The Last One on Cape Cod

When the A&W in Harwich Port closed in 2022, the glass mugs were still on the shelf inside the window.

You could see them from Route 28. The menu board behind them still had the root beer floats priced — $5.19 regular, $5.69 large. The mural was still on the dining room wall: a waitress in a white uniform and cap, carrying floats and burgers and hot dogs to nobody. The orange roof stayed orange. The building sat like that for nearly two years.

It went up in 1950. The A&W opened in it in 1959. George Decas bought it ten years later; in 1980 his daughter Patty and her husband Bill O'Donnell took it over. Bill died in 2015, and the family kept the place going until 2022 — about forty-two years, start to finish. Every Wednesday through the season, five to seven, Cruise Night filled the parking lot with classic cars, weather permitting. It was the last A&W on Cape Cod. When it closed, the property went up for sale at $1,350,000.

The Mugs Stayed in the Window

In April 2024, Claire Adams and Ellery Althaus bought it for $1,075,000.

They are the Bagel Hound people. She grew up in Montreal and went to the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts. He taught himself to bake bagels as a birthday present for her, because she said she missed the ones from home. They met working at Adrian's in Truro, bought Salty Market in 2014, ran it for eight years, then sold it in 2022 to make bagels full time. The shop is named for their basset hound, Theo, who Althaus says still gets his paws on about half a dozen bagels a month.

They already had Wellfleet and Provincetown. What they did not have was room. "We've reached our capacity," Adams told the Cape Cod Times. They picked Harwich partly because more people live here in February.

The building needed work, and it took longer than they said it would — the Memorial Day 2025 target came and went, and the shop opened in early summer, about fourteen months after they signed. What they wrote to the Harwich Planning Board while they waited is the part worth reading:

The filing goes on to spell out what stays: both pickup windows, the order counters, the lighting under the awning, the light posts in the lot. And they put the bakery — the one that now supplies all three shops — in the back room, a space Althaus says he was told was the original restaurant.

Bagel Hound's documented process starts at three or four in the morning the day before baking. The dough comes out the next day in four-and-a-half-ounce portions, gets shaped by hand, boiled on the stovetop for a few minutes, then goes wet straight into the topping bowls.

Adams, on taking over the A&W: "an honor to revamp and open something that has a bigger history than just us."

The Same Counter, A Different Man Behind It

Up the road at 18 Old Colony Way in Orleans, the fish counter has been a fish counter for a long time. It was Orleans Seafood Market, run by Chris King. Then in late 2023, King sold it to a scalloper.

Bradley Louw was born in Oudtshoorn, South Africa, and came here in 1999 when he was ten — twelve suitcases and ten thousand dollars, the way he tells it. He ended up on the Cape because he wanted to windsurf. His first job was on the William Bowe, a seventy-four-foot offshore lobster boat out of Hyannis. Then New Bedford scallopers, the Kate and the Kate II. He bought his first lobster boat in 2014 and sold it in 2020. He owns two now — the Renegade for lobster, and the Three Graces, a scalloper built in Nova Scotia in 2001, bought from a Cape captain named Tom Reilly who named it for his three daughters.

He told the Fishermen's Alliance why he bought a fish market: "I have two really nice fishing businesses, but I don't work for myself. I work for the fish buyers."

So some of it is his. In May 2024 he sat in an airport tracking the Three Graces on his phone, waiting for it to come in around midnight so he could unload the scallops and drive them to Orleans for the holiday weekend. The rest he buys off other local boats, and he has said he wants to put names on that — "I want to put a face behind the seafood."

The counter itself didn't notice much. A Yelp review from the Fourth of July this year: "My family has been buying fresh lobster and fish from this location for years." The phone number is the one the old market had. What's different is who's standing behind it. One customer last October described stopping in on a rainy afternoon and having the owner walk out from the back to talk her friend off the fish she'd picked and onto a flounder that had come in that morning.

One thing to know before you drive over: the kitchen and the market keep different hours. Fried food stops before the lobster pool does.

Twice in Five Years

The room at 1200 Main Street in Chatham has turned over twice now, and the second time it went all the way around.

For thirty-four years it was New England Pizza House, opened in 1987 by Philip and Sophia Malitas. You ordered at the counter and they called your number. Sicilian squares, subs, garlic rolls. In 2019 the family opened Knots Landing down the road at 1077 Main. The pizza stayed put in its old room for another two years, then moved in with them by the summer of 2021. The room at 1200 sat open.

In August 2022 it became The Chatham Cut — Prime steaks cut in house, a wine rack backlit floor to ceiling by the door, brass and dark wood and leather, seventy seats and ten more at the bar. Coastal Hospitality Group ran it. By May of this year, its liquor license was being transferred to its replacement.

In June, Melissa Ramsay opened Beacon & Buoy in it. Café, provisions, bistro — breakfast from eight, dinner Tuesday through Saturday, a provisions side built for beach days and picnics. The room is blue and white now. Short rib under a poached egg at breakfast for $23. Crispy lobster claws when the season cooperates. One reviewer in July, unhappy: "Prepaying at the door while speed reading a menu for breakfast is not a format I'm in favor of."

Three rooms, three towns, all of them handed down rather than built. None of these started with an empty lot. What each one got instead was a building with somebody else's life still in it, and a choice about how much of that to leave alone. Bagel Hound left the counters and the windows. Surfside left the phone number. Beacon & Buoy took a steakhouse apart and painted it.

But that complaint about prepaying is the whole thing in one sentence, and the man who wrote it had no idea.

The pizza place called your number for thirty-four years. The steakhouse seated you for four. Now you stand in the doorway and pay before you eat.

In that room, standing up is the older tradition.

Bagel Hound | 297 Route 28, Harwich Port Thursday–Monday, 7 a.m.–1 p.m. | bagel-hound.square.site

Surfside Seafood | 18 Old Colony Way, Orleans Daily 10 a.m.–6 p.m.; market, lobster pool and raw bar until 7 | (508) 255-7221 | surfsideseafoodorleans.com

Beacon & Buoy | 1200 Main St., Chatham Daily from 8 a.m.; dinner Tuesday–Saturday | (508) 348-5530 | beaconandbuoy.com

Hours shift this time of year. Call first.