Bryan Williams saw danger on the horizon back in February.
Williams and his wife, Janice Keller-Williams, own Keller Feed and Wine Co. in downtown Cottonwood Falls, where they serve Southern Italian and soul food half a block from the historic Chase County Courthouse.
“I could see it was going to be weird,” Williams said of the pandemic. “I’m a hippy dippy liberal, which shouldn’t mean anything, but I took a different position than some: safety first.”
They shut down the buffet, closed the dining room and switched to carry-out just a couple of weeks ahead of St. Patrick’s Day.
I was talking with Williams for the same reason I recently spoke with Heather Horton at Toast in Pittsburg and Karla Fleming of Sweden Creme in Mankato: With restaurants among the industries heaviest hit by COVID-19, I’ve been fact-checking politicians who say their party is the only one saving small businesses.
Williams grew up in small-town Missouri before going to boarding school and living in a couple of big cities on the East Coast. He ended up in Kansas City, working at Lidia’s Italian restaurant, owning a Mexican restaurant in Prairie Village and promoting the Kansas City T-Bones. It was in Kansas City where he met Janice, who had grown up in Cottonwood Falls, and the two vacationed there.
“I started to fall in love with this place and looking for a way to move here,” he said. “We’d go up and down the street and she’d say, ‘That’s where the grocery store was. That’s where the dress shop was.’ ”
Their route involved a couple of years in Emporia, where Williams restored and ran the Granada Theatre and Janice worked in fundraising, but they finally made it to Cottonwood Falls.
“When we moved here, everything had closed,” Williams said. “Pizza Hut had closed, the truck stop had shut down.”
Ad Astra Food and Drink, a cool gastro-pub in nearby Strong City, also had closed, though it would later re-open.
Keller Feed and Wine is in a unique position, Williams said. Janice has a good job, and the restaurant’s building is paid off.
“This restaurant is a love letter to the community,” he explained. “We just want to be part of the community and do good. I had some really stressful jobs for a long time. I’m 47 and feel like I’m 63. We just wanted to truck along and do all the fun things she did as a kid.”
Besides closing the dining room, he said, “We were buying Netflix rental codes and giving them to people here to convince them to stay home.”
He also had several hundred DVDs and Blu-Rays at home.
“My daughter started a free video rental — people could take them and bring them back or not, we didn’t care,” he said. “It was a fun little project for her.”
