The Newcomb Cafe and General Store in winter. Photo courtesey of the Newcomb Cafe
Aug 14, 2020 — In hindsight, opening a restaurant in 2020 sounds like a pretty bad idea, especially in one of the most remote communities in the Northeast. But that’s exactly what’s happened in Newcomb, a tiny town in the central Adirondacks, where two restaurants opened in January.
The Lake Harris Lodge and Newcomb Café opened at the same time early this year, bringing two new restaurants to a town that had none before. The Lodge provides fine dining and a bar, while the Café has a general store, gas pump, and serves breakfast and lunch. Lodge co-owner Tony Audino says those were all firsts in the town.
For the first two months, business was phenomenal. A great winter meant lots of snowmobilers stopping in at the cafe or getting dinner at the lodge.
“I think we were in shock, because the snow was amazing this year in Newcomb and we were so busy,” says Kelly Audino, Lodge co-owner and Tony’s wife.
That all came to a screeching halt in March, when stay at home orders rolled through. For a few weeks, resident Paul Hai says Newcomb was completely different.
“Newcomb was fundamentally quiet,” Hai says. “It was kind of like going back 50 years I guess, maybe 100 years. It was just really quiet.”
The Audinos had to pivot quickly. They started doing takeout orders to salvage some business, and were surprised and overwhelmed by the support of their friends. People came in every night the Lodge was open and ordered food, even if they didn’t need it.
“I don’t even know if some of these people eat pizza but they were ordering them like crazy,” Tony says.
Locals were ordering lots of food, and some even volunteered their time to help in the kitchen, the dining room, or any way they could. Slowly, the restaurant was able to reopen, with outdoor dining, and later socially distant indoor dining. As that happened it also became a gathering place for the community that helped keep it on its feet.
The lodge is now doing trivia nights, and the restaurant serves as a gathering place in the evenings, while the Newcomb Café has become a morning hangout. That’s been a pleasant surprise for Troy Ford, co-owner of the Cafe. He and his partner are both new to Newcomb, and he says the community has been one of the best parts of opening.
“Coming up here was very refreshing. The town of Newcomb embraced us with open arms,” Ford says. And the atmosphere in the Café is “like the old bar movies. It’s a good place where people can congregate. Everybody knows everyone. It’s been a fun venture.”
For safety’s sake, Troy closed the cafe for several weeks before resuming any kind of service. He says that despite all the turbulence, the response of local patrons has made the cafe more successful than he thought it would be in January. He and his partner had their own initial projections of what they hoped to make, and they’ve blown those out of the water.
Back at the Lake Harris Lodge, the Audinos are just grateful to have friends who are so willing to help out.
“We have fantastic friends,” Kelly says. “without the support of our community, we would not have made it.”
“It’s tough to even put into words how grateful we are,” Tony chimes in.
Most people in Newcomb seem cautiously optimistic about the future of the two new restaurants, and the town. It’s a small community, but people know they can rely on each other, and that counts for a lot when you don’t know what the next six months might hold.
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August 14, 2020 at 08:54PM
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In Newcomb, two new restaurants bring a community together - North Country Public Radio
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