The popular takeout restaurant Ancho Honey in St. George is closing for good due to increasing costs and the owner’s goal to have more time outside of work, he wrote in a Facebook post.
Owner and chef Malcolm Bedell opened the restaurant in an old house 10 miles down the St. George peninsula in 2019. He was also the owner of a food truck called ‘Which, Please in 2015, ran the kitchen at the now-closed Mussel Ridge Market in Spruce Head, and owns Honey’s Fried Chicken Palace in Thomaston.
Ancho Honey was closed for the winter, but Bedell decided that he won’t reopen it.
In the Facebook post on Friday, Bedell said that the ever-rising costs of ingredients and electricity made it impossible to keep his prices low at Ancho Honey. And, a dwindling workforce kept him from finding enough employees to keep the experimental kitchen in business.
Bedell added that he wants to spend more time with his teenage daughters.
“The grab-and-go meals that we tried to keep priced at around $12.95, really should have been closer to $15 or 16.95, and at that point, I couldn’t feel good about charging higher-end restaurant prices for food in a plastic box, no matter how good I knew it was,” Bedell said in the post.
Ancho Honey started out as a takeout business during the pandemic, Bedell said. He sold made-to-order grilled cheese sandwiches and other to-go meals that changed weekly.
In the post, Bedell said he thought about relaunching Ancho Honey under a different model, but after weighing making it a fine-dining restaurant, a burger restaurant or another sandwich restaurant, he decided against reopening it altogether.
“At the end of an eight hour shift as a line cook, I’m tired. I’m a little slower than I used to be. It hasn’t happened yet, but I can see a future where my presence on the line will be a liability and a source of frustration to the talented, bright-eyed young men and women around me. I don’t want that. But it’s coming,” Bedell said in the post.
Jules Walkup is a Report for America corps member. Additional support for this reporting is provided by BDN readers.