It's now 2025 and Anika's Pizza in Moultonborough, NH is excited for the new year!
We are excited about the new year and seeing so many new faces every weekend. While we have been here for 3 years now, the time frame doesn't tell the whole story. We have been plagued with challenges since before our doors were opened. When we purchased this restaurant in 2021, we planned to open Spring 2022 or 2023. Unfortunately, we were forced to open earlier than anticipated, and were overwhelmed with the amount of repairs we had to do. First we tore out the bathrooms and remodeled the floor, ceilings, walls, etc and turned a restaurant that was truly falling apart, into something new. Despite living blocks from Lake Winnipesaukee, we didn't have much of a chance to visit the lake our first year and a half due to a grueling schedule of repair, replace, and when we weren't fixing things, we were working at the restaurant.
Unfortunately, every few weeks some piece of kitchen equipment stopped working making it even more difficult to remain open constant hours. We replaced every freezer, refrigerator, oven, grill, water heater, etc. at a tremendous cost. While we had been open limited hours doing curbside pickup orders from October 2021 until March of 2022, we really wanted to be open, so we opened for 6 days per week, for around 7 weeks. Unfortunately, 70+ hours per week at the restaurant was unstainable for us. As we were told by the previous owners, we should either lease it out or hire people, otherwise, the hours would "kill us." We couldn't do it anymore on our own and continued looking for staff and finally found a few people but unfortunately did not find ones that we could trust for more than a week or two. Needless to say, we won't get into specifics, but refusal to wear gloves, failure to show up for work and do the job, etc. were just a few issues we had, not to mention theft, etc.
One good thing during all this time is the regular private orders we would get almost every week. We often got orders from organizations visiting camps, local weddings, businesses, and organizations. People would make comments on social media that we were never open, despite the fact that oftentimes we were open 5-6 days per week, but instead of being open 12 hours per day, we may have only been there 2-3 hours some days preparing large orders. This both helped to sustain us, and kept the work manageable for us. Unfortunately, every time we hired someone and had the excitement that we could do both (be open full time to serve the public and do private events), we could never find the right people, thus, we were still labeled to be "never open" by locals. We did understand the perspective, to a point and tried hard to open as much as we could and make it clear when we were open.
With all this going on since opening, we had a lot of false starts; telling everyone we would now be open daily, only to find we didn't have enough staff to sustain that goal. When we were open, some of these same locals, who often were simply friends or family with other establishments, never came into our restaurant anyway, so it seemed to be this lame way of complaining that we were never open and then not stopping by when we were open anyway, I never got the reasoning, or rather lack thereof, but oh well. We ended up opening what appeared to be random to most. While we tried to do a regular schedule, we have young children in school, health issues, not to mention the amount of work we continued putting into rebuilding a dilapidated property. Ultimately, 2022 was a very difficult year, and unfortunately this carried over into 2023, which was another challenging year for staffing and repairs.
Though 2023 saw some of the same obstacles as 2022, we were open many more hours than previously, and started a regular schedule of working 6 days per week, which was then cut down to 5 days per week after a while. We did this for a big chunk of summer and fall until we eventually cut our hours down to doing weekends only, with a random day thrown in when we had availability. The problem is, there are only 2 of us, and one of us is sick, the restaurant would naturally be closed. If we had to visit a sick family member in the hospital, the restaurant was closed.
So with only 2 people, no matter how you manage your time, it's still difficult to remain consistently open. You would think most people would understand, and while there were many locals that did, unfortunately, many vocal ones used this to continue to push the notion that we were "never open..." We have lots of knowledge about some of these people and why the same ones complaining about us never being open in 2021 were the same exact people in 2024; ultimately, there is an agenda there for many of them, and others simply repeat the never open myth.
Challenges aside, we made it through 2023 by being open more hours than ever, doing weekends regularly, and growing the restaurant. In fact, WMUR came and did a story about us for the Chronicle, which was great, and exposed us to more NH residents who had never been up to Moultonborough. Every week we had a new visitor who came all the way up just to eat at our restaurant, which is both gratifying and motivating to continue doing better. Most of the people we had spoken to had never passed Meredith, so beyond increasing our business, we helped expose Moultonborough to new visitors. This gave us hope and we continued doing every weekend throughout 2024.
Although we had a few rough periods on the weekends where we were closed, we were able to have a reliable schedule of being open almost every Friday and Saturday in 2024. We also were finally able to redo the roof which was replaced 100% (including plywood), and all of the siding. So now instead of dirty white, which is what the siding was since purchasing the restaurant, it was Red and Yellow, a complete new look to match the colorful insides! We continued the year being open regularly, and doing private orders for camps and weddings, but unfortunately the "never open" thing persisted with some people. We then changed the sign out front, which we used to put up as merely "Closed Today," or "Open." Now our sign said "Open Fridays and Saturdays, 11-8. This helped us tremendously as it made it clear what days we were open and was at least less likely to confuse people who may not have used electronic means of finding our hours.
Every week a new local visitor would come, mention the never open thing, and each week those same people would now be our new regulars. While we had some frustration hearing the same things over and over again, we understood and welcomed each new regular who saw, heard and actually tasted what made Anika’s Pizza so great. We continued getting visitors who saw us on WMUR, locals who saw our sign said Fridays and Saturdays and assumed it was the first time we had a regular schedule, and new visitors who had heard about us from influences who recommended our restaurant.
We finished 2024 as our best year ever, earning 55% more revenue than the previous year. This is despite physically being open only 1/3 the time we were in 2023. Not to mention the fact that we had no periods in 2024 of being open 5-6 days per week for months at a time like we had been in 2023. There were other good things that happened in 2024 as well. We hired a few excellent temporary employees from Thailand who helped with cleaning and dishwashing. They gave us hope we could find good, friendly, hardworking staff. However, rather than hiring staff and opening full time in the middle of fall, we decided to wait until Spring of 2025. This would give us time to continue doing this ourselves until we could find people to help increase our hours. We still do private events, everyone from local businesses, contractors, to the police department. We also do birthday parties, family gatherings, and more. Hopefully by the time it hits March, we can find reliable staff and we can be open more for locals and visitors, but regardless of what happens, we aren't going anywhere and will continue to serve some of the best pizza in the lakes region!