HANOVER — Monday’s lunchtime rush at Cutting’s Northside Cafe was like old times: the parking lot was was full, people were eating their sandwiches at tables outside and inside the restaurant and the line was five-customers deep waiting at the counter to pay their tabs.
“Hi Carolee,” Elaine Hawthorne said as she rang up customer Carolee Crossman’s order on the cash register before turning to a visitor and explaining, “I was a school teacher, so I learned names.”
Crossman, of Enfield, has been coming to get her lunch at Cutting’s on Lyme Road, also known as Route 10, in Hanover since it opened in 2007. She first walked from an office up the road and now drives from Dartmouth’s Tuck School where she works.
“This place is like ‘Cheers.’ They know your name,” Crossman smiled, referring to 1980s TV show of assorted characters who made a Boston neighborhood bar their home-away-from-home. “It’s like a family.”
Cutting’s is a family: Head cook and owner Cole Cutting prepares the orders alongside his wife, Tara, who passes the sandwiches and pizzas between the kitchen and customers waiting at the counter while Cutting’s grandmother, Hawthorne, works the cash register. Sometimes Cutting’s father shows up to lend a hand and if customers are lucky they might catch a glimpse of the Cuttings’ 5-year-old son playing behind the counter.
Now, Cutting’s is becoming the latest family-run eatery in Hanover to close, following by less than a month the closing of C & A’s Pizza and, earlier, Everything But Anchovies, two mainstays whose unadorned but satisfying fare served the appetites of townies and college students alike.
After 17 years, Wednesday is the last day for Cutting’s.
“Things kind of never bounced back after the pandemic,” said Cole Cutting from behind the counter after wrapping up lunch on Tuesday, explaining the decision that led him and Tara to close. “We were hoping it would, but the foot traffic was just no longer like before,” he said, adding that a parallel falloff in their catering business made recovery even tougher.
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But Cutting’s closing is not just another restaurant going out of business story. Cole Cutting is the third generation of Cutting family to earn a living out of the building, which was designed by his grandfather in his Hanover High School shop class and constructed with salvaged wood from his great-grandparent’s farmhouse on the property that burned down.
They called it The Little Store and sold penny candy and gasoline. His great-grandparents sold the property but then, when Cole Cutting was about 5 years old, his parents leased the building and ran a convenience store there. Cutting’s parents had hoped they eventually would be able to buy back the building but it didn’t work out, Cole Cutting said.
“It was heartbreaking,” he said.
Cole Cutting said he and Tara harbored the same dream — they and their son live in an attached apartment in the back — but the cafe’s struggling business in recent years put that hope out of reach, too.
Growing up in Lyme, Cutting, 41, briefly attended University of New Hampshire and Lyndon State to study physical education — photos of the Patriots, Bruins and Red Sox adorn the cafe’s walls — but college didn’t hold his interest. He worked seasonal shifts at King Arthur Baking Co. and then later with some buddies headed out west to Tuscon, Ariz.
In Tucson, Cutting got a job delivering pizza, eventually moved up to making pizzas and then managing the business.
That’s when he fell in love with cooking and making people happy with the food he prepared.
Back in the Upper Valley after Tucson, Cutting said he’d drive past his family’s old place and eventually he got the idea to put his new skills to the task of reclaiming a part of his patrimony.
He opened Cutting’s Northside Cafe — his mother has been a co-owner of the business — on April 17, 2007, the day he turned 24.
“At first it was me, my dad and uncle helping out, before my uncle passed away,” Cutting said.
Cutting was young and could stay open until 10 p.m. delivering orders to Dartmouth dorms and frats. Business was strong enough that he could afford to hire employees.
One of his employees was Tara. Tara, who grew up in Charlestown, worked at Cutting’s for four years “kind of doing everything,” but then got married and moved out of state.
Later, her husband died of cystic fibrosis and Tara came back to the area and to work at Cutting’s.
A romance bloomed between the owner and the employee “and the rest is history,” Tara said on Tuesday. They wed in 2021.
Before the pandemic, Cutting’s did a robust breakfast and lunch business serving people commuting in to or on lunch breaks from CRREL, Kendal at Hanover, the former Dartmouth Printing Co. and office workers in the cluster of businesses along Route 10.
The menu was basic but the portions filling. The bestsellers included the steak and cheese, “Grammy’s BLT” and cranberry walnut chicken salad.
Open from 6:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., Cutting and Tara would pull 12-hour shifts, with Cole’s grandmother coming in for four hours between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. to work the cash register.
The cafe has its jerry-rigged elements.
A few years ago, as it became more difficult for his grandmother to walk, Cole hooked a line of string around pulleys that he and his grandmother pull to carry orders clipped to the line with clothespins from the counter to the kitchen.
Cole Cutting said a big shift happened around 2018 when Dominoes opened in Hanover and cut into their delivery orders to the college. In response, Cutting began a side business of catering, mostly on the weekends, serving events at the college. For several years Cutting’s had a catering contract with Hotel Coolidge in White River Junction for events at the hotel.
But the catering business also fell off after the pandemic, and with people employed at the businesses along Route 10 now often working from home and not commuting in, the lunchtime foot traffic has fallen off as well.
Cutting said he does not know what’s next but he’s keeping an open mind.
“There are a lot of options out there. For the time being I just may do something different,” he said.
After a vacation, Cutting plans to re-open the cafe until he depletes the stock of food stored in the freezer and will continue to cater through October.
“This is all I’ve ever done. It’s been almost 20 years. I don’t think I could go to work in someone else’s kitchen,” Cutting said, laughing.
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com