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Cleo Moore Harding, owner of Dinty Moore's Restaurant, pauses
Crystal Hildebrand (left) laughs with longtime friend and customer Mary Ann Seay at Dinty Moore's Restaurant on its last day of business.
Dinty Moore's Restaurant is closed by owner Cleo Moore Harding (center) Crystal Hildebrand checks on customers at Dinty Moore's Restaurant, which closed after 73 years in business. |
BY EMILY BATTLE
The white specials board in the back of Dinty Moore's on Princess Anne Street was the bearer of bad news for Edwen Lopez yesterday.
Scrawled across the board was the message that the small home-style restaurant was closing after 73 years in business. Its last meal was yesterday's lunch.
"I'm sorry, 'Mama,'" Lopez told owner Cleo Moore Harding as he gave her a hug.
Like Lopez, many of the regulars at the restaurant are like family to Harding and her daughters, Crystal Hildebrand and Angie Hooe, who run the restaurant.
Harding grew up at Dinty Moore's.
Her parents, John "Dinty" Moore and Anne "Big Mama" Moore, first opened the restaurant on July 1, 1936, back when Princess Anne Street was U.S. 1, the nation's main thoroughfare from Maine to Florida.
Anne Moore started her own restaurant, Anne's Grill, in 1960, just next door.
Anne's Grill will stay open, owned by Harding's sister, Beverly Peyton. It's likely you'll find many of the Dinty Moore's family of regulars congregating there in the weeks to come.
Harding said she lived above the restaurant as a child, and her family grew to know so many people in town that Hildebrand said she and her siblings couldn't get away with any misbehavior as kids.
Ironically, that same setup, where business owners live above their shops and residents can visit restaurants and other stores in their own neighborhoods, is something that cities all over the country are spending a lot of money trying to re-create right now.
Fredericksburg has its own plan for the Princess Anne corridor that Dinty Moore's sits on, which calls for more restaurants, small grocers and other shops to serve the people who live nearby.
Hildebrand, Hooe and Harding said they'd seen business drop off gradually as more people started going to chain restaurants out in Central Park, and downtown traffic in general became slower.
But the current economic crisis is what did in the longstanding business, they say.
Harding said closing isn't easy, especially with all the memories the place holds.
On the shelf behind the bar, where breakfast regulars have sat for years, is a black-and-white portrait of Harding's father, and a sketch of her husband, Norman Harding, made on a napkin by a traveler passing through town.
Norman Harding, who passed away in 2005, cooked at the restaurant for years, and he's shown in the drawing in his chef's hat.
Cleo Harding said she's not sure yet what she'll do with the building that housed the restaurant.
For now, she's a lot more focused on how much she'll miss all the people who came to the restaurant, sometimes twice a day, for as long as she can remember.
"I've known a lot of them for all my life," she said. "This is home for us."
Emily Battle: 540/374-5413
Email: ebattle@freelancestar.com
