WORCESTER—When Christon Paddock’s daughter Gillian learned a few months ago that their friends, Jimmy and Pauline Yantsides, were planning to sell their Kenmore Diner, she urged her mother to buy it.
Gillian admitted on Thursday that she had been joking, but her mother decided to purchase the business anyway.
Paddock, 43, of Auburn, said she had grown tired of being on call for 24 hours a day while working as an operations director for AA Transportation in Shrewsbury, which operates school buses, and she needed a change.
Paddock has known Pauline for most of her life. The two are Jehovah’s Witnesses and attend religious meetings at Kingdom Hall in Auburn together.
So she bought the Kenmore Diner business and she’s renting the building from the Yantsideses. On Jan. 15, the Yantsideses served free meals to everyone at the diner to celebrate their 50 years of ownership and the next day Paddock took over.
Paddock worked at the diner nearly every day for three months to learn as much as she could from the Yantsideses before buying the business. She’s still learning from them.
“Jimmy is full of advice and he comes almost daily to check on me,” Paddock said.
Yantsides told Paddock the two keys to running a successful diner are fast service and keeping the place clean.
“People are in and out; they don’t have 45 minutes to waste,” he said.
The Yantsideses, both 72, said on Thursday that they don’t miss working at the Kenmore, but Pauline suspects that her husband does because he’s returned so many times.
After he goes to the gym, Yantsides shows up at about 8 a.m. most days to have a cup of coffee and toast and to ask how the day is going.
“I want to see the customers,” he said. “I miss the people.”
He’s even drummed up business for Paddock by urging his friends who work at the Toyota dealership in Auburn to order lunch.
Pauline calls Paddock a couple of times a week to tell her that she loves her and to make sure she’s happy.
“I would say, yes, I’m happy,” Paddock said.
Yantsides has even informed Paddock that he’ll work for her for free whenever she needs him over the next few months. She hasn’t taken him up on his offer yet.
The Yantsideses plan to visit their daughter, Joanna Zelaya, for 10 days in April and celebrate their 54th wedding anniversary on April 20. They will head to Greece for three months in late May.
Meanwhile, Pauline finds herself cooking a lot more at their home near Tatnuck Square now that she’s retired.
The Yantsideses used to get up at 4 a.m., but now it’s 6 a.m. Jimmy admits he wakes up at 3 a.m. but hangs out in bed until 6.
Jimmy said it was his goal to run the diner for 50 years, but the last two years were the most difficult because he couldn’t decide whether to sell the business or hire someone to work for him. Finally, he decided to sell the business to Paddock.
“I think she’s perfect,” Pauline said. “She loves to cook, she loves people, she’s very family-oriented. All her children are very interested in helping out.”
Paddock had done catering and worked as a server at the former Shorah’s Ristorante and at the Publick House in Sturbridge. Her father, John Richard, is an executive chef who worked at Shorah’s and the former Viva Bene. Richard helped out during the first week after Paddock bought the diner business.
“My family and I had always talked about opening some sort of coffee shop or something,” she said. “I wouldn’t have jumped to a diner, but the opportunity presented itself.”
Paddock aims to uphold the traditions set by the Yantsideses, acknowledging that achieving a 50-year milestone at the diner would be a significant accomplishment for her as well.
“I would be 93,” she said, “but I plan on seeing it through.”
Her daughters Gillian, 19, and Audrey, 18, both work part-time at the diner, and her husband, Ryan, starts the coffee and turns on the grill each morning before Christon arrives, and then heads off to work for AA Transportation.
“It kind of feels like working at home now,” Gillian said.
Since Paddock purchased the business, she’s worked every day from 5:15 a.m. or 5:30 a.m. until 3 p.m. She works a lot of hours, but she’s pleased to be home by the time her youngest daughter, 8-year-old Charlotte, gets off the school bus.
The sign on the building still reads Kenmore Diner, but legally the name has changed to Buddy’s Kenmore Diner. Buddy is a 5-year-old boy who lived with the Paddocks for four years, but the family was saddened when his adoption fell through and he no longer lives with them.
Paddock hired Gene Toscano, a family friend who worked at the diner for five years before the pandemic, as one of the cooks.
All cooks and servers wear jerseys with the new Kenmore Diner logo designed by Gillian on the front and their names and the number 24, as in 2024, on the back. The logo reads “Kenmore Diner” with a coffee pot pouring coffee into a mug that doubles as the “o” in Kenmore.
“I love them,” Toscano said. “Nice touch.”
In the winter, the jerseys are hockey-style jerseys. In the summer, they’ll be baseball style and in the fall they’ll be football style. The chefs also wear baseball caps decorated with Kenmore Diner coffee cups.
“It’s meant to be casual,” Paddock said. “This is an everyman’s diner.”
Paddock said a lot of the long-time customers have continued to eat at the diner and while they are pleased that nothing has dramatically changed, they are glad to have new specials to try.
Closing time has been extended to 2 p.m., two hours later than in the past, and in addition to breakfast, the Kenmore now offers lunch, including an Italian club sandwich with housemade balsamic dressing, an 8-ounce shaved ribeye sandwich with a cheese blend and homemade chili and clam chowder.
The breakfast home fries are now loaded with bacon bits, cheddar cheese, green onion, tomato, and sour cream.
Paddock said the average bill per customer is $20-$22, including tip.
Paddock said at least 10 people eat at the diner seven days a week and one of them sometimes returns later in the day now that the diner serves lunch.
“I think it’s more the atmosphere,” Paddock said. “The food is good, yes, but it’s comfortable.”
The diner has 11 booths and seven seats at the counter for a capacity of 55. On weekends, the diner is full from 9:30-11 a.m.
The diner continues to be cash only for now, but Paddock is considering accepting credit cards at some point.
Ed King, 49, of Kingston, and Steve Ives, 32, of Holland are installing mosaic marble floors nearby so they’ve had breakfast at the Kenmore Diner several times over the last month. On Thursday morning, they both ordered the house special of eggs, home fries, toast, and two choices of meat, devouring a huge chocolate chip cookie while waiting for their breakfast.
“This place is dynamite,” King said. “I haven’t had a bad experience yet.”
He also likes the look of the diner.
“It’s old school,” King said. “It’s classic. I like when they don’t change it too much. I don’t like it too modernized when it comes to diners. I think they’ve got to keep it classic, the booths, the stools, the whole nine yards.”
Jimmy said his original diner was built out of state in 1941 and at some point was moved to Park Ave. In 1965, the diner moved to its current location at 250 Franklin St. It was closed and in disrepair for a few years before Jimmy bought it and reopened it in 1974. The diner was destroyed when the abandoned Worcester Cold Storage and Warehouse building fell on it while being demolished after a fire that cost the lives of six Worcester firefighters in 1999.
After being out of business for 13 months, the Yantsideses opened the current Kenmore Diner in 2001 on the same site.
The day before the Yantsideses’ final day at the diner, their niece, Soultana Skirtakis, presented them with a painting she had made in England of their original diner and the current diner.
One of Yantsideses best memories occurred during the Blizzard of 1978. The Kenmore was closed, but they gave a key to a National Guard and the guardsmen cooked there and cleaned up after themselves for two days.
Pauline recalls a woman expressing that her cooking resembled the precision of conducting a symphony or the grace of dancing a ballet. The customer wanted to hire her as a cook, but she turned her down. Jimmy was also offered a job in the 1980s by a regional manager at Denny’s restaurants. The manager even said he’d give him a blank check and allow him to write in whatever salary he wanted. Jimmy didn’t want to give up his own business at the time, however.
Finally, last month, he was ready to do so…and without ever having taken the job at Denny’s.
Bill Doyle has been a professional journalist for 47 years, most of them as a sports writer for the Telegram & Gazette. He covered the Boston Celtics for 25 years and has written extensively about golf, boxing and local high school and college sports. He also worked for the campus newspaper when he attended UMass-Amherst. He can be reached at billdoyle1515@gmail.com
