SUNDERLAND — After decades of serving sweet summertime staples at Sugarloaf Frostie, Peter and Darlene Kulessa passed the family business to their niece, Julie Kulessa, and her husband Rick Strong of Sunderland on Wednesday.
“It’s time,” said Peter Kulessa, 72.
Ready to no longer weather the rushes and long summer hours at Sugarloaf Frostie, which often stretch to 15 hours, the pair decided to retire. Instead of splitting their time between Sunderland and their home in Colebrook, New Hampshire, the couple plans to stay in Colebrook, allowing for more time to trek through its trails on their snowmobiles.
If Julie Kulessa, 53, turned down the offer, Peter and Darlene planned on bulldozing the restaurant and selling the property on Route 116.
“They were pretty much feeling that this is a family business, which is really special, and if it wasn’t going to be a family member to take over the legacy, then the legacy would be done,” Julie Kulessa said. “A business like this needs to be run, not with dollar signs in the forefront, but with love and passion for our family business, and how it’s always been run and will continue to be run.”
Julie Kulessa’s grandparents, Alec and Frances Kulessa, started the family business in 1968 with a wagon filled with their farm’s potatoes and other produce. As more customers traveling along Route 116 stopped by, the couple constructed the building, selling beverages and later soft-serve ice cream, and finally hamburgers and hot dogs after customers requested a meal with their dessert, Julie recalled.
“I literally grew up in the background of the business,” she said.
After celebrating birthdays with her family in the business’ private room — coined the “family room” by the Kulessa crew — and pedaling her tricycle through the parking lot with her cousins, Julie started working at Sugarloaf Frostie in high school alongside her friends.
“No matter how much time goes by, when you’ve spent those years doing that, it never leaves you,” she said. “I can guarantee you any one of them would be able to come back and they’d be able to make the perfect ice cream cone.”
Since Julie Kulessa started, her apron has always hung in the closet. During her college years, she came back to Sunderland from Boston to serve the classics, and has remained “on call” ever since for business-related emergencies.
But Kulessa said she is not the only one in Sunderland with memories of Sugarloaf Frostie. For many regulars, stopping on Route 116 for an ice cream cone and a hot dog or burger was a tradition of their childhood that they instilled in the summertime routines of their families and, later, their grandchildren.
No longer running the restaurant this summer, Peter and Darlene Kulessa said they will miss their relationships with regulars and the employees that spent years behind the counter.
“The business plan, the appearance of the business, the feel of the business, the taste of the food, has not changed since what they remember in their own childhood,” Julie Kulessa said of the generations of regulars. “Just seeing that mint-green building as you’re driving down Route 116, it brings it all back. It looks the same, it feels the same, and I think that’s really important to people and their memories.”
Kulessa and her husband plan to keep the building’s signature mint-green color with some “upkeep.” Inside, she plans to install a “modernized” Point of Sale (POS) system to accept credit cards for the first time in the business’ nearly 60 years of sales.
Customers will also spot a few “healthier side dishes” on the menu this summer, but the new owners plan to “keep it true to the classics.”
“The things that were on the menu 30 years ago are the things that evoke the most memories with people, and those are the things that absolutely will 100% stay on the menu, because the nostalgia of the business is of utmost importance,” Julie Kulessa said.
Julie’s husband, Rick Strong, a chef and the former owner of the now closed Bridge Street Cafe in Shelburne Falls, recently learned her grandmother’s secret recipe for the sauerkraut on the “Long Kraut Dog,” a bestseller, from Peter Kulessa.
There is no physical copy of the secret recipe. Only the Frostie owners know its steps.
“It’s a pinch of this, a pinch of that,” Julie Kulessa said. “It’s one of those old-fashioned Polish recipes that truly comes from the heart.”
Kulessa has her sights set on May 1 as the grand opening day, but said this date may change as she and her husband settle in and hire staff for the summer.
“It’s scary because we’re going to be working harder than we’ve ever worked in a long time, but I can’t help but think that my grandparents who passed on years ago, this is the way that they would want it to be,” Julie Kulessa said. “That they’re smiling down on us and so happy, because it’s the way it should be.”