NORTHAMPTON — When Peter St. Martin and Maureen “Mo” McGuinness opened Sylvester’s Restaurant, the iconic Pleasant Street breakfast and lunch spot that will serve its final meals on Sunday, customers were hard to come by.
“It was really slow,” St. Martin said Wednesday, reflecting on 39 years in business as Sylvester’s prepped for its last few days. “We knew that opening a restaurant was kind of a risky thing. We always felt that, if you’re going to open a restaurant, you have to do something special, one great, special thing to attract people.”
For Sylvester’s, that one special thing was actually an ethos that touched every aspect of the food: All of it, even the bread for the toast and the dressing for the salad, must be homemade.
Nearly four decades later, amid a historic shortage of labor and soaring ingredient prices, the family is closing Sylvester’s to focus all of its attention on Roberto’s, another Pleasant Street eatery that they bought in 2004. The owners said they have offered jobs at Roberto’s to all Sylvester’s employees, including baker Bonnie Burnham, who has worked for the family since 1993.
“It’s not the correct model for the economic times,” McGuinness said of running two restaurants during a labor shortage, one of which is only open for breakfast and lunch. “Breakfast used to be doable, but now it’s very difficult not to lose everything if you don’t stop doing it.”
The family couldn’t imagine jacking up prices to keep pace with rising costs, St. Martin said. The restaurant buys organic free-range eggs from The Country Hen in Hubbardston, just one of the high-quality items that the owners insist on serving but which have become much more expensive in recent months.
“The egg prices have gone up about 30% in a couple of months,” St. Martin said, dismissing the “stupid” idea of increasing prices on menu items like the $12 omelets. “Who’s going to come out and pay $19 for an omelet? So we really just had to make a decision that this model was not working for us.”
“Maureen and I met working at a restaurant in Amherst called Judie’s,” which closed due to the economic collapse caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, St. Martin said. “I was out of college but she was still in school, and we were dating and talking about opening a business. She and I decided to open this place” not far from his previous job at the former Woolworth’s store in downtown Northampton.
Before it was Sylvester’s, the building at 111 Pleasant St. had already lived a storied life. It was the home of Sylvester Graham, the 19th-century diet guru who invented graham crackers and used to swim every morning in the Mill River. Before St. Martin and McGuinness moved into the space in October 1983, it was a vegetarian restaurant called Feast & Folly, and before that, it was a small cafe.
And it already had another breakfast spot across the street.
“It was not the bustling street that it is now,” St. Martin said. “This area was not really considered part of downtown back then. If you wanted to be downtown, you had to be up on Main Street. That changed over the years.”
The original Sylvester’s was significantly smaller than it is today, little more than a single room with a service counter and a few tables.
“We had maybe 35 seats in there, and the kitchen was this cramped little kitchen in the back,” St. Martin said, but the business expanded over the years as customers continued to come back for homemade food. “By the time 1993 came along, we had really outgrown the space and some things had occurred that enabled us to buy the building.”
Once they owned the building, they expanded the footprint, added a second dining room and put a prep station in the basement. In 2004, the second dining room expanded and the restaurant took its present form.
“I was talking to a couple that have been coming up here from Holyoke ever since the ’80s,” St. Martin said. “We’ve seen a lot of people come in with babies and now those babies are having babies. … We walk through the dining room and we recognize people from years and years and years of coming here.”
When businesses nationwide shuttered in 2020 due to COVID, there was little that Sylvester’s could do to serve customers. Although takeout was eventually allowed under public health regulations, “Eggs benedicts don’t travel very well,” St. Martin said, and the family started considering their options for consolidating their businesses.
Chris St. Martin, the owners’ son, manages Sylvester’s with his wife, Jillian Duclos. The couple met while working at the restaurant, and on Wednesday, their year-and-a-half-old son Henry was following his grandmother around the dining room, playing with a toy fire truck.
“We’re restaurant people. We love what we do. … We’ve just been so tapped as a family,” Duclos said. “Raising little Henry and then filling in gaps on the labor side. We really haven’t had any time to think about what could be next, but now we’re starting to feel a little hopeful, almost, that maybe the possibilities are endless.”
Asked about the plans for the building, Peter St. Martin said nothing is decided. Sylvester’s could return with new owners or with a different business model; in the meantime, the family is being flooded with requests for its bread and baked goods recipes, and it’s not impossible that those popular items could remain available in stores or at Roberto’s.
“Sylvester’s may get reborn as something else, or we may find someone who wants to take over what we were doing and continue the Sylvester’s tradition, or we may rent it to somebody who has a totally different idea of what they want to do with the space,” St. Martin said.
McGuinness said Sylvester’s “may, after three weeks, morph into something. Open the cafe, you know? We don’t know. … We may stay open and sell bread” for a time.
She added that the Sylvester’s and Roberto’s teams provide food and volunteer labor to several homelessness services organizations in the area, as well as the Children’s Advocacy Center. The restaurant pays “above average” wages, she said, because they value their workers and consider themselves a part of the community.
Customers left “tear-jerking” comments on social media when Sylvester’s announced its closure, McGuinness said, describing the outpouring as “completely unexpected.”
Chris St. Martin said that Roberto’s will now have the staff to open seven days a week instead of five, and with longer hours.
“Roberto’s has had the same pizza recipe since the 1960s,” Chris St. Martin said. “I think it’s the best pizza I’ve ever had, but we also have a great pasta menu, which we’re trying to expand now. … We’re trying to bring it back to a full, Italian-themed restaurant.”
Duclos said Roberto’s is “like Cheers, where everybody knows your name. It’s one of those places people have been coming for years. … It’s just the kind of that place where you garner those relationships, and we’ve had that at Sylvester’s, as well.”
Sylvester’s Restaurant is open through Sunday, its final day in business, from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Brian Steele can be reached at bsteele@gazettenet.com.