Route 26 Cafe marks last day of business

Barb Curtiss, proprietor of the Route 26 Cafe in LaCrosse, had one of her busiest nights of the year Saturday night. Her husband Keith and other friends helped with a crowd that at one point numbered 50 people. She finally closed the doors after 9 p.m.

The closing included lots of hugs and farewells because it was the last night of business. She had informed LaCrosse Community Pride, owners of the restaurant, that she could not continue to operate because of health reasons.

Her contract with the Pride group, which owns the building, began last July, but Curtiss had to make some improvements before opening Route 26 Cafe last September.

She signed the contract a little more than a month after the Grillbilly Cafe closed. That cafe began business in what for years had been the Teapot Cafe in LaCrosse.

Grillbilly Cafe opened in May 2013 and closed a year later when proprietors Joe and Dionne Evans said they couldn’t handle the work load any longer and wanted to concentrate on working on their ranch near Hay.

The Teapot Cafe had been a fixture in LaCrosse for more than 40 years. Previous owners, Cheri and Steven Garrett, closed the restaurant in November 2012 because of health problems. They had operated the cafe for more than 10 years.

Curtiss and her husband moved to LaCrosse in 2005. She said that they fell in love with the LaCrosse area after living in Arizona and Texas. Keith is employed with the Whitman Public Works Department.

LaCrosse Community Pride purchased the cafe building when it bought the former LaCrosse State Bank from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The FDIC took over the building after it shut down the Bank of Whitman, a branch that occupied the bank portion of the building.

Community Pride leased the bank portion of the building to Sterling Bank, which opened its LaCrosse branch in July of 2012. Sterling Bank has since been purchased by Umpqua Bank.

According to some of the cafe’s customers, LaCrosse could support a cafe when other businesses lined Main Street, but with those businesses gone, area residents tend to migrate toward Colfax, Pullman, Lewiston and Spokane.