Duke's Lazy Loggerhead Cafe served its final meal. Why the Jupiter landmark closed

JUPITER — When Duke’s Lazy Loggerhead Café announced its impending closure this month, Jupiter residents rallied around the restaurant to save it. Loyal customers started two online petitions to keep it open. Many residents became angry with the town over the close, fighting for it to stay on the beach at Carlin Park.

"We just want people to understand that we're grateful for their support," Jennifer Wilson said Wednesday. "We couldn't make it work. We never intended for this to snowball."

And so the Lazy Loggerhead served its final meals on Friday, 25 years after it opened at the Jupiter beachfront park.

Details of lease led to restaurant owners' decision to close Loggerhead Cafe

Wilson and her husband, Brian, the Jupiter couple who own and operate the beachfront breakfast and lunch café, say the town of Jupiter isn’t the problem. They’ve actually received nothing but support from Jupiter officials.

The issue, according to the Wilsons, is that Palm Beach County is asking for the owners to take on more liability and higher rent in their 10-year lease renewal contract. Their rent is already about $6,000 more expensive each month than it was when they opened.

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"For 25 years, we've had the same contract, year after year," Brian Wilson said. "But the rent, basically, would always go up a little. And now there's a minimum rent. … And there's probably a dozen other things in there.

"You have to be open 365 days a year, with a minimum amount of hours. They started a new thing saying we are responsible for a 75-foot perimeter of the building now, which includes bathrooms and showers (at the beach access that Duke's is on). Also, after the pandemic, this industry has had a complete paradigm shift."

Palm Beach County's director of parks and recreation takes issue with the idea that the county forced the Lazy Loggerhead to close. He said the Wilsons should be "ashamed of themselves" for allowing misinformation to spread online.

Eric Call noted that the Wilsons submitted a bid for their space and were awarded a contract. But they decided to negotiate terms of the contract after the bid, raising concerns that Call says were not brought up in the bidding process and arose too late to address.

The county will look for another restaurant company to provide meals in the 60-year-old space, Call said.

According to the Wilsons, they didn't bring up contract issues during the bidding process because they were nervous that they'd lose out to another bidder on their space if they came in with a laundry list of contract changes before winning the bid.

After the couple won, they said they tried to negotiate their complaints, but it was too late for the county to budge. They decided that they couldn't afford to follow through with re-leasing on Palm Beach County's terms, according to the Wilsons.

"I think it was June. We sent probably a dozen points of things we'd love to negotiate in the contract and change," Brian Wilson said. "Finally, I think like two or three weeks later, we got a letter back from them. And it was like two pages, three paragraphs of things we would ask to be changed and reasons why.

"And the reply for almost everything was two words: cannot agree. … You'd expect a little more give and take than 'cannot agree.' Two words."

'This place, our employees and a lot of our customers have become our extended family'

But the couple isn't looking to be saved by anyone, or try to negotiate with the county anymore. They already tried to do that, and they've decided to bow out. The Wilsons have had their skirmish with the county; they weren't looking for soldiers to show up to the front.

"They didn't want to negotiate," Jennifer Wilson said.

The couple says the outpouring of local support and media frenzy in the cafe's last week has drowned out their main message. The Wilsons say they didn't mean to send out a distress call. They just wanted to thank their customers, employees and families for two and one-half decades of support.

"This place, our employees and a lot of our customers have become our extended family," Brian Wilson said. "I'm not surprised there was some pushback because it's such a family atmosphere. And what we really wanted to do is just thank our family, thank our friends and thank our staff."

The community's support this week has been telling of what the restaurant has meant to residents and snowbirds alike for the last quarter century. The Lazy Loggerhead Café's customer base is all word-of-mouth business. Brian and Jennifer barely post on Instagram, they don't like Facebook and they rarely ever update their website. When the Lazy Loggerhead Instagram does get a new post, it isn't Brian or Jennifer behind it. The couple has no figurative podium to rally troops from, except for the one that their customers have created for them.

"We just wanted to say thank you, and we don't do Facebook," Jennifer Wilson said. "There's no marketing budget. There's no advertising. But we haven't needed it. We've been really lucky."

The Wilsons are closing the chapter of their life that gave them a family. The couple never had any kids of their own. But they've supported a small staff of mostly college students looking to stay out of debt during their studies, which has given them a different kind of family.

"We've had a handful of young women that come to work for us while they go to school and work on their careers," Brian Wilson said.

"Two of them just got their Master's degrees recently. One of them ended up graduating from Yale. There's another one that just recently graduated with her MBA. We've gotten attached to those kids a lot. One of them, her name is Allie, we'd like to thank her. Because we didn't have kids, and she made me feel like a girl dad."

The staff is what is concerning the Wilsons now. With tears in her eyes, Jennifer explained that their close-knit team of the 10 employees will have to look for work elsewhere.

"It's not just about the Wilsons," Jennifer Wilson said. "What about the other 10 people who work here that don't have a job anymore? It takes a village to make a restaurant run."

Staff writer Mike Diamond contributed to this story.

Lianna Norman covers Northern Palm Beach County for the Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at lnorman@pbpost.com. You can follow her reporting on social media @LiannaNorman on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Loggerhead Café in Jupiter closing after 25 years in Carlin Park