At the June 14 Haines Borough Assembly meeting, economic development director Lee Hart commented that it takes a spreadsheet to find a restaurant that’s open in Haines.
Hart’s remarks came a few weeks after a friend of mine received an email from an Anchorage friend wanting to know where to eat in Haines. “It’s complicated,” my friend responded.
Last night at the brewery, a visitor traveling around the state asked where she and her husband could grab lunch in Haines. Responses varied from, “That’s hard to say” to “You might check at the visitor’s center.”
Face it. Our town has a restaurant issue. The byzantine landscape for eating out includes brick and mortar restaurants, grocery store deli cases, mobile food vans, stationary trailers and meals that “pop up” in local homes.
Not one, it seems, keeps regular hours or serves dinner between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day.
The arrangement is an aggravation for the dining public and a problem for folks trying to organize wintertime tourism events like the bald eagle festival, ALCAN snowmachine race and Winter Games swim meet.
It’s a classic case of the free market, left to its own devices, serving the public poorly. Whether it serves restaurateurs very well is even difficult to say.
To comprehend the problem, it helps to understand the restaurant scene was screwy even before March 2020 when COVID-19 rearranged our world. Also, our local government had a hand in creating the disarray and might be essential to righting it.
When I arrived in Haines in 1986, the town had four year-round restaurants: The Bamboo Room, The Lighthouse, The Chilkat Bakery and Porcupine Pete’s. During summers, the Halsingland Hotel offered fine dining and Hazel’s Chuckwagon served burgers and fries in a trailer at the ferry terminal.
Mountain Market eventually replaced Porcupine Pete’s for lunch and by the 1990s, local grocery stores – following a national trend – started serving hot foods for lunch and breakfast at deli cases. Here as elsewhere, traditional, sit-down restaurants began losing ground to faster food.
The race to the fastest and cheapest food accelerated around 2002 when resident Fred Folletti opened a drive-through in a trailer on Second Avenue. The trailer (today’s Sarah J’s) violated sections of code regarding driveway access and prohibiting permanent commercial trailers in the townsite, but then-Mayor Mike Case approved it by issuing a temporary-use permit unilaterally, circumventing a closer review by the Haines Borough Planning Commission.
Fast forward to 2010 when the trailer – as well as another trailer selling pizza and operated by Haines police sergeant Jason Joel – sought to operate year-round. As the prohibition on commercial trailers was unequivocal, a majority of Haines Borough Planning Commissioners voted that such trailers – with their wheels removed and jacked up on blocks – weren’t trailers at all, but permanent structures allowed by code.
The decision understandably rankled owners of traditional restaurants who paid property taxes and upkeep on real buildings, employed waiters and dishwashers and also provided rest rooms and parking. More significantly, year-round trailers, especially ones located near the cruise ship dock, siphoned off summer profits that historically allowed brick-and-mortar restaurants to stay open during winter months.
Making enough money in summer to cushion low sales or losses during lean winters is a strategy used by many – if not most — local businesses to stay open year-round.
Nevertheless, the race to the bottom kept on. If food trailers were okay downtown, how about mobile food vans? By 2016, under the specious logic that downtown Portland had food vans and more variety was paramount to questions of public policy, the Haines Borough decided mobile food vans were okay, too.
“Pop-up” restaurants are the latest thing. That’s where customers pay to eat a meal at a private home. It’s not clear that the Haines Borough has even considered the regulatory questions they entail.
The logical end to all this is that someone will invent vending machines that dispense nourishing, hot meals and the food vans, food trailers, restaurants, pop-ups and deli cases all will go out of business.
By then we’ll be eating some version of Soylent Green, wondering what the hell happened.
There are some imaginable ways to put this genie back into the bottle.
For example, the Haines Borough could require restaurants to obtain a local restaurant license available only to businesses operating at least 10 months per year. Or, restaurant licenses for trailers, food vans, and pop-ups could be limited to two years on the assumption that successful vendors would build or buy a restaurant building after two years of successful operation. And all food vans and food trailers could be limited to a single site, just as house trailers are confined to trailer parks downtown.
Those ideas are a lot more than assembly members will consider, as most are married to the Reagan-era myth that a free market cures all ills. What they should remember is that a lot of this mess is the consequence of actions taken by the Haines Borough.