Why watch the Friends reunion when you could just live it instead? While Father’s Day weekend marked the official reopening (albeit, a “soft opening”) of Kay’s Orcutt Country Kitchen (closed since last November), the iconic eatery is formally celebrating the occasion with an upcoming reunion of its own.
On June 26 and 27, five of Kay’s former servers are returning to the restaurant for Old Time Workers weekend.
“We’re just gonna rock and roll it, even though none of them have really done it for 15 years,” owner Kay Tims said of the group—made up of her three daughters and two longtime family friends, each of whom worked at Kay’s around the early 2000s.
“They worked this job through junior high and high school, and then they’d come here and work through college on vacations and so forth,” said Tims, who admittedly felt a tad reluctant when the reunion idea was first brought up.
“They were more excited than me; I was more like, ‘Jeez, it’s been a long time since these girls worked with me,’” Tims said. “Their response: It’s like riding a bike.”
Tims added that she hopes longtime customers get a kick out of seeing the five servers’ faces again, namely the regulars who basically “watched them grow up,” she said.
She also feels grateful that the group offered to help out as the restaurant gets back in the swing of things during the reopening.
“I’m still shorthanded. I brought back all of my cooks, and I’ve got about half of my front staff, but a couple of them have moved on,” Tims said. “But I’m figuring it’s going to work itself out; I think everybody’s shorthanded.”
Tims can vividly remember her initial reactions to news of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the red flags leading up to the shutdown last March.
“We started to hear rumbles in the news, and we had become so slow the week before. We knew that this was no joke, people were really getting scared. So we felt it coming,” Tims said. “And then when they declared it was a pandemic and they were going to close businesses, it seemed surreal. It seemed like I was in a movie; that this really couldn’t be happening.
“My reaction was, ‘I need to protect my employees,’” she added. “I just told them, ‘You need to go home, do what you need to do, and we’ll come back and fight another day.’”
In June of 2020, Kay’s did reopen for takeout and outdoor dining, but the restaurant shut its doors again in November. During that window though, Tims hoped the restaurant would have been able to return to some form of indoor dining, which unfortunately never became a possibility.
“I came back in the middle of June, and we were supposed to be open 50 percent [capacity, for indoor dining], and then I never even got to that point,” Tims said. “I got the food and I got everything ready and they had already closed us for indoor dining. First it was only to-go, and then shortly after that they let us do outdoor dining.”
In November, Tims decided the takeout and outdoor dining options were no longer going to work for them, she said.
“There just wasn’t enough—we were losing money. We were not getting enough to pay our bills,” Tims said. “And I figured the only way to save the restaurant was if I closed her down—unplugged all the lights, turned the gas off.”
In Tims’ opinion, a sentiment certainly shared by many Orcutt locals, there’s a very big difference between eating Kay’s food inside the restaurant and outside the restaurant.
“It’s not the same having us outside,” Tims said, while glancing at the restaurant’s photo-laden walls, rich in history of both the restaurant’s evolution over the years (including more than a few photos of Tims and her daughters while they were working there) and Old Town Orcutt as a community.
Before the year 2000, Kay’s was simply known as Orcutt Country Kitchen, where Tims worked as a waitress for nearly a decade before becoming its owner.
“I was scared, I was very afraid to step out and own the restaurant,” said Tims, recalling when she found out the restaurant was for sale. “My parents were actually the ones who encouraged me. They were like, ‘Come on, you could do this thing.’ And I never looked back. They were like, ‘Kaylynn’—I mean, nobody calls me Kaylynn anymore—but they said, ‘Kaylynn, you know, you should do this, it’d be a perfect job for you, you’d be home every night; it’s only daytime hours.’”
And it still is.
Prior to the pandemic, Kay’s was open seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., but for now the restaurant is open Thursdays through Mondays, but with the same traditional breakfast/lunch hours.
“Who doesn’t like breakfast? Just talking about it makes me hungry,” Tims said before revealing her favorite item on the kitchen’s menu.
“Bacon. I have the best bacon,” she said. “I love my bacon.”
Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood would never refuse bacon. Send comments to cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 24 – Jul 1, 2021.