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Restaurant Interview

Decent Essays

I interviewed Marilee Hobbs, one of my mom’s close friends and Linda Keuver, the owner of the restaurant for my local history paper. When she was younger, Marilee worked at the Hans and Gretel Restaurant in East Durham off of Route 145. Linda Keuver was married to John Keuver, whose family owned the Hans and Gretel Restaurant. Hans and Gretel is located about a quarter of a mile south of the Stonebridge Road and Stonebridge Road Extension intersection on the east side of the road. The Beers’ Atlas showed the main road running through East Durham, Route 145, but each piece of property was labelled with the land owner’s names. This made it hard to determine the exact location and prior use on the Beers’ Atlas. John Keuver’s parents bought the …show more content…

John Keuver ran the main parts of the business. He ran the front part of the restaurant, handled the orders and paperwork, and did some of the short order cooking. His sister, Claire, did all the major cooking and ran the kitchen portion of the business. Marilee worked breakfast, lunch and dinner shifts ad had her usual cast of characters. The Keuver family were Germans, but all the patrons were Irish. As told by Mrs. Keuver, “the restaurant’s specialty dish was German sauerbraten.” Marilee said that many Irishmen would come in early Sunday morning, “smelling terribly of alcohol”, and tell Marilee to “tell the cook to hurry up their eggs so they could make it to Sunday mass on time.” Mrs. Keuver told me that “the restaurant was a busy place for many years, especially in the summer.” During the daytime shifts, Marilee said that she’d walk out of the restaurant with thirty to fifty dollars just in tips, and she’d make an average of one hundred dollars in tips each dinner shift she worked. She said that at many occasions, Mr. Keuver would have to lock the doors and make people wait outside for an available table because the restaurant would become so busy and crowded

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