Westward Orchards has run afoul of the town’s regulations for indoor and outdoor seating at a food service establishment. In an email to Westward store manager Stephanie O’Keefe last summer, Ira Grossman, the town’s sanitarian, said the farm stand’s food service permit had no approval for seating, and the septic system was not large enough to meet the Title 5 requirements for a restaurant.
As a result, there will be no tables and chairs inside the store or on the porch, and no picnic tables on the grass. With no place for lunch customers to sit and eat, O’Keefe told the Press she had decided to permanently close the lunch counter.
To meet the Board of Health’s regulations for restrooms in food service establishments, Westward would have to either install a larger septic system or lobby for a variance based on its limited food service. Grossman’s email said restaurant septic systems must handle a flow of 20 gallons per seat, with a minimum leaching area of 1,000 gallons per day. “There is no other category for [a] farm stand with food service,” it said.
The septic issue was always there, O’Keefe said, but “nobody wanted to shut us down for that.” At the end of 2019, the Board of Health told Westward to install a public water supply or the board would not renew its food permit the following year. That work was done in 2020, but Westward said installing a larger septic system was too much of a financial burden to take on, and store owners decided to remove seating instead.
O’Keefe said she could have kept the lunch counter open for food to-go, but she didn’t think that model would work. “Tables on the porch were a big draw for us,” she said. The store will still offer prepackaged containers of items such as chicken salad and soup, as well as coffee and cider donuts, and possibly premade sandwiches. O’Keefe said this is a good time to make the switch from lunch counter to prepackaged items, because that’s how the store operated last year in order to follow COVID-19 regulations.
On the bright side, O’Keefe said closing the lunch counter will make the store more manageable. She said it was hard to find help to run it because the store is only open June through December. She was frequently the one making sandwiches while her mom, Karen Green, took orders. O’Keefe said her mom and her dad (Don Green, who also works at the store), are at retirement age, and her aunt Gail Conlin, who typically worked the cash register, has already retired, so store management will soon be in O’Keefe’s hands alone.
But having run the lunch counter for over 20 years, she’s sad about its closing as well. “When I came home from college at 22, the lunch counter was my baby. I’m so attached to it, it’s hard to let it go. But I also know how much work it takes to do it.” O’Keefe said she couldn’t bring herself to throw away the sign where she wrote the soup and sandwich special every day, so it’s stored away for now. “Baby steps,” she said.
