Dysart’s Truck Stop and Restaurant, a longtime favorite pit stop just off Interstate 95 in Hermon where hungry travelers stopped round-the-clock to fuel up on classic diner food, announced Wednesday that it is cutting back its hours next month.
In outtakes from filming a Dysart’s ad, Jack and Sonya Palmer repeatedly flubbed the words “buttery, flaky crust” – sometimes getting agitated – but ended up with many YouTube fans. Photo screen shot from YouTube
The restaurant will be open from 5 a.m. to midnight daily beginning Oct. 1, co-owner Mary Dysart Hartt said.
The fuel operations and store will remain open 24/7 and serve sandwiches and other food.
The “late-night landscape” has shifted over time, Hartt said. Local businesses have eliminated overnight shifts; fewer people are coming into the restaurant after a night at local bars; and trucking laws have changed, resulting in fewer drivers on the road after midnight.
“With all of those changes, and even though the rest of the day remains very strong, we just aren’t seeing enough business between midnight and 5 a.m. to justify keeping the restaurant open overnight,” she said in a statement.
Dysart’s opened on Mother’s Day in 1967. The landmark restaurant is known for its big portions of homestyle comfort food. A second full-service restaurant opened on Broadway in Bangor in 2014, but it is not a round-the-clock business and its hours will remain the same.
Dysart’s got national attention in 2012 when customers Jack and Sonya Palmer of Hermon filmed a TV commercial for the restaurant but kept stumbling over the words “buttery, flaky crust.” The couple’s tongue-tied outtakes went viral online, and they were parodied in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch in 2018.
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