a counter and watch what’s going on and see the activity,” Cindy Austin said. The service comes from people who’ve worked there a long time, she added, which is “service that you don’t tend to get nowadays.”
Daniel Gervais said what separates a diner from any other restaurant is the feeling.
“It’s what we remember from way back when,” he said. The drive over had been beautiful, and a Friday morning in a booth felt like a fine way to spend it. “This is magnificent.”
Inside there are 64 seats, and this fall they’ve been full. Allard said sales are running 12% to 15% above normal, and the run has lasted about a month. On a busy day, the Four Aces serves between 400 and 500 covers.
“Leaf peeping season,” Allard said. “The foliage brings a lot of people into the state, and this year, foliage is still going on, so it’s kind of extended our busy streak.”
On weekends, lines reach the parking lot.
Then comes the other half of the year. Business spikes before Thanksgiving, slides through December and drops once New Year’s passes. Allard said sales stay down for five or six weeks, until school vacations and events at Dartmouth start bringing people back in the spring.
The costs don’t take the winter off. Allard said food prices are up 13% to 14%, and every rise in diesel reaches him twice, because the food arrives by truck.
“You either readjust your menu, or you keep it and pray that you’re gonna stay busy,” he said.
‘A seven-day-a-week job’
Does the Upper Valley need another diner? Allard doesn’t think so, and he knows what it would take.
The country has been losing them for 70 years. At their peak in the 1950s, there were about 6,000 diners nationwide, and roughly 2,000 a decade ago, according to diner historian Richard Gutman.
And the Worcester cars aren’t the only ones missing here. The Polka Dot in White River Junction closed, along with the Lebanon Diner and the Fairlee Diner, which was the only breakfast place in its town.
The Four Aces sat on the market for a couple of years before Allard bought it in 2025. His aunt couldn’t find a buyer.
“I think financing might have been an issue,” Allard said. “It was very hard for us at the beginning to get financing. I think the banks were a little less aggressive with restaurants.”
And then there’s the work.
“There’s no downtime for you. It’s a seven-day-a-week job,” he said. “If employees call out, somebody goes in. If you don’t love the industry, then it’s kind of hard to want to spend over half a million dollars for a business.”
There’s an even narrower version of this. The Fort, the Allards’ other restaurant, used to be open 24 hours, back when it ran as a truck stop. It stopped about a decade ago. The sign out front still says 24 hours; the kitchen closes at 8 p.m.
Allard, who works in insurance, said carriers tightened up on round-the-clock restaurants over theft and robbery risk, and the coverage got too expensive. The late-night revenue didn’t cover what was going out the door.
“Where’s your return on investment?” he said. “How many people are going to come in to keep your lights on?”
These days, the closest thing left is the Denny’s off the interstate in West Lebanon, and even that has pulled back. It runs 24 hours Thursday through Saturday and closes at 10 p.m. the rest of the week
Only a handful of diners still serve the Upper Valley, and a long line is a problem if you’re the one standing in it. From behind the counter, it’s the best thing that happens all year.
