Heritage Cafeteria closes after 56 years

A mainstay on Battlefield Road closed yesterday after 56 years in business.

Heritage Cafeteria, a restaurant known for its home-cooking style of food, shuttered at 1364 E. Battlefield Road.

A sign on the door - posted online by the Ozarks Alive Facebook page - indicates the business closed due to higher costs, changing economic times, the opportunity to retire and a property purchase offer.

“This decision was not easy, but after a lot of thought and prayers, we feel like this is the right time,” owner Don Evans wrote in the message on the restaurant’s door. “We want to thank all of our loyal customers and reassure you that our full-time employees will receive severance pay and help in finding new jobs.”

Calls to the restaurant and names listed in the phonebook under the owner’s name were unsuccessful this morning.

KY3 reports an undisclosed company purchased the property. The Greene County assessor’s website does not list an ownership change for the 1.75-acre property, which has a 2016 taxable appraised value of $1.6 million. The property owned is listed as the Richard D. Evans Trust.

Evans is the third generation of the Evans family to run Heritage Cafeteria. His grandfather, Don S. Evans, started the company, with help later from his parents, Richard and Dorothy Evans; and his uncle and aunt, Louis and Patricia Lohmeyer, according to Springfield Business Journal archives.

The restaurant originally opened at 1310 S. Glenstone Ave. in October 1960. Heritage Cafeteria reached a peak of four locations in the 1980s, but the partnership dissolved a decade later following the death of Don S. Evans. A location at North Town Mall had already closed by that time, and two others that were renamed to Mrs. O’Mealey’s closed in 1998 and 2002.

At the time of its 50th anniversary, the restaurant on Battlefield Road employed 50.