Grew up eating at Auction Barn Restaurant; now they revived it

By Ben Westcott, Chronicle Staff Writer

Last January Tom Williams and Brian Hafner reopened the closed Auction Barn Restaurant in Argyle, well aware of the challenges like high food prices and finding employees that face locally-owned restaurants in rural areas. In fact, it’s why their predecessors quit.

The recent disquieting news that the long-standing Burger Den in Cambridge closed certainly makes them think.

“When you hear about someone that’s been in business for so many years going out, and we’re just getting in it, it’s scary,” says Mr. Williams. “The last thing you want to hear is that a good business that has a clientele that’s a great base is going out.”

But 11 months into it, Mr. Williams and Mr. Hafner say business is going well. “Of course, it can always be better,” Mr. Williams said.

Mr. Hafner said, “Since we didn’t know anything, anywhere we’d go we’d ask people running were like, ‘You’re opening in January? Get ready to lose for two or three months, because January and February are loss months.’ But week two we were okay, because everybody wanted this place. They all came.”

It wasn’t like the duo knew a whole lot about running restaurants. They said they’re both hobby beef farmers who flip houses. Mr. Williams is a clerk at the Argyle Post Office. Mr. Hafner is a retired canal locktender.

They both said they had been coming to the Auction Barn since they were in diapers. They didn’t want to see it go.

“Every Wednesday I’d come here with my dad,” Mr. Williams remembers. “That was like our time. It was just special to me. I think it’s probably what I most remember about me and my dad.”

After the Auction Barn closed in October 2022, Mr. Williams and Mr. Hafner said they approached owners Brady and Kia Wolff and asked if they would lease the building to them so the restaurant could continue.

The pair backed out of the plan twice after agreeing that they would do it.

“It took me a couple days to get my head in the game,” Mr. Hafner said.

Ultimately, they took the plunge.

“If he (Mr. Williams) had said a little diner or something in a village somewhere, I probably wouldn’t have been keen,” Mr. Hafner said. “But this place…I’ve been coming here since I was four. It’s got a draw. It’s a location. This is the only one I would have thought about.”

It opened in ––1959 to feed farmers going to auction with their livestock at the large barn just steps away. The auction house closed in the 1990s.

“When they’d have cow and machinery sales, there wasn’t even standing room in this place,” Mr. Hafner remembers.

Marge Miller, whose father Fred ran the auction, was the restaurant’s first owner. Brady Wolff and his wife Kia bought the restaurant in 2015, renovating it in 2020.

Mr. Williams and Mr. Hafner updated some plumbing and the kitchen, and added a salad bar. They also offer a breakfast buffet every other Sunday morning.

Right now the Auction Barn is open for breakfast and lunch Wednesday through Sunday from 7 a.m.-2 p.m.

Mr. Williams said customers ask every day when it will be open for dinner as it used to be — “especially now that The Burger Den is closed,” he noted.

Worries about finding adequate staffing are the main reason they say they’re not doing dinner right now. When asked to stay open later, Mr. Hafner likes to respond, “Do you know five good people that want to work nights?”

Mr. Williams said that during the week the clientele is mostly senior citizens.

“They like the hometown sitdown meals,” he said. “99% of everything is homemade here, so it makes it nice. I think that’s what most of the people look forward to…We try to welcome them and give them a good meal at a good price.”

The food is “all-American,” he said. “It’s a homestyle sit-down meal like what we were raised on at home. It’s just a good hearty meal.”

Mr. Hafner said “The chocolate cake has been on the corner since this place opened. And that’s the original recipe.”

They run weekly specials that the owners say people look forward to.

“We’re known for doing groups, and we try to push that,” Mr. Williams added “We can do parties, we can do anything like that. It’s so easy to move the tables around, so it makes it good for big parties. And a lot of restaurants can’t do that. It’s not a chain.”

Of course, the effort is not without its difficulties. “A challenge is the price of food,” Mr. Williams said. “It’s just crazy.” But less crazy recently. Mr. Williams said eggs were $4.10 a dozen when they took over. Now they’re just $1.40 a dozen.

The employees have been crucial.

“I’m able to trust my help,” Mr. Williams said. “…If it wasn’t for my help, we wouldn’t be doing this. They’re the ones that run the place.”

Mr. Hafner said, “We just spent 20 days down at his (Mr. Williams’s) mother’s in Florida. We have a staff where we can leave. That’s worth a fortune. If we expanded to dinner we would never find the caliber or the number of people.”

Mr. Williams said the Auction Barn sits at the perfect location, on Route 40 between Argyle and Greenwich.

“We just did it for the community,” he said. “There was no restaurant.”

Mr. Hafner wanted to retire before becoming an Auction Barn owner, but, for now, he’s all in on the restaurant game.

“We weren’t sure at first what the hell we were doing,” he said. “And now we’re like, we can do this.”

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