Buddy’s Diner will be back in business in September 2027, said Nicole Bairos, the owner of the vintage Worcester Lunch Car that’s been serving breakfast, burgers and good cheer to Somervillians since 1951.
The 1929 classic train-car-style diner at 113 Washington St., East Somerville, shut three years ago because of a ruinous plumbing problem requiring repairs that seemed beyond Bairos’ means.
It’s a grim moment for diner food in Cambridge and Somerville, and plumbing is blamed in each of three shutdowns: At Buddy’s; at the Rosebud in Davis Square, where owners blamed a plumbing problem on an abrupt closing in mid-May, and on Tuesday must explain that to the Licensing Commission; and at Charlie’s Kitchen in Cambridge’s Harvard Square, where a crowdsourcing page set up Jan. 29 explained that “a catastrophic leak and extensive water damage” has closed it until further notice. As of Monday, the Charlie’s campaign has raised $23,489 of its hoped-for $26,000 to support staff and make major repairs.
Of the three, Buddy’s is the one to start lining up for.
“People need to know that the ball is rolling, things are going to be fixed and that we hope to be reopened in spring of next year,” Bairos said in a Wednesday call. She amended that opening to the next September in case spring was overly optimistic: “It’s going to take a little while,” she said, because while the plumbers are at work she plans to empty the diner completely. “I need to get new equipment, new everything. Everything’s so old there, so everything has to be trashed.”
When Buddy’s reopens its doors, there will be fewer items on the breakfast menu but a new things for lunch – more Portuguese food – and later hours with a liquor license, if all goes to plan. “I want to basically turn it into a Portuguese cafe, like they have in my mom’s village in Portugal or my dad’s village in Santa Maria,” Bairos said. (Mom and dad ran the Portuguese American fish market on Broadway, where Bairos worked as a kid.)
Never fear: “We will still have our homemade corned beef hash that’s everybody loves,” Bairos said.
Bairos bought Buddy’s in 2006 at 22, paying around $210,000. The plumbing problems began in 2021, she said. Reopening will take around $270,000, which she is making up in grants and a $100,000 crowdsourcing campaign that, as of Monday, had raised $25,573 thanks to a spate of recent publicity. “I still have a long road ahead,” she said.
It was more complicated and slower than she hoped to take advantage of a $74,000 Community Preservation Act grant, which Buddy’s applied for last year with the help of the East Somerville Main Streets organization.
“At first I was like, I’m going to put the place back up for sale, this takes too long,” Bairos said. “But they reached out to me last week, and everything’s good to go.” Funds will be released in the next two weeks, and the contractor is ready to go, she said. In the interim, she’s applied for more grants for the restoration.
She spent the first year Buddy’s was closed suing a utility company she blamed for the sewage disaster. When she ran out of money, she represented herself, and the case got tossed out, she said. While she hopes to revive the case, there have been other blows: she lost her insurance, and her son’s father died in March. Collecting his annuity at least allows her to share the summer with her son in the family home on Spring Hill next to St. Catherine of Genoa Parish – “sitting on my porch like an old lady” – before going back to serving and bartending until Buddy’s is able to open.
She’s seen people wondering online about the fate of Buddy’s and conjecturing that the reason for delay is her – that she took the money and ran. But the grant money does not come to or through her, she said. She’s considering making a scrapbook of receipts to keep at the diner so people can “see where every dollar went.”
But those cynics are few, and Bairos said she has far more people to thank, including: East Somerville Main Streets for grant help; Matthew Dickey, the Instagrammer who drew attention to the diner and led to a bump in donations; and mayor Jake Wilson, city councilor Matt McLaughlin and Roberta Cameron, the city’s Community Preservation Act manager.
“Right now there’s tons of attention, and it’s so helpful,” Bairos said. “Listen, I’m good at serving customers, I’m a good cook, but I’ve been doing this since I was 22 on my own and when it comes to asking for help, I’m terrible. If all these people didn’t come forward, I would never be where I am.”
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