LURAY — Taste of Home Downtown is precisely what its name suggests. Burgers, sandwiches, fried chicken, breakfast burritos, desserts and more, right in the center of Luray.
The restaurant, located on Main Street next to the town hall, has a homey feel and receives a steady flow of customers from nearby businesses. After all, it is downtown.
Susan Dinon opened her restaurant just two months ago. She described how her restaurant has been doing.
“Crazy,” she said. “We’ve been really busy, which is good. I’ve had to change a few things. On Saturday mornings, we used to have a breakfast buffet, but we stopped it. So many people did not want it — they wanted to order off the menu.”
She called that trial and error. She and her daughter, Lisa Keyser, fine-tuned the menu based on what the community was asking for, Dinon said.
Dinon credited her sister, Betty Ann Axline, for providing the idea of opening a restaurant. She was working with the previous tenant of the downtown space at a different space. That’s when she found out that the space would become available.
“Why don’t you open up a restaurant?” Axline suggested, rather forcefully. “And that’s how it started.”
How did Axline know that her sister would be the person to run a restaurant?
“I don’t know,” Dinon said.
She did have some previous experience. In the middle-to-late 1970s, she worked at a small diner that was part of — oddly enough — a carpet store.
“You had the bar over on the left and the booths on the right. We still cooked hamburgers and pizzas and subs,” she said.
You could eat in the place and then walk to the other side of the building for flooring.
That restaurant benefited from the number of businesses within easy walking distance, just as the new restaurant does, Dinon said.
The first day was “hot,” because people had been waiting for her to open. She couldn’t have a soft opening or “grand opening” because so many people were waiting, she said.
Eventually, she had a ribbon-cutting, a month later.
Axline helps out in the restaurant, sometimes cooking, and sometimes serving. A board in the restaurant reads “Betty Ann’s Apple Dumplings.” That’s a family recipe, Dinon said.
Keyser, the head chef, makes the cobbler, and another employee, Gloria Jenkins, makes the peach pies, cherry pies, and peanut butter pies.
“Which everybody loves is peanut butter pie. It is good,” Dinon said.
Her mother, Nancy Shifflett, is 92 and folds the silverware into napkins.
Dinon enjoys making people happy with her cooking. She enjoys socializing with different people, whether locals or those from out of town.
For Dinon, the most challenging part of running a restaurant is making sure people prepare the meals consistently. Each cook prefers to prepare meals differently.
Another challenge is the limited space available. That makes it more difficult to keep items in stock, she said.
“So we run out a lot until the next truck comes. And then we have to go shopping,” she said. “We’ll run out, and then we have to run out to the store.”
The truck comes twice a week, Dinon said.
As far as the challenges of being a woman business owner, she hasn’t seen that.
“I didn’t really think about it, you know? I mean, I will be very vocal if someone blows me off. That’s not good,” Dinon said.
How many people blow her off? Just a few of her employees.
“Some of them are like children that don’t listen,” she said. “You kind of have to put your foot down.”
Another part of her business is the downstairs section. Unlike the rustic look of the upstairs, the “Heroes’ Haven” downstairs is a sports bar catering mainly to first responders, with décor to match.
The bar, which was once a thrift store called Peacock Alley, can be accessed either by a staircase in the restaurant or through an outer side door located down the ramp. It opens in the evening, with a few hours of overlap, allowing bar patrons to order meals from the restaurant above. When that closes, a small bar menu is available.
The restaurant is open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., Sunday through Thursday, while on Fridays and Saturdays, it’s open until 9 p.m. The downstairs bar runs from 5 to 11 p.m., and on weekends, the hours are from noon, “because that’s when football starts,” to 1:30 a.m. It might close early if the place is empty.
Regina Hilliard, president of the Luray Chamber of Commerce, was pleased with the restaurant, both from a business perspective and on a personal level.
“As far as guests that are coming in here that we’re referring, they’ve been enjoying all three meal options — breakfast, lunch and dinner. They’ve been open every day. It’s given our visitors, as well as our locals, that great country diner, that local vibe,” she said. “It’s great to have a restaurant open seven days a week.”
Plus the fact that the food is consistent, Hilliard said.
“I’ve only enjoyed their salads. I’m kind of on a health kick,” she said. “So I haven’t enjoyed the whole home-cooked Southern food. But their salad was huge; I couldn’t finish it all.”
The salad had a generous amount of meat, she said.
Earlier, at the ribbon-cutting ceremony on Aug. 21, the restaurant served a breakfast buffet featuring bacon, sausage, and more.
Hilliard praised the downstairs space.
“They have a nice casual place downstairs where people can go with a pool table, darts, games and card tables, TVs,” she said. “That’s just another benefit for locals and the tourists just to go downstairs and enjoy, where they can order food and have drinks and just play games.”
The place is an excellent addition to downtown Luray, customers said.
“The owners are wonderful, just really down to earth, and just really want to give back to the locals,” Hilliard said.
A Taste of Home Downtown is at 55 E. Main St. in Luray.
Dining and Cooking