Kristy's Coffee Shop closes after 40 years

Barbara Stanley has a cup of coffee Friday morning inside the now closed Kristy's Coffee Shop on Historic Route 66 in Gallup. The popular 24-hour restaurant, renowned for its french fries and patty melts, closed on Christmas day and Stanley is considering retiring to Rio Rancho, N.M. (Photo by Jeff Jones/Independent)

By Bill Donovan
Staff Writer

GALLUP — For the past 40 years, Kristy's Coffee Shop has been almost an institution in Gallup, beloved by young and old alike.

But on Christmas Day, Kristy's closed maybe for good. It's owner, Barbara Stanley, had decided it was time to retire after decades of duty where some years 2003 for instance - she could only take a couple of days off annually.

It wasn't without a lot of regret and soul searching because she knew just how much some people in Gallup loved the restaurant.

In fact, a lot of people in town are already beginning to suffer withdrawal symptoms for its loss.

"Where am I going to get my patty melts and wet fries now?" asked city councilor Mary Ann Armijo.

While a number of restaurants in this area have patty melts on their menu, no one makes them quite like Kristy's. And as for the wet fries, Stanley said she hasn't seen any other local restaurant offer them.

Kristy's started out as a Denny's. You can look at the wall of the restraint today and see a reminder - a roll of D's on the tile.

Stanley said he began there as a waitress in the mid-1960s and became owner when she married Mike Stanley - who died a couple of years ago and who came to town shortly after she became a waitress to run the Denny's franchise.

After several years of running it as a Denny's, the franchise lease expired and the restaurant was renamed to honor one of the Stanley children.

Stanley said officials for Denny's weren't exactly unhappy to see the restaurant go independent, mainly because there were times when the Stanleys would complain about various restrictions put in place by the head company that made no sense to them.

Take the uniforms, for example.

The company provided uniforms for its waitresses but only in small and medium sizes. For those who wore a dress size above 10, well, the company's policy was not to hire someone who would not fit into their size uniforms.

This didn't sit well with the Stanleys.

Stanley said she remembers talking to an official of the company and telling her that the Stanleys had this well-known California attorney who loved to take on the big companies. The larger sized uniforms were ordered.

Another problem the Stanleys had with Denny's was the policy over teenagers.

The company didn't allow people just to hang around not eating but the Stanleys always had the belief that their restaurant should welcome teenagers who may just want to have some place to go to talk.

"Chain restaurants don't like people just sitting around and talking," said Stanley.

She mentioned being in Appblebee's recently with a friend and having the waitress start hovering over them as they finished their meal. As they stayed and talked, the waitress started making hints about paying the bill and Stanley said she finally asked the waitress if she wanted them to leave.

"She said the company has a policy of having the waitress turn over a table every 20 minutes," Stanley said.

Not at Kristy's which became in the late 1960s a hangout for teen-agers and their friends.

It was a comfort to generations of parents to be able to call up the restaurant and know that their kids were there just hanging out and not getting into any trouble, she said.

It also became a hangout for a lot of adults as well since for many years Kristy's was the only restaurant in town that stayed open 24 hours a day.

Up until just a decade or so, it's wasn't unusual to see people come into the restaurant in the wee hours of the morning after having a little bit too much to drink. They would just stay and drink coffee and maybe have a patty melt to help them sober up.

This happens less frequently now, Stanley said, as police and community officials have made inroads into the DWI problem.

But over the years, while Kristy's would continue to be an oasis for a lot of regulars, the customer base continued to decline as first the mines closed and then the railroaders left town. Even the opening of the casinos east of Grants would affect business.

But the restaurant continued to remain profitable even though a couple of the restaurant's policies probably lost it some business.

Take, for example, credit cards.

Kristy's was one of the few restaurants in town that did not accept credit cards and for a business that once catered relied on tourist for much of its income, it was a policy that puzzled a number of people.

But the answer is simple.

Stanley explained that the cash register is located in a place that has no phone service.

To have credit cards then, Kristy's would have had to set it up near the pay phones in the back or in the office, also located in the back.

You have to remember, she said, when Kristy's first opened in the 1960s, only rich people had credit cards and to get them verified, you had to go to the phone, call up the credit card company and then wait for it to be verified. That sometimes took as long as seven or 10 minutes.

That was too long for a waitress to be away from her customers.

And although the company could have hired cashiers, Stanley said these costs would have had to be passed on to the customers with higher prices and the Stanleys always had a policy if keeping the prices as low as possible.

Besides being customer-friendly when it came to allowing people to just sit and ponder life, the restaurant had another major access - its patty melt sandwich.

Sure, this is just a hamburger on rye bread but Stanley said anyone who has had one of Kristy's patty melts knows it is more than that.

What makes her patty melts so special has been a trade secret but Stanley said she would share one thing.

"I made sure to get the best rye bread I could find and get the best ground beef," she said.

She's willing to share this secret, however, if someone wants to take over the business.

It turns out that while the Stanleys owned the business, the land and the building belonged to an Albuquerque couple and although the Stanleys offered numerous times over the years to buy the place, it was never up for sale.

Stanley said she hoped that there was someone who would want to continue operating a restaurant at the site and although she realized that new owners would mean some changes in how the restaurant was run, she also knew that for many people in the Gallup area, Kristy's was a way of life.

"We would have people who had moved away come in whenever they were in the area just to get the patty melts," she said.

So, for right now, a Gallup tradition is no more. And those people who have been calling, as if they have lost an old friend, there is some hope that one day, people will be able to go into Kristy's at 2 a.m. and say something that thousands of local residents have said hundreds of thousands of times "A patty melt and wet fries, please."