It's a sight not many of us are used to. Chairs are stacked on top of tables, the fireplace is empty and the shelves are bare. No one is ordering pretzel sandwiches or turtle soup and it's mid-day, a time when this small town eatery would normally be busy with their lunch crowd.
But there's no need to worry. The Crossroads Dinor will be opening its doors for business in the next few weeks.
The dinor shut down mysteriously in December 2008, with no prior warning. Most Edinboro residents were unsure of just how long the restaurant would be closed. Some presumed it had been shut down permanently, abandoned by its owners and left for dead.
But the dinor's new Director of Operations Jim McNamara says the owners, Jim and Evelyn Sims, never intended on shutting it down for good.
"We were going to close it up anyways for a period of three months, but Jim [Sims] and I looked at the numbers and decided to take it into a new direction," McNamara says.
That new direction includes new appliances, new management, and most significantly, a new menu.
"Homemade pies, ice cream, milkshakes, good home-cooking food. We want to bring the old diner back," says Marion Blackburn, another member of the new management team.
Not everything about the dinor will be new when it opens May 3. You can expect to see the old fireplaces up and running again, and there's a 95 percent chance they will still be serving their famous turtle soup. But in the coming months, the new management team hopes to introduce outside dining, delivery and a late-night menu.
"Right now, the dinor is in a recovery mode,"?says McNamara. "We have a clear vision of where we want the dinor to be."
The Sims purchased the restaurant from Jim and Sharyn Gillette in 2007. Then, McNamara helped them in the initial reopening process. But eventually Jim Sims' nephew Dave Turzak took over management of the restaurant. McNamara says Turzak did the best he could with the old streetcar, but there were simply too many problems to handle at once.
"Nobody needs to know exactly how many problems we had,"?McNamara says with a laugh. "The biggest issue we kept running into was the foundation of the building...the roof was leaking so bad it bowed up the floor. You couldn't have the fireplace on without opening the back door for ventilation. Cost-effective wise, if we would have continued to stay open, it would have run us right into the ground."
The dinor may have looked barren for the last four months, but there was a lot going on inside. Plumbers, electricians, and other workers have been hard at work replacing and rewiring the entire restaurant.
The total cost for the renovations is currently around $9,000 which is under the cost the new management had predicted.
"We factored in roughly about $12,000," says McNamara. "And we're pretty much on line to meet that cost."
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