Polar Cub Café to close after 50 years of operation
By Ariana Crockett O’Harra The Polar Cub Café’s 50-year run has come to an end. On Friday, November 28, the storied restaurant will close for meal service. On the morning of Sunday, November 23, the morning sun was just peeking through the windows of the café, customers waited in line at the register, buying coffee and baked goods. Despite the busy scene, the cafe will be ending the meal service this week. The coffee shop inside the restaurant will still be open. Larry St. Clair bought the building and business in January with his wife Mymy. While the restaurant is eking out a profit, it takes lots of time and adequate staff to operate it. The St. Clairs haven’t been able to find enough employees to run the restaurant to allow them the time to run their other businesses. Downstairs, they operate the Polar Bar, and there are apartments upstairs. Larry has a gold mining business and Mymy runs a nail salon. “Business is good,” said St. Clair in an interview with the Nugget. “There’s no problem with the amount of people visiting the restaurant. It’s the amount of time that it takes is not feasible. St. Clair said that the profit they make from the restaurant just isn’t worth the amount of time and effort they put into it, compared to what they make from their other businesses. “The Polar is profitable,” he said. “Mining is more profitable, per hour, per year.” When the St. Clairs bought the building from Patrick “Pat” and William “Bill” Krier, whose family had owned it for 25 years, the Krier brothers told them the restaurant wasn’t profitable. “We took over at the first of the year and the former owners advised us when we did the best thing we could do is close the restaurant,” said St. Clair. He said every day, there’s something that must be fixed in the restaurant. “There’s always a fire, not literally, metaphorically speaking, there’s always a fire in the kitchen,” said St. Clair. “There’s something broke, something won’t start, something is messed up, we have to fix it.” The other issue is staffing. St. Clair said that putting a plate of food on a customer’s table takes five people from start to finish: the cook, dishwasher, waiter, manager and someone to do maintenance. Right now, the restaurant is operating with a staff of two a dishwasher and a cook plus the St. Clairs themselves, and a janitor who works a few hours a day. “There are no baristas. There are no cooks. Wait staff has been impossible, and they’re just not here,” said St. Clair. With the restaurant closing, the waiter and dishwasher will be laid off. The St. Clairs looked for a manager to take the day-to-day operations off their hands, too, but they couldn’t find a single applicant. “We’ve left it open, almost as a community service to Nome, and we keep saying that it’s not profitable, but let’s leave it open,” said St. Clair. “The labor pool isn’t here. It’s just not.” “It’s not just the restaurant’s dilapidated. The whole building is a problem. So when this goes bad over here, it affects the restaurant over here,” he said. “All of it just compounds onto me to fix it all.” Still, the iconic seaside view isn’t going anywhere. The coffee shop will remain open for business and customers will still be able to use the space. The coffee shop will have pre-made food such as baked goods, bagels, and potentially breakfast burritos, but they won’t be doing any cooking in the restaurant kitchen itself. The plan is to strip the kitchen of ruined equipment and deep clean it. St. Clair said that a lot of their food currently comes from Costco, which is where they plan to get the small eats for the coffee shop. The beans are from Kaladi Brothers Coffee, an Anchorage based coffee roasters. All of that will be available at the same location. The Polar Cub Café’s last day of meal service will be Friday, November 28. Section: News.
