SUNDERLAND — After 47 years, Bub’s BBQ will leave 676 Amherst Road, as Andrew Garlo, owner of the beloved business, plans to take the restaurant’s wings and ribs on the road with a food truck.
“The sauce will be the same, the sides will be the same, the meat will still be the same,” Garlo said. “It just won’t be unlimited anymore.”
Customers will have one last chance to sit in the restaurant’s booths this weekend from noon to 8 p.m. Friday through Sunday, and next week from Wednesday to Saturday. The last day in business will be Feb. 28.
Former building owners Deac Tiley and Elaine Tiley sold the property to Edward Quinteros for $150,000 on Jan. 27. Quinteros said a barbecue company based in New York City is considering renting the property, but he stressed that no plans are concrete.
Bub’s BBQ opened on July 4, 1979. It was first owned by Howard “Bub” Tiley, who sold it to his son in 2000. Andrea Moroney bought it in 2011, and the business was sold again to Andrew Garlo in September 2022.
Garlo, a Westfield native and Sunderland resident, has rented the building for the past four years. When he and his wife, Nina Garlo, heard that the owners were selling the building, they considered purchasing it. However, they opted against it due to the asking price and the unexpected repairs that would be needed at a time when “unexplained infertility” has already caused the couple to face financial challenges in starting a family, according to their Facebook post on Monday announcing the business transition.
Although sales were strong in the Garlos’ first three years running Bub’s BBQ, business dipped in the last year.
“The idea of a brick-and-mortar restaurant is almost out of style,” Andrew Garlo said. “These big restaurants after COVID have fallen to the wayside. You look around and every other day a restaurant’s closing. Food’s expensive, rent’s expensive, people aren’t going out as much as they were.”
When Quinteros purchased the property, Andrew Garlo said he discussed renting the building, but “we both couldn’t settle on a deal that worked for both of us.”
Quinteros did not elaborate on the topic of any discussions about renting the space.
“He’s a nice guy and everything,” Quinteros said. “I don’t have anything negative to say about anybody.”
Although a food truck will be a new adventure for the couple, selling alligator meat and wings in a mobile fashion was always a part of their plan since Andrew Garlo bought the business in 2022, a proud moment for the pair.
“We were so proud to buy something that’s been around for so long,” Nina Garlo said.
She remembered driving past the beloved barbecue spot when they first moved to Sunderland in 2020 and her husband announcing, “I would love to own a restaurant like that. How cool would that be?” Although Nina Garlo said she rolled her eyes at the time, her husband’s lofty idea became a reality a couple years later, and the smoker she thought he would never use became a part of their daily routines.
“It feels like this was just our fate,” Nina Garlo said.
“I was excited to buy the place, but I’m more excited now to buy a food truck,” Andrew Garlo said in one of the restaurant’s bright green booths.
Without property taxes or rent, the food truck will allow the couple to cook and travel without the added stress, Andrew Garlo said. Instead of planning months out, Nina said they can take it day by day in the food truck and live as “adventure buddies” again, a goal that bonded them when they first started dating.
“This will be our new adventure,” Nina Garlo said.
Although the couple is looking forward to taking Bub’s BBQ to breweries nearby, and stops outside of Massachusetts on road trips and food truck competitions, they say they will miss the regulars that made the hard work worth it.
The Garlos can list the orders of familiar faces from memory, from a construction worker’s 40 mango habanero wings to an Amherst woman’s half rack of ribs and the regular who orders a grilled chicken sandwich for $17.12.
“She has the exact change,” Andrew Garlo said.
When longtime customer Peter Kaplan comes in, Andrew Garlo pushes a button on the cash register he created just for his order.
“We remember our people,” Nina Garlo said.
Almost every weekend, Kaplan drives more than an hour and a half from Wayland to Bub’s BBQ, where he shares a meal with his dog Jolie. She eats food that Andrew Garlo prepares just for her.
“Everything I got I liked,” Kaplan said in a phone interview. “We’re going to be missing an institution.”
The couple forewarned the regulars of their decision to leave the building before breaking the news in Monday’s Facebook post. In the announcement’s more than 200 comments, current and past customers shared memories from the restaurant’s 47 years, including college dates, rehearsal dinners and countless family meals.
“Bub’s has touched so many people across the years that it’d be hard to find someone that didn’t know Bub’s anywhere you went,” Andrew Garlo said. He pulled out a signed letter from a former Patriots kicker who frequented Bub’s and a postcard from boxer Sherman “Big Train” Bergman.
Besides notes and drawings from former customers and news articles dating back to the restaurant’s start in 1979, about 30 pigs of all sizes fill Bub’s BBQ, including a pig lamp, a pig table, a stack of pig figurines with cow-like spots, a pig in a dress on the door to the women’s bathroom and another in a tuxedo for the men’s bathroom and, of course, the restaurant’s menu of smokehouse staples printed on a pig-shaped sign.
“At one point, there were 168 pigs in the building,” Andrew Garlo said.
With the pigs and artifacts telling stories of Bub’s BBQ’s past, packing up the restaurant will prove to be a difficult task, but the Garlos plan to save it all in case they return to a brick-and-mortar business model down the line.
“We’re not riding into the sunset,” Andrew Garlo said. “Not yet.”
“We’ll be driving off into the sunset, but with Bub’s,” his wife said with a laugh.