Hungry Horse Cafe has fed locals for 20 years

A small cafe and convenience store on Washington Road is a “real throwback” that has thrived for two decades.

The Hungry Horse Cafe celebrated its 20th anniversary on Saturday. Owner Pat Phelan, 60, celebrated by doing what he does every day: biking to the store at 5 a.m. to bake fresh pastries and get ready for another day of serving breakfast and lunch to his loyal customers.

“Everything here is fresh,” he said. “We bake just enough to get us through the day.”

Phelan's strategy for longevity is simple. He strives to keep overhead low so he can continue to provide low prices on coffee, bacon and eggs, and sandwiches and subs. He said some customers have actually told him he should raise prices, but that's just not his way. He said the only time he raises prices is when it is truly necessary, like when a California frost recently damaged lettuce crops and inflated the price of the leafy vegetable.

“I hate like hell to raise prices. You have to do it sometimes,” he said.

Like most eateries, the economy has made things difficult for the Hungry Horse. Phelan noted it is a popular spot for contractors, and that when landscapers and roofers have less business, so does he. The rising price of gas and other costs of living don't help, either, he said.

“It's a struggle in the food business this time of year,” he said. “Talking to sales reps, they all say the same thing.”

But Hungry Horse continues to trot forward, thanks to the relationships forged with its customers. Phelan said the cafe has its share of regulars who show up right on schedule.

“I come back here for the people,” said Matt Willmer, who lives down the road and eats lunch at Hungry Horse three times a week. “They're good to me and always have been.”

He said his children like joining him on trips to the cafe because “they like the fact they can order their sandwich any way they want.”

Despite its success, Phelan was skeptical about the store's chances when his business partner, John Abbott, first pitched the idea after the two had success working together at their Honeybee Donut Shop in Seabrook. Abbott owns the North Hampton Grocery on Route 1 as well as the building that houses the Hungry Horse.

Phelan said he thought the location was too obscure to be a success, until he sat inside one day and watched the traffic drive by.

“I sat in here one day and I watched the cars go by and thought, 'Maybe I'll make a go of this,'” he said.

Phelan noted that some things have changed since 1993, while others have remained the same. He brews less coffee daily now, from 25 to 30 pots a day down to 12 to 15, which he blames on the proliferation of Keurig coffee brewers. He also noticed that people are more conscious about spending and health nowadays, and are more likely to opt for a smaller bag of chips or drink.

But through it all, Phelan remains a “real throwback.” He doesn't own a cell phone, and his store doesn't have its own Facebook page. He tried to create a Web site for it, but found out the town of Hungry Horse, Mont., had already taken the good names.

When he played Hamlet as a young man, Richard Briers, who has died aged 79 after suffering from a lung condition, said he was the first Prince of Denmark to give the audience half an hour in the pub afterwards. He was nothing if not quick. In fact, wrote the veteran critic WA Darlington, he played Hamlet "like a demented typewriter". Briers, always the most modest and self-deprecating of actors, and the sweetest of men, relished the review, happy to claim a place in the light comedians' gallery of his knighted idols Charles Hawtrey, Gerald du Maurier and No?l Coward.

"People don't realise how good an actor Dickie Briers really is," said John Gielgud. This was probably because of his sunny, cheerful disposition and the rat-a-tat articulacy of his delivery. "You're a great farceur," said Coward, delivering another testimony, "because you never, ever, hang about."

Although he excelled in the plays of Alan Ayckbourn, and became a national figure in his television sitcoms of the 1970s and 80s, notably The Good Life, he could mine hidden depths on stage, giving notable performances in Ibsen, Chekhov and, for Kenneth Branagh's Renaissance company, Shakespeare.

Paired with Felicity Kendal as his wife, Barbara, and pitted against their formidable, snobbish neighbour Margo Leadbetter (Penelope Keith) and her docile husband, Jerry (Paul Eddington), he gave one of the classic good-natured comedy sitcom performances of our time. Briers was already an established West End star when he started in The Good Life. In the same year as the first series, he up-ended expectation as Colin in Absent Friends, Ayckbourn's bitter comedy about death, and the death of love, at the Garrick theatre. Like the playwright, he proved once and for all that he "did" bleak, too.

Briers was born in Raynes Park, south-west London, and educated at schools in Wimbledon. He described his bookmaker father, Joseph, as a feckless drifter. His mother, Morna Richardson, was a pianist. Richard's cousin was the gap-toothed film star Terry-Thomas. While doing his national service with the RAF, Briers attended evening classes in drama. He then worked as an office clerk before taking a place at Rada, where he won the silver medal. He won a scholarship to the Liverpool Rep for the season of 1956-57 and was never out of work thereafter. At Liverpool he met Ann Davies, whom he married in 1957; they spent most of their married life in Chiswick, west London, in a house they bought around 10 years later.

Seasons in Leatherhead and Coventry were followed by a London debut in 1959 at the Duke of York's as Joseph Field in Lionel Hale's Gilt and Gingerbread. He played in Harold Pinter's A Slight Ache at the Arts theatre and went on tour as Gerald Popkiss in Ben Travers's Rookery Nook, before giving an irresistible Roland Maule, the importunate playwright from Uckfield, in Coward's Present Laughter, at the Vaudeville in 1965.

He was back at the Duke of York's in Ayckbourn's first London hit, Relatively Speaking, in 1967, forming a wonderful quartet with Celia Johnson, Jennifer Hilary and Michael Hordern, who inadvertently trod on a garden rake that sprang up to hit him on the nose ("What hoe?!"). He was Moon, the stand-in critic, in Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound at the Criterion in 1968 ("a performance of sharp hopelessness and vindictiveness," said Helen Dawson), and played several roles in Michael Frayn's The Two of Us, with Lynn Redgrave, at the Garrick in 1970. He took over from Alan Bates in Simon Gray's Butley in 1972 and proceeded, he said genially, to empty theatres all over Britain in the leading role of Richard III on tour.