After nine months of tracking the economic downturn, Wayne Asbury and Bill O’Mahony hoped business would pick up at Del Rossi’s Trattoria in Dublin with the fall tourist season.
But with costs rising and tourists failing to materialize, the co-owners decided to close the doors of the nearly 40-year-old restaurant. The Italian eatery stopped serving customers last month.
“It happened fairly quickly, and Bill and I are just kind of feeling like the dust is settling and we’re wrapping our heads around it,” Asbury said.
Asbury and O’Mahony bought the business three years ago. September and October are typically their peak months, they said, but this year was the slowest September yet.
“Two weekends ago, it was just a terrible weekend, and we said, ‘If we have another weekend like that, we’re going to get in trouble,” Asbury said. “Progressively, this year, since January, when we compared numbers to the two years before, we could just see it heading in this direction.”
The restaurant business is notoriously difficult, with typical profit margins of only three-to-four percent even in the best of times. Other restaurants in the region have rclosed in recent years, including Audrey’s Cafe in Dublin, and The Smoking Trout in Marlborough and Fireworks in Keene.
Asbury and O’Mahony said in three years, they’d never hit the point where they considered closing their doors.
“We just kept thinking, ‘OK, things will pick up,’ and then they didn’t,” O’Mahony said.
For months, they said, they tried cutting costs without compromising the quality of the food. The owners regularly sent staff home on slow nights and started doing more and more of the work themselves, from painting the building and doing the landscaping to bartending and washing dishes.
Asbury said they were taken by surprise at how quickly things declined in the past few months. Costs piled up, with monthly bills jumping 25% this year.
“It’s oil prices, it’s food and wine, it’s the inflation of everything,” Asbury said. “After the third bad pay period in a row, that was it. We had to stop before we ended up in trouble. It snuck up on us, to be sure.”
Labor costs were a factor, too. O’Mahony said Del Rossi’s lost some of its cooks because they wanted a raise that the restaurant couldn’t afford. Gas prices increased this year, and some employees commuted to Dublin because they couldn’t find housing in town, O’Mahony said.
Raising prices to cover these rising costs wasn’t feasible, O’Mahony said. Main courses were priced in the $20 to $30 range.
“You just end up alienating people in these tough economic times,” he said. “People are really tightening their purse strings; they are just giving up that monthly meal out or travel.”
Asbury and O’Mahony said they likely spent more on food than some other restaurants, including more high-end items such as prosciutto, high-quality beef, fresh fish and chocolate.
Del Rossi’s business model was more labor-intensive than many, as the restaurant continued to serve the homemade pasta and scratch sauces that the Del Rossi family created decades ago.
“This sort of model is not done a whole lot anymore. It’s difficult to do in the best of times, but the economic downturn made it nearly impossible,” Asbury said. “You don’t see homemade pasta very often unless it’s really high-end places.”
Asbury said he and O’Mahony have tracked economic pressures almost since the day they bought the restaurant in 2023.
“We could sort of see, politically and economically, what was happening,” Asbury said. “No one is spending money these past few months. A lot of middle-class families are just struggling.”
The partners said they hoped a busier summer and fall would put them in a strong position going into the winter — but instead of ramping up, things slowed down.
“What we have been seeing is that fewer people are going out, and if they are going out, they are spending less,” Asbury said. “People who used to order a few drinks and dessert are skipping drinks, and they’re not ordering dessert. People are probably spending almost $10 less per person than last year.”
Both owners said the worst part of the decision was breaking the news to their staff, including servers who’ve worked at Del Rossi’s for 10 or 15 years. Plus, they called all their customers to cancel upcoming reservations.
The partners said the community has been supportive, with dozens of people reaching out to tell them how much they’ll miss the eatery.
The owners said Del Rossi’s was a “destination” supported by visitors to the region as well as by local businesses, but fewer customers from far away were coming through their doors.
“We’ve noticed we’re not getting the people from New York, from Connecticut and Pennsylvania,” O’Mahony said. “That used to be a huge part of the fall business for us.”
The Canadian tourist market has also dried up.
“We used to get a fair number of Canadian tourists, not specifically for leaf peeping, but all year, and that is gone,” Asbury said.
O’Mahony and Asbury aren’t sure yet what they’ll do next but said they’ll most likely sell the property.
“It would be a fantastic turnkey restaurant for someone who is able to take it on,” Asbury said. “We’ll see what happens.”
