After opening The Fillin Station restaurant a year and a half ago, Lori Fuzi will be closing this month. (Baker City Herald/S. John Collins)

Hurt by the recession, The Fillin Station restaurant is closing, while other local eateries look for ways to cut their costs

Baker City might be the world capital for

restaurants featuring hometown hamburgers, steaks and prime rib, but

even in cattle country, one more may have been one too many.

An orange sign taped to the window of The Fillin Station restaurant on

Main Street reads “Business for Sale,” but potential buyers will need

to act fast because owners Jay and Lori Fuzi are planning to shut down

at the end of December, 18 months after they opened with high hopes.

It may well be one of the better restaurants in town, but it’s also one

of the newer, and that’s tough to overcome during an economic downturn,

Lori Fuzi said.

Fuzi got her start in the restaurant business when she was a teenager working as a car hop at the AandW on 10th Street.

Her parents, Janet and William Pierce, later operated Janet’s Cook

Shack in that building for three years, before they sold it to open The

Fillin Station as a 1950s Main Street diner.

Photos of classic cars from the 1950s and 1960s line the walls. There’s a life-size cutout of Elvis Presley just inside the front door.

“My mom, stepdad, husband and I opened The Fillin Station, but it is more my thing,” Fuzi said.

During the summer 2007 the Fillin Station was packed with tourists, including throngs of people who converged downtown during events such as the Hells Canyon Motorcycle Rally and the Memory Cruise.

Business dropped off as that first summer faded to fall, but by then The Fillin Station had attracted enough local customers to keep the business going through its first winter.

By the spring of 2008 business picked up again, Fuzi said, and her mother wanted to retire, so she bought her parents out in April. By summer, however, gas prices climbed to $4 a gallon, and the tourist trade dropped off.

By September, Fuzi said, the effects of constant national news reports about a looming recession were taking a bigger bite out of restaurant sales.

“In the last three months, our sales have been cut in half, compared to the same time a year ago,” Fuzi said. “Our November was as bad as last January, which was our worst month.

“Our regulars who were coming in once or twice a week are now coming in once a month,” Fuzi said. “I talked to several restaurants owners that have been here for years, and they are down too.”

“We went through all last winter with seven people, eight counting myself,” Fuzi said. With the decline in business, layoffs started in September.

“We’re down to one full-time and one part-time cook, two part-time waitresses and one part-time dishwasher,” Fuzi said.

She knows the statistics – 98 percent of new restaurants fail within the first two years.

“Owning a restaurant business is hard. You are married to it. These guys (the waitresses, cooks and dishwashers) are my second family,” Fuzi said. “I see them almost more than my own family.”

“I’m working from seven in the morning to eight at night,” Fuzi said. “We’ve put our hearts and souls into it. We hate to let go, but if January and February are this slow, we won’t make it until spring break, when things usually pick up.”

With Oregon’s minimum wage set to increase from $7.95 per hour to $8.40 in January, coupled with higher food and energy prices, Fuzi said the gap between revenues and expenses is widening.

“We’d rather go out without having to claim bankruptcy,” Fuzi said. “We just hope to break even by closing at the end of December.

“If anyone wants to buy it, we’ll sell cheap,” she added. “We’ve got a great operation. We’ve got great employees. Everybody says we serve good food, and we serve large portions at reasonable prices.”

“The joke we heard a lot from our customers was ‘get a wheelbarrow and wheel me out of here,’ ” she said.

Fuzi hired chef Russ Culley, and the restaurant’s head waitress, Jennifer Slater, is well liked and has 18 years experience waitressing at the Baker Truck Corral.

“Jennifer and I both started in the food industry when we were 14. She started at the Truck Corral and I started at AandW,” Fuzi said. “Now, we’re 38 and we’re both looking for work.”

Considering the amount of experience of everyone involved in The Fillin Station, including Fuzi’s running the J-L Deli in the Basche-Sage Mall, and her mother’s owning Janet’s Cook House, Fuzi said it’s hard to understand what went wrong.

Bad timing, she said, might be to blame.

“It’s amazing how many people watch the news. They’re getting scared. I hear it every day,” Fuzi said.

“I heard a politician on TV telling people ‘don’t go out to dinner,’ and I’m thinking ‘don’t say that,’ ” she said.

In addition to recession fears prompting people to cut back on dining out, Fuzi said during their year-and-a-half in business, other factors, such as canceling the Main Street Saturday night cruise portion of the Memory Cruise, also hurt business.

The Main Street cruise drew lots of car owners and spectators to downtown restaurants, she said

Fuzi thinks more events of that sort are needed.

But even Miners Jubilee brings fewer people downtown than it used to, she said, because much of the action has been moved to the Baker County Fairgrounds.

Then there’s the question of whether the building the Fuzis rented from Bob Butler and Annie Wong is jinxed.

The Fillin Station is the latest in a string of restaurants that failed to make it in the building at the corner of Main and Court.

Cliff Cahill and his wife, Dusty, bought The Country Cottage Cafe on 10th Street two years ago from Lori’s mother, who operated Janet’s Cook Shack in that location.

Cliff Cahill said he looked at the Wong building, but after hearing about the restaurants that failed there he crossed the site off his list.

Over the past several years, the building housed the Royal Chinese restaurant, the Tamarack Steak House, Paul Bunyan’s, Crabby’s, and Rascal’s smorgasbord restaurant. Jimmy Chan’s Restaurant opened in the Wong building before moving to its current location on the opposite side of Main Street.

Cahill said downtown building owners tout the tourist trade as a benefit for locating a restaurant downtown, but when he noticed many Main Street businesses close around 5 p.m., Cahill said he was skeptical.

From previous experiences owning restaurants and pizza parlors, and working in stores at the Oregon Coast, Lake Chelan, Wash., and the Karcher Mall in Nampa, Cahill said he’s learned that the 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. period is prime time when tourists like to dine out and browse shops.

“It’s hard to be a tourist town when they roll up the sidewalk at 5 p.m.,” Cahill said.

As for the recession, Cahill said it has definitely hurt business at the Country Cottage Cafe the past couple of months.

It helped, though, that the previous restaurant there, Janet’s Cook Shack, already had a good clientele.

“Business is down some, especially in the evenings,” Dusty Cahill said. “It’s like a roller coaster right now. It’s up some days and down other days, but it will be OK.

“We’re cutting back on our expenses wherever we can until things smooth out,” she said.

That means she and Cliff are washing dishes, bussing tables and cooking more than they used to.

“We could probably be making more money someplace else, but we bought this restaurant because we like Baker City,” Cliff Cahill said. “The first time we drove around town, we fell in love with the community. It reminded us of the 1950s, with people out working in their yards and kids playing catch and riding bikes on the streets.”

Even though business has been a little slow the past few months, Cahill said net income is still slightly ahead of this time last year.

Cahill said he and Dusty are doing other things to keep costs low, such as buying lettuce and other fresh vegetables and cutting them up for salads, rather than paying more for bagged salad mixes.

“I cook four days a week, and Dusty bakes all the pies and makes all the soups, salads and dressings,” Cliff Cahill said. That’s especially important during hard times.

The Cahills make their own biscuits from scratch, and they also make chicken fries and sauces.

“If we had to hire people to do everything, and bought all prepared food, our prices would have to be a lot higher,” Cliff said.

In response to lagging sales attributed in part to the economic downturn, owner Barbara Sidway added two entrees each night for $7.95 to the Geiser Grand’s menu.

“We know people are hurting and we wanted to do something to help, so we are offering special lower priced entrees until the economy turns around,” Sidway said.

Like The Fillin Station, the Oregon Trail Restaurant in Baker City features a menu similar to those at the Country Cottage, Sumpter Junction, Inland Cafe, Baker Truck Corral and other local restaurants.

However, the Oregon Trail Restaurant has been around for decades at the same location, under various owners.

Waitress Chastity McGuire said that longevity helps the Oregon Trail Restaurant, which her brother owns, get through bad times.

She said business has been a little slow this fall, but not enough to cause staff cuts.

“We serve breakfast all day. That’s definitely a big draw,” McGuire said.

At the Golden Crown Restaurant on Campbell Street, owners Ken and Long Chen said they haven’t noticed much of a drop in demand for Chinese food, which is their specialty.

Ken Chen said business is down a little this fall during certain times, primarily in the late evening.

“We haven’t cut any positions, but sometimes if it gets slow during certain times, we let people go home early,” Ken Chen said.

“We’re not cutting down on the amount of food we order, or anything like that.”

At The Fillin Station, Fuzi said she’s starting to get calls from other restaurants interested in buying kitchen equipment, grills and supplies when the restaurant closes.

“For us that’s a good thing, because we’ve got to sell it to pay off our loan,” Fuzi said.

“I’m going to miss the customers, but it will be nice to move on to something else where I actually get a paycheck,” she said. “I figure even if I get a minimum wage job, it will be more than I am making here.”

Along with her employees, Fuzi said she’s looking at her options, checking out the Oregon Employment Department’s Web site for job openings, and weighing whether to go back to school to change careers, start a catering business or put her hands-on experience owning and running her own restaurant to use managing a restaurant for someone else.

“We’ll see what doors open,” Fuzi said. “When one door closes, another door always opens up.”