Southern York County restaurant closes four months after opening

When chef Shawn Scheivert spoke to the York Daily Record in July about the Great American Melting Pot restaurant, he said he knew it’d be a challenge to have it stick in the community.

“We’re the new kid on the block,” Scheivert said. “They’re not going to give us a chance until they feel we’ve been here long enough… Once we get them in the door, we can provide them with good quality.”

Four months after it opened, the Glen Rock restaurant has closed, owner Gene Montanarelli said Monday.

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“I think our food was excellent. I think our price was excellent. For some reason, I just couldn’t get these people to come in,” Montanarelli said.

Montanarelli believed that the restaurant’s proximity to the York County Rail Trail would spur business – and for a time, it did, he said – but when temperatures got colder, business dried up, too.

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“Once the rail trail died off because of the temperatures, I couldn’t draw from the downtown area,” Montanarelli said.

Montanarelli made the decision to close the restaurant on Thanksgiving Eve, and told employees on Friday. The restaurant’s last day was Sunday.

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If he could go back to July, Montanarelli said he would still open the restaurant again, but would do some things differently – like start making pizza earlier and produce more foods to attract a York County diet.

“The people here are very much York countians who enjoy a certain type of food,” Montanarelli said. “We did a short rib meatloaf, but they wouldn’t buy it. The minute it was a hamburger meatloaf, it became popular.”

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He said the restaurant wasn’t turning a profit, and he was losing about $1,000 a week out of pocket. While he feels bad about the lost money, he feels worse for the restaurant’s 12 employees.

“Money means a lot, but people’s lives mean more,” Montanarelli said. “These people have their whole lives ahead of them.”

Anthony J. Machcinski is the food reporter for the York Daily Record. Follow him on Facebook, @ChinskiTweets on Twitter or email him at amachcinski@ydr.com.

Below are photos from when the restaurant opened in July.