Hu ’s new café draws more customers
Even at height of shutdown, Country Café Pit Stop did brisk business
Even at height of shutdown, David Huff’s Country Cafe Pit Stop did brisk business.
Opening a business at the start of a pandemic seems like a big gamble. Restaurants, in particular, have struggled to turn a pro t amid guidelines that, until recently, restricted operations to curbside pick-up. And in a small county like Rappahannock where local patrons can’t make up the shortfall in visitor tra c, many businesses chose to close temporarily.
Not so for Country Café Pit Stop, which opened its doors on March 21, just as COVID-19 was starting to spread quickly through the US.
Business thrived at rst with Shenandoah National Park still open, said owner David Hu . And he found his new location o Route 211 drew even more customers than he was used to getting in the town of Washington.
The crunch came when the park shut down and he and other business owners in the county tried to make sense of shifting guidelines from the state. But even then, he never thought about not launching.
“It seemed like the timing was just really perfect,” he said, sitting on a picnic table to the side of 211 on a late weekday afternoon after a lunch rush.
“You would be surprised how busy it is.”Hu estimates he gets around 150 customers a day, many of them local. Even at the height of the shutdown, however, the Pit Stop was still drawing city tourists who’d come out to drive through the mountains. This past weekend, he said, “they were just lined up.”
Having run a dine-in restaurant for the past 40 years, he wasn’t certain that the to-go model would be su cient. When the Country Café closed back in October 2019, he was hoping to nd another location in the county where he could open something similar. But he looked for months to no avail.
Then in February Hu got a call asking if he’d be interested in taking over the space that had served as Burger’s and Things. He jumped at the opportunity.
Take-away service is what the small, road-side eatery has always catered to. Customers enter a narrow hallway to place an order through a service window and pick it up when ready. In the time of COVID-19, that model was exactly what was needed and possible.
As other small businesses around the country have struggled or shut down entirely — some never to re-open — the Country Café Pit Stop is “doing very well,” said Hu , who dealt with his share of nancial hardship in the months prior to the pandemic.
“Our hardest time was a winter of no working,” he said, as he searched for a way to continue doing business in Rappahannock. “But the Lord was faithful to us.”
The people of Rappahannock have also been unbelievably supportive, he said. That’s proven true of other businesses in the county, too, including Hackley’s Country Store, which the former owners of Burger’s and Things moved into.
Now that businesses are starting to re-openly slowly and with restrictions on the number of patrons, Hu is allowing patrons to use the picnic tables again at half capacity and is working to bring in some items from the old café menu. He’ll have help from his sister Betty, son Isiah, niece Catherine and Andrew, the only employee who isn’t family. It’s a crew that has gotten him through a pandemic, an opening and now a “re-opening” of sorts that he’s opening will get Rappahannock a little closer to the way things were.