When Paul and Carol Hinderlie took over a broken-down bar and grill and reopened as the Harbor View Cafe 25 years ago, many locals were outraged that they’d raised the price of eggs from 15 cents to 20. “Back then,” says Paul, “real men didn’t eat omelets. And poached eggs? And corned beef hash? I don’t think so. Unless it’s out of a can–then it’s OK.” But since then the cafe has become the economic engine of tiny Pepin, a Wisconsin town on the Mississippi River whose only other claim to fame is being the birthplace of Laura Ingalls Wilder. With a staff of around 70, the Harbor View is the largest employer in the county. It’s become a magnet for tourists: in the summer months it serves about 1,800 people a week, more than double the town’s population of 878.
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When the Hinderlies opened the Harbor View they had little expectation of becoming a community cornerstone. They’d met in 1970 at a Lutheran retreat center in the Cascade mountains where Paul was working as a cook. After they married in 1974, he held a succession of restaurant jobs in Seattle and his hometown, Saint Paul, always dreaming of someday opening his own place. They stumbled across the bar and grill in Pepin after visiting Paul’s sister in the Wisconsin countryside. “It needed a lot of work,” says Paul. “But it was a real live food-service operation,” and its rural location made it affordable. The couple paid $67,000 for the property, putting it together with help from family and friends after the local bank refused them a loan.
“There are shoestring operations, and there are broken shoelace operations, and we were about three steps below that,” Paul says. The Hinderlies did all the renovations themselves, installing windows and new flooring and tearing down the dropped ceiling to expose a tin one. After they opened– on April Fool’s Day 1980–business slowly grew. By the time Ahlstrom, an old high school friend of Paul’s, came on as a partner in 1983, the bank was willing to give them money for improvements–a credit card with a $50 limit.
Paul Hinderlie is pragmatic about the changes in Pepin. “Little towns used to have hospitals, multiple churches, doctor’s offices,” he says. “If we’re going to stay together and there’s no longer much of an agricultural community, it has to come from somewhere else. If it has to be service and tourism, well, that’s what it has to be. We just have to make sure that those jobs pay enough to keep people nearby.”
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