The Making of a Third Place, Pt. III
Welcome to the membership
This is the third part of a story about the restaurant we bought in 2021. Read the first part here: The Making of a Third Place, Pt. I: First It Was Exciting, and the second part here: Pt. II Then It Was Difficult.
“I never put up a barber pole or a sign or even gave my shop a name. I didn’t have to. The building was already called “the barbershop”. That was its name because that had been its name for nobody knew how long.” ~ Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry
One of the decisions we had to make early on was what to call our new venture.
When Tim’s brother had taken over the business ten or twelve years earlier, he emphasized the new start and his one-of-a-kind baked goods by changing the name to The Bravo Bakery and Cafe, and that became a language that dated your time in the valley. If you referred to it as The Chalet, you were an old timer. If you called it The Bravo you were still new around here. But you could never get away from history—it was The Chalet, right down to the etched glass window in front.
When our daughter was a toddler she used to mispronounce it fancily: La Chalet.
The night before we opened the Chalet Deli + Market, our kids were there with us, putting on the finishing touches and sampling the espresso and hamburgers to make sure they were fit for the public. In all our years of parenting we had been the supporters and encouragers to our kids, praying them through rough spots and getting bloody in the work with them. Now, the reversal of things was a comfort.
Opening day was nuts. Tim and I didn’t sleep the night before, and we were out of bed at 3:30 a.m. with excited brains and nervous nerves and not the slightest clue how this would go, but we were going. We put on our best jeans and brand new Chalet Deli + Market t-shirts, tied on our cushiest running shoes, and left the house in the dark for the 8 minute drive to the deli.
We fired up the grill at 4:00 a.m. and opened the doors for business at 6. By 8 o’clock we had five or six employees on shift with us, and Tim’s dad was working in the kitchen as well.
It was madness for hours. I think our daughters each stepped in to help a time or two that day, as well, but it’s a blur. I know all our kids were around. I know Tim’s mom was making pies and cakes for us. I know that lunch time was crowded and stressful, but people were so good. It felt like everyone came at once, ordering food and making requests, and some curious people just popped in to see the place.
I don’t think Tim or I ate or sat down all day. At 10 p.m. we died in our bed, with our alarm set to do it all again the next morning.
Many of the following days were simply exhausting. When you’re tired, shot through with adrenaline until the adrenaline runs out, it can be really hard to see the good.
On our second day of business someone wrote us a bad review and said our breakfast burritos were "obviously from McDonald's". The nearest McDonald's is an hour round trip and I guarantee you I did not get up at 4 a.m. to drive to McDonald's for your burrito, good sir. No. On that second day of business I got up at 4 a.m. to go open the store alone because my husband had worked himself into a complete physical meltdown after months and months of remodeling, cleaning, buying equipment and groceries, stocking the store and deli with our life's savings, and working 18 hours on opening day, kind sir. He could not stand upright without vomiting that morning, without the room spinning, without his heart leaping from his chest. I opened the store by myself that day—the second day of this completely different life—and I cooked the sausage and scrambled the eggs and assembled the best breakfast burrito I could at the time, sir. I'm sorry you didn't like it.1
It would be months of health-mysteries for Tim, and there are still no answers for that weird episode, just suspicions and self-diagnoses. His blood pressure was abnormally low, his heartbeat low and erratic, white blood cell counts very high, and his energy level crashed hard. It was a year before he really climbed out of that exhaustion and the weird symptoms, and then he developed other issues related to overworking.
He’s never been great at pacing himself and that runs in his family.
For months my mother-in-law crafted beautiful pies for us, and my father-in-law passed on his recipes and instructions for the best biscuits and gravy2 you’ve ever had, the cinnamon rolls as big as your head, the clam chowder he is famous for, and several other soup recipes. He showed us all the tricks of the old grill and oven, and we brought a chair into the kitchen to get him to sit down and rest.
We had access to industry experts, seasoned by a whole life of the restaurant business, and living right next door to the deli. Eventually we were able to train bakers to take their place, but we had to literally shoo my father-in-law out of the kitchen.
Everyone said the hardest part of this business would be finding good, reliable help, especially in such a rural area, and for a while that was true. It was hard, and to be fair, we were training people to do a job that we ourselves were still in training for. It was rough.
Within the first several months of opening we had three employees leave to have babies, which is to be expected and celebrated when you hire newlyweds. Our daughter-in-law was going to be the store manager, but she gave us our first grandson that April, instead—a complete miracle pregnancy. She helped us get things off the ground and had the tedious task of entering every single grocery item, every beverage, and every deli item into the system for us.
We lost a few of our younger staff to college and better jobs in the city, which is also expected and celebrated.
The first year and a half felt like a revolving door of wonderful employees, along with unexpected illnesses, missed alarms, and personality clashes. There was a constant fear of my phone ringing or dinging with some “deli tragedy”, and my body and brain paid a toll.
Looking back through photos for these Substack posts, I can track how my life was going. I can see where things shifted, when my photos changed from the monthly hikes two friends and I were committed to taking in 2021, to remodeling pictures and timelapse videos. Then it was Christmas, and snow, and what felt like one last hurrah! with our family before our unknown life began.
Starting in January of 2022, my photos shifted to price tags, bulk packages of sausage, fresh made sandwiches and soups, beautiful homemade pies, produce, shopping lists, and bleeding fingers from bleach water. I don’t know why I took half the pictures I did, but now I’m glad for the documentation. I was barely writing during this time, but the pictures tell much of the story. A thousand words, many of them painful and harsh, some of them sweet reminders.
Opening day I think I accidentally took a screenshot of the homescreen on my phone. I do that a lot—is it just me? But it’s a happy accident. On my homescreen was a reminder for 5:40 a.m. that said “Make Kirsten’s coffee”. Kirsten is a labor and delivery nurse, one of my hiking buddies, and my closest friend for the last 27 years. On opening day, she stopped in at the deli on her way to work to be our very first customer ever, and to pray and hang out with us for a bit. I cry thinking about it.
Also in that screenshot was a verse a faithful friend shared with a group of us that day.
January 27th: a photo of half a deli sandwich, wrapped and stickered with our logo, taken in my car. This photo documents the first time I left the deli to go home and take a break. In the 10 days prior, I had only ever left during open hours to frantically pick up more groceries. We were constantly running out of things, unable to keep up or plan for the days ahead. We were chasing our tails and catching naps on the couches in the back seating area3, and getting to make myself a sandwich and go home was something worth documenting.
February 7th, my first walk in nature since opening the deli—sunshine, my dogs running wild after weeks stuck at home, and my favorite mountain to climb.
Getting that part of my life back felt like such victory and big freedom, like I could do this deli thing and survive. I remember I still smelled like sausage from working the morning shift, but the air was icy-fresh on my bare arms and I was in absolute solitude.
This gravel road into the mountains, into the woods, onto the trails my dogs know by heart—this is my Place. I love people and this community holds great friends and some real characters I cherish, but I crave solitude, and I always get a bit of it out in the forest. I don’t call it a happy place, because it’s where I can be sad, too. But it makes me happy in the deepest way.
I’ll go big and say: it makes me remember the presence of God.
When you’re a business owner your phone is always on you, and your life is always on call. I could have left my phone home, but honestly I always have it with me on a walk anyways—business or no business.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, right around the one mile marker. I was rounding the corner into the openness of sunshine, climbing the hill with my slack and aching legs, tired feet, happy head.
I was alone, but not. In the woods, but reachable.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket. Someone was sick—couldn’t come to work or had to leave work—I don’t remember exactly. I had to turn around and go back to the deli, but first I had to walk the mile home.
I cried hot, angry tears, tears of frustration and self-pity and doubt and questions for God and I knew I should have just stayed home and rested but now I’m on this stupid walk and my legs are tired from work and climbing and holding my weight and I’m tired. I don’t want to go back.
Why? Things were just fine before. Why.
Here is where I start to lament, because life was just fine and we didn’t need any of this and I miss the way things were. I miss my life—not just my “old life”, but life. Period. The part where I am a person and I do things people do. Why did we start a business in the middle of a pandemic and right before historic inflation? Why did we start a business at all? Because things really were fine before.4
The first year was predictably rough, but in our second year, TNT Payne Construction was no longer paying Chalet Deli + Market’s bills. We may never be able to reimburse the loans we took from the construction company to get us started, but the deli was mostly self-supporting by mid-2023 and this felt like success.
In May of 2023, I worked all but three days of the month. But in June, things started to turn around. We hired four more great people around that time—people who love our community and who have previous experience with either a store or a restaurant. Slowly, we re-trained and made improvements, and gave manager titles and small raises when we could.
By December, I had someone to work the Sunday morning shift and was back in church, after two years away.
Currently, I am not on the schedule to work shifts at all. Last week I filled in for someone who was sick, but for the most part I am catching up on General Manager duties and shopping for groceries twice a week. I am having a bit of life back, but I still carry my phone with me and panic a little anytime there’s a notice from the work group text.
The thing we were forewarned would be the worst problem, has become the biggest blessing—the people.
From our three managers who see things I don’t see and keep the place running, to the faithful people who do their work with excellence, to the teenagers who pay attention to things and care about their work in ways our culture doesn’t give kids credit for—we are so thankful. We have an embarrassment of riches in our employees. Sometimes they have so much fun at work that they joke they should be paying us, and I die from the joy of it all.
I am a peacemaker. I want everyone to be happy—which is really impossible in the food industry—but we have people who work hard and enjoy being a part of making this Third Place in our unique community5.
The Chalet Deli + Market is a never ending list of things to do and fix and buy, and we still have big plans and improvements to make, but there has not been a week that has gone by where we haven’t heard something positive from our community, or from strangers passing through. This work is a testimony of the power of encouraging words, because sometimes that is the only thing that keeps us going. Seeing this place being used and enjoyed in the ways we dreamed it would be has been our only paycheck, and we are rich.
This work has also deepened my belief that most negative comments and opinions come from a place of ignorance—you just have no idea how hard something is, how much work, how much money, or how many things are happening behind the scenes. I’m learning to let purely negative stuff, especially from complete strangers, roll off. We are not meeting everyone’s needs, and that has to be okay.6
I want you to know there are holes in this story, both for good and for bad. I haven’t even told you about the sinkhole, the ridiculously bouncy price of eggs, the difficulty of finding burgers in the first year of business and roast beef in the second. You don’t know about the thefts and the constant losses, the broken and broken down, the critics, the multiple open shifts needing coverage.
And I also haven’t told you all the “small” miracles, the prayers prayed and answered, the happy people, the amazed, the thankful. I can’t even begin to tell you about the feeling of having people pick up on a dream and serve it like it were their own, because it has become their own. I haven’t told you how it feels to be a part of this membership, or maybe I have.
But I hope if you’re ever driving Highway 42 West to the Oregon coast, through a sleepy mountain valley that doesn’t look very promising, you’ll stop and grab a sandwich, a latte, a slice of homemade pie. I hope you’ll come in and feel welcomed because you know some of the story, because the story is the membership, and the membership is home.
“…as I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here.” ~ Jayber Crow
This is an excerpt from my essay titled “Lament, McDonald’s breakfast burritos, and the hard work of staying”.
Someone suggested buying canned gravy once, to save on labor, but we would never dishonor my father-in-law like that. Canned gravy is anathema.
We took the black leather couches from our home, weathered by fifteen years of family life but still in great shape, and put them in the deli. This little thing means so much to me.
“It is what I call a ‘third place,’ a setting beyond home and work (the ‘first’ and ‘second’ places respectively) in which people relax in good company and do so on a regular basis,” from Celebrating the Third Place by Ray Oldenburg
Our favorite way to lighten the mood in a stressful work situation is to quote a negative review someone gave us: “Food isn’t worth the overpricing, nothing under a dollar and food is hardly food.” It’s the nothing under a dollar part, for me.
Wonderful. Beautiful. I love it.
Oh man.... I'm crying. Again. Oh the gracious goodness of God... how I wish we were planning a road trip your way--soon! soon!
(and you and Shawn Smucker should compare notes--his 'maybe we should buy a bookstore' post got me thinking :-)
Take care, friend.