HANOVER — The lunchtime rush at Cutting's Northside Café on Monday was a familiar sight: The parking lot was full, people ate sandwiches outside and at tables inside, and the line of customers at the counter was about five deep.
“Hello, Carolee,” Elaine Hawthorne said as she checked out customer Carolee Crossman's order at the register, then turned to her visitor and explained, “I was a school teacher, so I learned your name.”
Crossman, who lives in Enfield, has been eating lunch at Cuttings on Lime Road (also known as Route 10) in Hanover since it opened in 2007. At first, she walked from her office down the road, but now she drives to the restaurant from her job at Dartmouth College's Tuck School.
“This place is like Cheers. Everybody knows their names,” Crossman said, smiling, referring to the 1980s TV show about a cast of characters who make a Boston neighborhood bar their home. “It's like a family.”
Cutting teeth Family: Executive chef and owner Cole Cutting prepares orders with his wife, Tara, who passes sandwiches and pizzas between the kitchen and customers waiting at the counter, while Cutting's grandmother, Hawthorne, works the cash register. Cutting's father sometimes drops in to help out, and if you're lucky, you might catch a glimpse of Cutting's 5-year-old son playing behind the counter.
Now Cutting's is becoming the latest family-owned eatery to close in Hanover, following the closure of C & A's Pizza and, before that, Everything But Anchovies, two mainstays that satisfied the appetites of town residents and college students with no-frills but satisfying fare.
After 17 years, Wednesday will be Cutting's' final day.
“Things never really picked up after the pandemic,” Cole Cutting said behind the counter after lunch on Tuesday, explaining his and Tara's decision to close. “We were hoping it would pick up, but the traffic just wasn't what it was before,” he said, adding that a simultaneous slump in catering business made recovery even more difficult.
But Cutting's closure isn't just about a restaurant going out of business: Cole Cutting is the third generation of Cutting family members to make a living from the building his grandfather designed in an industrial arts class at Hanover High School and built with lumber salvaged from his great-grandparents' farmhouse, which stood on the burned property.
They named it “The Little Store” and sold one-cent candy and gasoline. His great-grandparents sold the building, but when Cole Cutting was about 5 years old, his parents rented it and ran a convenience store. Cutting's parents hoped they would eventually be able to buy the building back, but that never happened, Cole Cutting said.
“It was a heartbreaking incident,” he said.
Cole Cutting said he and Tara, who live with their son in an apartment behind the shop, shared the same dream, but the cafe's poor performance in recent years has put that hope in jeopardy.
Cutting, 41, grew up in Lyme and studied physical education at the University of New Hampshire and Lyndon State College — photos of the Patriots, Bruins and Red Sox hang on the cafe's walls — but college didn't appeal to him, so he took a seasonal job at King Arthur Baking Company before heading west with a group of friends to Tucson, Arizona.
In Tucson, Cutting started out delivering pizzas and was eventually promoted to making pizzas and then running the store.
It was then that he fell in love with cooking and making people happy with the food he made.
Cutting moved back to the Upper Valley from Tucson and was driving by his family's old home when he got the idea to put his new skills to work recovering some of the family heirlooms.
He opened Cuttings Northside Café, co-owned by his mother, on his 24th birthday, April 17, 2007.
“At first it was me, my dad and my uncle helping out, but then my uncle passed away,” Cutting says.
Despite his young age, Cutting was able to stay open until 10 p.m., delivering orders to Dartmouth dorms and sororities, and business was going well enough that he could afford to hire employees.
One of his employees was Tara, who grew up in Charlestown and “did everything” at Cuttings for four years before getting married and moving out of state.
Her husband then died of cystic fibrosis and Tara returned to the area to work at Cuttings.
Love blossomed between the owner and employee, and “the rest is history,” Tara said Tuesday. The two were married in 2021.
Before the pandemic, Cuttings did a thriving breakfast and lunch business serving commuters and lunchtime customers to CRREL, Kendall at Hanover and the Old Dartmouth Printing Company, as well as office workers from businesses along Route 10.
The menu is simple but hearty, with the most popular dishes being steak and cheese, the “Gourami BLT,” and the cranberry-walnut chicken salad.
The store was open from 6:30am to 6pm, with Cutting and Tara working 12-hour shifts, while Cole's grandmother worked a four-hour shift from 10am to 2pm, working the cash register.
This cafe has a few elements going for it.
A few years ago, when her grandmother began having difficulty walking, Cole attached a string to a pulley and pulled it with her to carry orders, attached to clothespins, from the counter to the kitchen.
Cole Cutting said the big change came around 2018 when Domino's Pizza opened in Hanover and delivery orders to the university dropped off. In response, Cutting started a side business catering for university events, mostly on weekends. For several years, Cutting had a catering contract with the Hotel Coolidge in White River Junction for events at the hotel.
But since the pandemic began, catering business has declined, and lunchtime foot traffic has dwindled as Route 10 store employees now often work from home rather than commute to work.
Cutting said he doesn't know what happens next, but he's keeping an open mind.
“There are a lot of options out there. I might do something different for the time being,” he said.
After the holidays, Cutting plans to reopen the cafe until he has used up the food he has stored in his freezer, and then stay open until October.
“This is all I've ever done, for almost 20 years now. I can't imagine working in someone else's kitchen,” Cutting said with a laugh.
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.
