FAIRLEE — The lights in Samurai Soul Food, the fusion restaurant in the center of town, were dim last Tuesday afternoon.
Retro records still hung from the walls, and the kitchen’s shelves remained stocked with cans of coconut milk, but instead of prepping for the next day’s service, owner Kelden Smith was scanning the restaurant for items to sell.
Smith closed Samurai earlier this month after struggling for years to bring in customers and kitchen staff following the COVID-19 pandemic, he said. Minimal staff meant Smith had to clock long, exhausting hours on the line, on top of running the restaurant, just to break even. In Samurai’s tightest moments, he didn’t take a paycheck to make ends meet.
“It just physically and mentally was too much for me,” Smith, 66, said in a recent interview. “If I’m not having fun going to work, I’m not working, especially for free.”
That attitude is a far cry from the optimism Smith carried when he opened Samurai Soul Food almost a decade ago. The Hanover native founded the restaurant, with its hodgepodge decor and comfort dishes, after building a career in fine dining and corporate kitchens.
Restaurant work was the only kind Smith knew. When he was a child, his mother ran Cafe la Fraise, a French eatery in downtown Hanover, where Smith helped out as a teenager before finding work at the Hanover Inn.
He later left the Upper Valley to move out West, where he started a family and found work in fine dining establishments, eventually moving back to the East Coast and serving as head of Bank of America’s corporate dining room in Washington, D.C.
But the glitz and glamour of high-end restaurant culture slowly lost its sheen, and Smith returned to the Upper Valley about a decade ago, taking a job at Worthy Burger in South Royalton. He opened Samurai with the help of now-former manager John Hessler about a year later.
Located in a squat building with blue and orange trim, Samurai’s menu brought together comfort dishes from around the world, with sometimes bemusing results.
Nachos were loaded with sushi-grade tuna and the Kung Pao Chicken Wings came garnished with goat cheese.
Customer Dover Horesh loved a fish taco dish with a bright mango salsa. “It was killer,” said Horesh, a White River Junction resident who formerly lived in Fairlee.
Samurai has been a part of several big moments in Horesh’s life since they moved to the Upper Valley about two years ago.
The restaurant is where they enjoyed a celebratory dinner after their first day of work at Dartmouth College’s Department of Studio Art, and it’s where they had their first date with their current partner.
“It was a really, really, really good date” that was made better when Samurai’s staff let the pair linger long after service had finished for the night, Horesh said.
“That was so above and beyond any restaurant I’ve been to in my life,” Horesh said.
Indeed, Samurai built a long roster of regulars, some of whom contributed to the restaurant’s eclectic decor.
A deer head hanging near the pool table was gifted by a hunter, and the stuffed fisher cat on the bar came from a customer whose son shot it after it ran amok on his mother’s property.
Samurai also brought in its fair share of tourists, who’d pack the restaurant in summer. Between regulars and out-of-towners, business was booming.
But the pandemic put a stop to that momentum. Even after lockdown restrictions were lifted, Smith struggled to rebuild the customer base he’d had before.
Finding staff became harder, too. Samurai’s menu was designed to be executed by four people, but as staff grew thinner, Smith found himself running the kitchen with just one other person while a few others handled the dining room. If someone called out sick, Smith had no choice but to close for the night, which happened several times this past summer.
On top of staffing troubles, in the past few years rainwater caused extensive damage to the dining room and bathroom floors that Smith, who owns the property at 176 US Route 5 and lives in a studio apartment behind the restaurant, couldn’t afford to fix. Instead, he used kitchen mats to cover the patches of rotting floor as a safety precaution.
The mounting list of challenges weighed heavily on Smith. He’d always loved being in kitchens because “you go to work with a family every day,” he said; some of Samurai’s staff had been with him for years. But despite their camaraderie, Smith’s joy for the work began to wane a few years ago. After another tough summer this year, closing felt like the only option.
“I’m too old to be a line cook, and that’s basically what I was,” he said.
The shuttering of Samurai coincides with other restaurant churn in Fairlee. Broken Hearts Burger, formerly at 192 US Route 5, closed last winter, less than a year after owner Matt Walker reopened the restaurant following a months-long revamp.
A new burger joint, Crave Burger Bar, opened in August in the same location. The business is a collaboration between longtime chef Micah Orser, of Orford, and Austin Junker, who owns Casa Brava Tapas in Hanover.
The closure of Samurai is “definitely a blow to Fairlee,” Orser said in a phone interview. “Having more [restaurants] is a good thing. It brings more people into town.”
Smith, for his part, doesn’t yet know what he’ll do with the restaurant now that it’s closed. Selling the property would mean he’d have to find a new place to live, but there’s also potential to revive the restaurant under new ownership.
For now, he’s taken a job at the post office in East Thetford, where he’s looking forward to a slower pace of life. “It’s the first time in my life I’ll have a sit-down job,” Smith said.