NORTHAMPTON — Pleasant Street mainstay Sylvester’s Restaurant will close next weekend after 39 years in business.
Sylvester’s, which offers breakfast, brunch and lunch five days a week, is owned by the same family that owns Roberto’s Restaurant, also on Pleasant Street. The owners have offered jobs at Roberto’s to all Sylvester’s employees, and they hope to open Roberto’s seven days a week in the future.
“To look back on it, my parents started this restaurant in 1983. I was born in 1988,” Chris St. Martin, who manages Sylvester’s with his wife, Jillian Duclos, said on Friday. “This restaurant was my whole life growing up. … It’s a very emotional day for all of us. It’s really an emotional week for all of us. But we’ve reached the decision that it’s time to consolidate.”
A letter from Sylvester’s management to the community, posted Friday on social media, refers to running a restaurant during the COVID-19 pandemic as “a monumental task.” St. Martin said the family wanted to focus its time, energy and workforce on one restaurant.
Among the toughest challenges are simultaneous shortages and rising costs for both products and labor, which St. Martin said do not appear to be temporary.
“It’s looking more and more like this is the economy we’ll be living in,” St. Martin said. “This isn’t goodbye. We’re still in the community, still slinging pizza and beers at Roberto’s.”
Sylvester’s will remain open this weekend and next.
“I don’t know if we’ll make it all the way to Memorial Day on Monday, but we’ll try to make it through Sunday,” St. Martin said. “There might be a race to get the last huevos rancheros.”
He said customers will miss their favorite foods, like banana bread and blueberry muffins, but also “the sense of community that Sylvester’s provided. It’s a great place to meet up for coffee or study if you’re a college student.” He and Duclos met when he was “cutting potatoes” and doing other small tasks for the restaurant and Duclos was working as a server.
The office of the Greater Northampton Chamber of Commerce is a stone’s throw away from Sylvester’s. Executive director Vince Jackson said the restaurant’s owners, Peter St. Martin and Maureen McGuinness, are “shining examples of great business leaders and great employers.”
“Their closure permanently will be a huge and painful and sore loss for our community. Not just for the community more broadly, but for the restaurant community,” Jackson said. He added that St. Martin and McGuinness are “always willing to share wisdom, expertise and best practices with other restaurant owners.”
Jackson said he is “always intrigued by the silver lining” and that the community is “fortunate” that Sylvester’s employees were offered other jobs.
He agrees with Chris St. Martin that supply shortages and soaring costs are here to stay. Restaurateurs, Jackson said, have to be “innovative and creative” across the country. Upscale restaurants are seeing growth, he said, as casual dining spots struggle with shrinking profit margins and customer bases.
“Even though those problems will persist, they’re strong-minded businesspeople who are innovative and willing to make investments along the way,” Jackson said of Northampton’s business owners. “I think it will give way to innovation in a way that hasn’t been accelerated before.”
Brian Steele can be reached at bsteele@gazettenet.com.