Trail’s End Cafe is closing after this week, and there are no immediate plans to offer breakfast fare at its nearby sister restaurant, Lincoln Kitchen.
In a February 26 post on the LincolnTalk email list headlined “Exciting News from Lincoln Kitchen,” general manager Manny Rodriguez announced that Matt Molloy had been named as the new culinary director for Lincoln Kitchen and the Trail’s End restaurant in Concord. Both restaurants as well as the Trail’s End Care are co-owned by Lincoln residents Jim and Carol White. Near the end of the email, Rodriguez said that Trail’s End Cafe would close on March 2.
“It really didn’t work out for us. We enjoyed doing it, but financially it doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Jim White said in an interview with the Lincoln Squirrel. “The cafe is a small business, and as we’ve learned, what it offered in the way of breakfast food and sandwiches competed with Donelan’s. I think we should provide to the town a really first-class lunch and dinner restaurant, and Lincoln Kitchen really is that option.”
Trail’s End Cafe opened in October 2016 and Lincoln Kitchen opened almost exactly a year ago. They replaced the Whistle Stop, which closed in July 2016, and AKA Bistro, which shut its doors two months earlier. In August 2016, the Whites and their daughter Elizabeth Akehurst-Moore signed leases on both South Lincoln properties, which are owned by the Rural Land Foundation.
According to Rodriguez’s email, Molloy has 20 years of experience including acting as the longtime Chef de Cuisine at Lumiere in Newton, executive chef at Beacon Hill Bistro and The Inn at Hastings Park in Lexington, and a chef instructor at Le Cordon Bleu Boston. He is leaving his current position as a chef at a software company in Lexington.
“Hiring Matt Molloy really was independent of the closing of the cafe,” White said. “Our chef in Concord left and we really need a chef of Matt’s caliber to be responsible for the menus in Lincoln Kitchen and Trail’s End Concord as well as Concord Market, which will have a lot of prepared foods.”
The 15,000-square-foot Concord Market is under construction in Millbrook Tarry between Keyes Road and Lowell Road in Concord, a commercial plaza owned by the Whites that is also home to the original Trail’s End, and is aiming for a mid-July opening, he said. “Obviously it’s taking a lot of resources and it requires a lot of attention. It’s a major operation. I think the cafe in Lincoln is a nice little spot, but it’s too small for us to really be worth our effort.”
Molloy will start work on March 5, but White said he didn’t know when diners might see changes in the restaurants’ menus.
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