Transcription of Michael Giberson and Neil Andersen for the show Gardiner Drama & Dining #284
Lisa Belisle: Anyone who’s ever been through Gardiner is aware of the A 1 Diner, which is quite the landmark. Today it’s my great privilege to have with me Michael Giberson and Neil Andersen, who own the A 1 Diner in Gardiner. In April they’ll celebrate 29 years of ownership of the diner, making them the longest-running owners of the 1946 Worcester dining car. Pretty impressive.
Neil Andersen: It’s hard to believe.
Michael Giberson: We think so.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah. Well, thanks for coming in and talking to us about this, because it’s kind of an interesting subject, I think.
Neil Andersen: Thanks for having us.
Michael Giberson: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Why diners?
Michael Giberson: Well, my dad owned the diner, and he bought it as a retirement business and soon found out it was not a retirement business. He owned it for nine years. Neil and I had lived together in Boston, and we had wanted to open a little breakfast restaurant in Boston, but neither one of us had two pennies. I had moved to LA for a short time and Neil was still in Boston, and I called my dad one day and he said, “I’m going to sell the diner.” I said, “Well maybe I’ll come home for that.” That’s kind of where it all started.
Lisa Belisle: Michael, you were actually born in Gardiner when there was a regional medical center there?
Michael Giberson: I was, yeah I was. I’m a native.
Lisa Belisle: How did you end up, how did the two of you end up meeting? You said you spent time in Boston. You were both out of the state of Maine for a while.
Neil Andersen: I grew up in Massachusetts. I was born in Massachusetts, and we worked together at, shall we say? At Legal Seafood, yes. That’s where we met, and we worked together there for a while. Then we worked together at another restaurant that is now defunct. That was what was happening. Yeah. It was in the blood.
Lisa Belisle: It’s kind of a commitment to work in food and food service and hospitality. It’s something that it has to be a conscious decision if you’re going to do it as long as you’ve done it.
Neil Andersen: I think it was kind of an unconscious decision at the time, because we were both pretty…. It would be conscious now.
Michael Giberson: Yeah. I grew up in the restaurant business. My aunt and uncle owned a restaurant, and I worked there when I was a junior high, high school kid. I learned a lot of different stuff from my aunt who taught me bookkeeping and doing the payroll and all that kind of stuff. It was kind of in my blood, plus I’ve always cooked since I was a kid. There was really no conscious intention to end up in a diner. We just, just by chance, we ended up there.
Neil Andersen: Right, and my grandparents were caterers on the South Shore. I grew up in a house that had catering equipment in the basement, that I would play with pots and pans and stuff. My grandmother was a great cook. Then I worked as a bartender and scooping ice cream at Friendly’s, just from the ground up, absolutely.
Lisa Belisle: Were there detours before you got to the place of deciding, “Okay, this is what we really want to do”?
Neil Andersen: I mean, just the path of life that you take along until you’re, I was 25 or 26 and you were 36, so still both relatively young. I think ownership wasn’t, you know, we had talked about it would be fun to do something, but it wasn’t like, “Oh we’ve got to own our own place.” It just sort of came upon us. Then you seize that opportunity.
Lisa Belisle: There’s something really special about diners that keeps us interested, I think. There’s a really rich history there. How much of that did you know about before you started this business?
Michael Giberson: I think we knew a little bit, I mean, I did from my dad having the business, but I wasn’t around when he had the business, so I wasn’t really into the history of the whole thing or didn’t know that much about the diner industry as a whole. Then once you’re in it, then all of a sudden you become aware of, oh, there’s all these books about diners and people that are interested in diners. It’s kind of like a cult of diner with some people. They’ll travel 100 miles out of their way to go to a diner.
Neil Andersen: Yeah, and I think it’s cyclical. I think when we started it, it had faded, because it was big in the 40s and 50s, when the cars were just starting and people were traveling. Then in the 70s and the early 80s it had sort of faded out but it was almost starting of the renaissance of people buying old diners. There was a place called the Flash in the Pan that we used to go to on Route 1, that was one of the early places, and we were like, “Oh, diners can be cool. You can serve good food in a diner. This place is great.” That was a big inspiration to us. Then I think we’ve seen it sort of cycle. Then coming up now with Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, that’s, I think the renaissance is in full bloom again, which is wonderful because these are historic places that are special, I think, and they need to be saved and appreciated.
Michael Giberson: They are special because we’ve seen whole generations cycle through that diner. We’ve seen young couples get engaged there, have kids. Their kids have worked for us.
Neil Andersen: Then they have kids.
Michael Giberson: We’ve heard so many stories from people, tell us how special it is to come to the diner as a child and then come as a teenager and come as an adult. I mean myself, I hung out in that diner, it was the junior high after school hangout when I was a kid, because you’d go in there with very little money and you’d get a coke and you’d play the juke box and you’d get some french fries, and that was the place to be.
Lisa Belisle: What is it about your diner that keeps people, aside from obviously the social element and the culture of it, what keeps them coming back? What’s the mystique of the diner?
Neil Andersen: Food. Let’s say first and foremost, I think, food. I think we serve good food, and we serve honest food. We have a great variety of things. I think we’ve sort of found that sweet spot between diner classics and interesting contemporary food. It’s a restaurant, people come there to eat, most importantly.
Michael Giberson: It’s important to have a variety. We have everything you’d expect to find in a diner, but in a small town in Maine, in midwinter, you have to do everything you can to encourage every customer to come in. Having a real variety on the menu does that, and keeping it fresh.
Neil Andersen: Yeah, and vegetarian food, ethnic food, regional food. That’s something that we were always interested in. That was, we knew from the start that what we would have to do to keep us interested and to keep us there we couldn’t just do the standards. We had to hopefully step it up a little bit.
Michael Giberson: Plus we watched my dad struggle because his business was kind of dying because it was very traditional. His clientele was elderly. His biggest time of the month was when social security checks came out. We obviously knew we had to change that business model in order to succeed. We managed to do it. First, we just kind of tweaked his menu and made better quality of what he was doing. Then we started introducing our own type of cooking.
Lisa Belisle: If someone were to visit the diner today and, say as a vegetarian myself, and I haven’t been to the diner for a few years now, but what could I expect to see there?
Michael Giberson: Well there’s always the ever-changing menu boards on the wall, and they have a bunch of vegetarian stuff on them usually. There’s a lot of vegetarian stuff just permanently on the menu. There’s some Asian noodle dishes. There’s a variety of salads. There’s a veggie burger. Then a lot of the soups are vegetarian, and of course we try to keep a lot of the specials vegetarian too. Because even though there’s a ton of carnivores in the world, even the carnivores want to eat less meat now. They like to mix it up just because they know it’s healthier.
Neil Andersen: There’s always curries, vegetable stews, we’ve got these Gorgonzola rice cakes that have grilled Portobello mushrooms on them. There’s all sorts of stuff.
Lisa Belisle: Well, now I can’t believe I haven’t been there in a while.
Neil Andersen: We can’t either actually.
Lisa Belisle: Exactly. I’m going to have to make a trip up there very soon, just to have the vegetarian food. Now a lot of people know Gardiner as, it’s kind of a place in between. There’s a lot of people who will drive through, and obviously you can’t really drive through Gardiner without seeing the A 1 Diner. To you, Michael, this is it, this is where you were born, this is where you’re originally from, you spent the first 17 years there and then you’ve come back there. Neil, you’ve made a conscious decision to be there.
Neil Andersen: Since ’86, yeah.
Lisa Belisle: What’s so special about Gardiner?
Michael Giberson: It’s really a great little community. We’ve kind of watched it struggle. Of course when I was a kid it was a thriving community, because there were three big shoe factories. The downtown had everything you could imagine. You didn’t really have to go anywhere to get anything in the 50s and 60s. Then those towns, all those mill towns started to die and fade away. When we got there, the downtown was pretty bleak, and slowly over the last 29 years we’ve seen it come back. The community itself has great housing stock. There are beautiful old homes, quiet neighborhoods. It’s really a beautiful town situation on the river and on the Cobbossee Stream. The city has done a great job building new waterfront area, connecting to the rail trail to Augusta. We’re building a new trail up the Cobbossee Stream. It’s a great community, and Johnson Hall is a huge factor, a huge factor.
Neil Andersen: It’s a member of the Gardiner, of the Main Street Community in Maine, which we’ve been involved in in the beginning. It’s sort of like quintessential small town Maine that’s sort of reinventing itself. Absolutely, and it’s really wonderfully centrally located. I love the fact that we can get to Rockland or Camden or Brunswick or Portland, there’s any number of places you can go. It’s very centrally located. Without having to drive. You can get to Bar Harbor or Belfast. It’s terrific.
Lisa Belisle: Michael, your family, how did they come to be in Gardiner?
Michael Giberson: My mother’s family has been in Gardiner for generations. My dad’s family, his parents both came through Canada and into the US. My dad’s father died when he was a kid, but they met and….
Neil Andersen: High school sweethearts, right?
Michael Giberson: Yeah, my parents were high school sweethearts. My dad was the captain of the football team. They were married for, until my dad died, for 60 years. They’ve always been Gardiner people.
Lisa Belisle: What about you Neil? As somebody who’s not originally of the Gardiner community, obviously now very much a part of the Gardiner community, how has that felt, to come in from the outside?
Neil Andersen: Terrific. It’s funny, now that I think I’ve lived the majority of my life in Gardiner, as opposed to the town that I grew up in. I was just in Massachusetts and in Boston dealing with my mom and stuff, and when I come back I’m always so happy that I made this decision. I think the time was right. It feels very much like home to me. You lay down your roots and when you’re 25 you haven’t really quite decided who you are and then it sort of unfolds in front of you and this is where it’s happened. No, I’m thrilled to be there. You got to love what you do and be happy where you are.
Lisa Belisle: The restaurant business can be challenging, especially if you’re talking the middle of Maine in the middle of the winter, but there’s something about what you’re doing that’s kept you interested, not only for the 29 years that you’ve had the A 1 Diner, but prior to that in the time that you spent in the other restaurants. I think, Neil, you still also work in another restaurant.
Neil Andersen: Yup.
Lisa Belisle: Why do you keep coming back? What is it that keeps drawing you?
Michael Giberson: Well, I think the basic thing is the love of food and the community that happens around a diner, around any restaurant, is great with the staff, with your customers. Most of the people we know in Central Maine, we know through the diner. You meet friends that way, you meet new acquaintances, you meet famous people, you meet travelers. It’s very, very interesting just to go out into the diner. You know, I’m isolated in the kitchen most of the time, but I do wander out front and I strike up conversations, and it’s always amazing to hear people’s stories and where they’ve come from and where they’re going.
Neil Andersen: Yeah, you’re either cut out for it or you’re not, and you know that. There are people that get into it and they realize, “I can’t do this.” You have lots of, you know, people that use it as a stepping stone to get somewhere else, waiting on tables, things like that. Then there are those of us that are kind of lifers, and it is, it’s in you, it’s your personality. I think you have to have an affinity for people and hard work and the challenges that they present you. It’s certainly not for everyone. I mean I know I couldn’t imagine myself working in a cubicle or an office or being really isolated, I’d lose my mind, it would just make me crazy. You just figure it out I think.
Lisa Belisle: Are those two of the characteristics? People that have an affinity for others but also people who are used to hard work?
Neil Andersen: I mean it helps. It doesn’t mean that people who don’t work in the restaurant industry aren’t hard workers, but it’s physically grinding too. It takes its toll on you, and it’s non-stop, it never really stops.
Michael Giberson: When you’re the owner you’re really married to it. I mean we luckily live less than a half a mile from the diner, so if there’s a problem I can be down there in a couple minutes. My crew knows that and they don’t hesitate to call, which is great because I want to be involved and I want to help them out in situations. Everything from the credit card machine not working or a leaky pipe, or whatever. You really are a slave to your business when you own something like that.
Lisa Belisle: Well, it sounds like it’s almost like having a child.
Neil Andersen: That never grows up.
Michael Giberson: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: That never grows up.
Neil Andersen: Never.
Lisa Belisle: Okay.
Michael Giberson: Gets older, but never grows up.
Neil Andersen: Right.
Lisa Belisle: What are some of the things that you’ve learned specifically from owning your own business versus working within the industry?
Neil Andersen: That’s a tough one.
Michael Giberson: Yeah, really.
Neil Andersen: I mean, I feel like staying focused on what we do best. We’ve tried to branch off and do other things and they’ve been somewhat successful, but we’ve always come back to the core of the diner, and that’s when we’ve been the happiest and the most successful. I really feel like just having that focus on the thing that you do and do it as well as you possibly can. I mean, I think the working for other businesses, other restaurants, have helped me be a better owner. I think they work in tandem. I don’t see them as sort of completely separate entities. To me. I think being a diner owner makes me a better employee for someone else, and being an employee for someone else hopefully makes me a better diner owner, because I see it from both angles.
Michael Giberson: It’s been so long since I’ve been an employee I don’t really remember.
Neil Andersen: He’d probably be a terrible employee now, because he’s worked for himself for so long.
Michael Giberson: Yeah. That’s true.
Lisa Belisle: Well, but it’s interesting because I know owning your own business, I mean, it’s great because you’re your own boss, but then you’re it, the buck stops with you.
Neil Andersen: Oh, completely.
Lisa Belisle: That’s it own set of stressors, because there’s nobody else to wake up in the middle of the night and worry about whether the pipes are frozen.
Neil Andersen: People don’t understand that, yeah, that your whole life is on the line and everything that you have and you own and you do, it rises and falls with the success of your business.
Michael Giberson: Really, that’s another driver to make the business successful, because that’s a huge chunk of our retirement, is when we sell that business. We have to maintain it. We have to keep improving the building, the kitchen. I mean we have two old buildings, the diner itself, 1946, but our kitchen building is from the late 1800s. They used to work on Model T’s in our kitchen. It used to be a garage. There were gas pumps out front. It’s been a challenge, and when we inherited, not inherited, but when we bought that building it was really ancient and decrepit, especially the kitchen building. It’s taken us 30 years to modernize it, and we’re still working on it.
Neil Andersen: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: I’m wondering, when we have people in we always ask, who do you think should get some recognition for what they’re doing in their community? You actually suggested Thom Harnett, or maybe it’s Harnet.
Michael Giberson: I think it’s Harnett.
Neil Andersen: Harnett, sure.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah, so you suggested, and you called him Gardiner’s great mayor.
Neil Andersen: Yeah. We’ve actually had a couple of great mayors.
Michael Giberson: Yeah, we have. We’ve had a bunch.
Neil Andersen: Andy MacLean, who was the mayor before this, was terrific, great, and Thom has been now.
Michael Giberson: Brian Rines.
Neil Andersen: And Brian Rines, who have done a lot for the town. Just good, even people.
Michael Giberson: Solid people.
Neil Andersen: Yup, even keeled. Inclusive. Wonderful people who care about their community, but are like the best of what a politician can be, I think.
Lisa Belisle: Tell me about that. In a small town there must be some, well, I guess you’re not that small, but in a small-ish community there must be some challenges with being the mayor, and to be able to maintain the kind of relationship that he obviously has with his community and deserve this recognition, how does he accomplish that and still move things forward?
Michael Giberson: Well, being in a small town, it’s just like being in a bigger political sphere. There are the people who want to do stuff and the people who don’t want to do stuff. There are the people who cling to the past, that don’t want anything to change, and that’s always a challenge. I was on the council for two years and I saw that, living proof of that, that there are people who, no matter what you want to do, there are people who really don’t want to do it or they want to drag their feet doing it. That is a challenge, and I think Thom and the previous mayors have realized that and worked towards goals that were achievable and built coalitions that made that happen, and worked with the council to do that.
Lisa Belisle: In a town like Gardiner, which has been evolving since it’s not any longer dependent upon industry the way that it once was, what do you see the needs as being? You said that you’ve worked with Main Street, and this is all about trying to evolve small towns in the state of Maine. What do you perceive needs to happen so that Gardiner, and other towns like it, can move forward?
Neil Andersen: Well, I think it is happening. I mean there’s a new medical center that’s being built that’s going to have some housing, that will be a big deal. Of course, the other side of this interview is Johnson Hall, which I think will be a huge key part in the cultural center. When that’s up and running, when the big theater is running and they’re having a constant stream of great shows in, it’s going to be bringing people into the community. Then that, I think, organically grows small businesses and other restaurants and things of that nature. To me, the arts part of it is huge.
Michael Giberson: I mean there are people in any town who don’t care about the downtown, they don’t think it’s necessary, but it really is the heart and soul of the community. If you have a downtown that really is dying, that says a lot about the community. I mean the building next to us used to be a drugstore, and for years after the drugstore went out of business, it was boarded up. What signal does that send to people who pass through the community when….
Neil Andersen: That was the first thing they would see would be a boarded….
Michael Giberson: The main building at the main intersection in town is a boarded-up building? There are a lot of things that are challenging to a small town, in a downtown like that, that need to be resolved and it takes the work of the whole community to do that. It’s very incremental. It does not happen overnight, as we’ve seen. It’s like two steps forward, one step back. All the time. Slowly it is turning around. We’ve got a brand new co-op in Gardiner. We have some new businesses opening. People are developing the upper floors of the Main Street for housing. All of those things are important.
Neil Andersen: I think it’s tinkering with the mix of sort of retail and a downtown, of what is necessary that can be supported 365 days a year, and then other smaller businesses that are a little more specialized. It’s got to be a mix, I think. That’s challenging.
Lisa Belisle: When you have a town like Gardiner, that is not coastal and it does attract people during the summer, but I’m guessing there isn’t quite as much of a shift, from a tourist standpoint, as some parts of Maine. How do you, I guess, try to convince people that you’re still open for business in February?
Michael Giberson: Well, I think one of the things that’s really helped us is both the highways come to Gardiner. The old coastal route, before they built the new bridge in Augusta, was to get off the highway in Gardiner, and if you’re going on Route 9 or Route 17, you drive through Gardiner. I think that’s one of the things that’s really helped the town itself. It is really touristy, unlike the coast, which is always touristy, tourists have discovered Central Maine more and are branching away from the crowded areas of the coast a lot. A lot of people who come back year after year want to explore more, so they discover these towns that are away from the coast. All of those things have helped.
Neil Andersen: Yeah, and where we are there’s a ton of lakes and ponds, so there’s a ton of summer people that come in that have summer camps and homes. You see a big swell. I don’t think it’s as dramatic as it is, say in places like Boothbay, where it just closes down and goes to nothing. That’s actually to our advantage, I think. We are a year-round community. Also using things like social media, and we’ve been very fortunate to have a lot of great press and we have an Instagram account and a Facebook account. People like to be in touch that way. There’s tons of people who will comment or follow us that live on the other side of the country, or somewhere else, but they come here in the summer and they want to keep in touch and see what’s going on. I think that is a constant reminder and that’s worked greatly to our advantage, and being on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives was huge.
Michael Giberson: Well, and we did have a ton of crazy media coverage, which was amazing. Like I said before, you need everything you can get in a small town in Maine in the winter. We’ve been in The New York Times, we’ve been on the Food Network, we’ve been in major magazines. It’s been amazing. It’s kind of a snowball thing, because we don’t go looking for any of that publicity, it just kind of happens and it’s great. I think part of that is the resurgence in the popularity of diners.
Neil Andersen: Yeah, people are interested.
Michael Giberson: You know, people are interested, and plus it’s a great building, it’s a beautiful building just to come and look at it. When you think it was built in 1946 and it’s been used hard every day and it’s still standing, it’s pretty amazing.
Lisa Belisle: Do you think that you, in addition to getting people who come back because they have some nostalgia about what’s happened in their past, do you think that you’re also getting a younger generation that really never knew any of this stuff?
Michael Giberson: We are seeing more and more of that. I see so many young couples in, and teenagers and 20s, it’s amazing. I’m always so happy, because I didn’t ever want it to be the stodgy old folks place, you know, where the old guys came in and sat and had coffee all afternoon and smoked cigarettes. We see more and more young people, it’s great. I always just am so happy when I see that.
Neil Andersen: Yeah. I mean it is a great mix and we certainly have lots of elderly clientele that we love.
Michael Giberson: Oh, yeah.
Neil Andersen: They’re the heart and soul of the lunch crowd, and they’re wonderful and they have the time to spend. I think there’s young people making their own memories now and creating their own experiences, and I think they want a more genuine experience, as opposed to sort of a generic, cookie cutter fast food, faux chain, you know what I mean? That’s the same everywhere. This is something that’s kind of unique and a little bit more individual and hopefully a little more special. I think they’re staking that claim for themselves, which is great.
Michael Giberson: I think that’s some of what’s driven young people to move to Gardiner too, from out of state and southern Maine, is a lot of people who grow up in big urban areas don’t want their kids to grow up in that same situation. They want to move somewhere where they can have more of a sense of place and have a downtown that they can call their own, and raise their kids in a small community. I think we’ve seen a pretty large influx of people from away who are doing that.
Lisa Belisle: You’re celebrating 29 years in April, and you probably have a few really good years ahead of you, quite a few I’m guessing, because you’re both young.
Michael Giberson: A couple.
Lisa Belisle: Okay, well from a couple to many.
Neil Andersen: Probably a lot of years and at least a few good ones.
Lisa Belisle: Okay. What would you like to see happen? What is your hope for yourselves and also for the A 1 Diner?
Michael Giberson: Well, we have a challenge coming up, because the bridge that the diner sits on is going to be replaced in 2019, and it’s a huge project because all the utilities for the power company and the phone company and the gas company, all run under that bridge.
Neil Andersen: We sit right on that bridge.
Michael Giberson: Right. We’re going to be closed for a little bit in 2019. We don’t really know the details of it yet, because the final plan isn’t don’t. We’ll be closed for a couple months maybe. We’re not really sure. That’s going to kind of give us a chance to reassess where we are and what the future is. I’m coming up on wanting to retire, and probably after the diner is reopened after the bridge thing happens, we’ll put the diner on the market. We have two or three people who are already interested, and I’m sure if it was public we’d have even more people interested. My goal is to turn the diner over to someone who loves it like we do. I wouldn’t sell it to just anyone. I want to sell it to someone who loves it for what it is and wants to continue the tradition of great food there.
Neil Andersen: Yeah, it’s going to have to be someone very hands-on, owner-operated, I think. I would agree. Yeah, that sounds reasonable to me. I’ll probably continue to work elsewhere for a while. Yeah, I think we’ve earned it.
Lisa Belisle: I would say you have.
Neil Andersen: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: I’ll make sure that I make it back over there before you close down in 2019.
Neil Andersen: You’ve got plenty of time. It’s not going to happen tomorrow, trust me.
Lisa Belisle: Then before you retire.
Neil Andersen: Yeah. You definitely have plenty of time.
Lisa Belisle: I’ve been speaking with Michael Gibersonn and Neil Andersen, who own the A 1 Diner in Gardiner, and who in April will celebrate 29 years of ownership. I really appreciate your taking the time out of your very busy schedules to come and have this conversation with me. I also appreciate the community that you have continued to contribute to and create within your own diner, so thank you very much.
Neil Andersen: Absolutely, thanks for having us.
Michael Giberson: Thank you. It’s great fun. Thank you.
Neil Andersen: Yeah, terrific.