Brad Dalton, owner and operator of the “77” Restaurant in Ferrum remembers well the day he had to shut down.
“I remember picking my child up from school and joking with the PE teacher, I told him ‘Well, you got a two week vacation – we’ll see you in a couple weeks.’ And it did happen like that”, recalls Dalton.
The dining room shutdown lasted more than two years – and while curbside pick-up and deliveries kept the business afloat, the “77” loyal yearned to return.
Dalton fondly refers to his patrons, “There’s three folks in particular. They’re elderly people – religious customers. They’re here every day. They would pull up and ask ‘So, when are you opening up?’ – And I’m like, well I don’t know. I’m waiting on these numbers to get down.”
Roger, Brenda, and Joyce have been coming to the “77” for decades.
Roger: “We come here every day for brunch. It’s kind of like our dining room.”
Brenda: “We were like, oh for heaven’s sake - what are we gonna do now? Where are we going to get our gossip from now?”
Joyce: “We did a lot of take outs”. Brenda: “Yeah.”
The dining room finally reopened in May of 2022, but with fewer hours – and fewer employees.
“I have five now. Pre-COVID was about ten – so I have about half of what I had”, says Dalton.
It only takes one visit to “77’ to get a sense of its place in the community.
Dalton continues, “I have old college students that come back for homecoming. This is a place they stop at to eat and to reminisce – see me or mom or whoever. But, yeah, it’s a pretty big place for the community."
And even though it’s a limited schedule, Roger, Brenda, and Joyce couldn’t be more delighted.
Joyce: “Happy, happy, happy – and it feels like home.”
Roger: “You can come in and be yourself.”
Brenda: “And the nice thing is that when people walk in that you don’t know, you say ‘hello’ to them and the next time they say ‘hello’ to you. It’s called kindness.
In Roanoke’s Grandin Village, the unmistakable sound and aroma of popcorn once again fills the air. But for The Grandin Theatre Foundation Executive Director Ian Fortier, the pandemic shutdown brought uncertain times.
“Will the Grandin ever open again? Will people ever go back to movies again? So there was a lot of concern. How is this ever going to work again?”, Fortier recalls.
But, Fortier explains, rather than waiting the pandemic out, a plan was devised and improvised – including rentals of the theaters and introducing a once-a-week Summer Blockbuster series.
“So I think we did Jurassic Park and E.T. and Dirty Dancing and Indiana Jones. We said we’ll sell ninety seats and for each one of those films, we sold all ninety tickets", says Fortier.
A further reworking of their business model lead to an eventual abbreviated first-run schedule, leaving the Grandin Theatre the rest of the week to serve as a more diverse cultural center.
Dalton elaborates, “You can easily lump The Grandin with AMC and Regal because we’re all movie theaters. But in reality, The Grandin is not an internationally-owned, corporate cineplex. It’s a one-stop, one-of-a-kind historic landmark cultural icon in our community and people want to be here for other reasons.”
The Grandin Theatre continues to find ways to serve and entertain – and Fortier says the community continues to respond.
Fortier summarizes, “So far it’s working – gangbusters! You come for an event, you come back for a movie. You come for a movie, you come back for a show. You come for a show, you come back for a concert. You come for a concert, you come back for an event. It’s self-perpetuating and it’s turning into something that’s very vibrant and, right now, we’re just trying to keep up with making sure that we can present everything at a high level and give people a great experience because we know when they come here, it’s something unique – which is a word that’s often misused in our culture. But there’s only one Grandin Theatre.”
