The Menu Said 40 Cents

Adam Hostetter was sure about the hamburger. Fifteen cents. That's what it cost, as he remembered it, when his grandparents opened Wimpy's in Osterville in 1938. It was also the number Wimpy's had been telling people ahead of its farewell.

Then a menu turned up.

It was the oldest one the family could find, and it didn't say 15 cents. Hamburger, 40 cents. Cheeseburger, 50. Hot dog, 30. So the throwback prices for the customer-appreciation day on Tuesday, Oct. 6, changed to match. The regular menu stayed available at regular prices, the Cape Cod Times reported. Nobody picked a round number for a promotion. The advertised prices were whatever the paper said.

Memory is generous with old prices. Paper isn't.

Paper also suits this week, because it's the last week of something most of us have carried around in our heads. Saturday, Oct. 10, is Wimpy's planned last day at 752 Main St. The lease wasn't renewed, and the name is moving to Hyannis.

So why does a restaurant you may not have eaten in for years feel like it's leaving you?

It started with six stools.

In the late 1930s, crews had come to the Cape to install telephone service. They could get breakfast and dinner where they were lodging, according to a 2005 Boston Globe obituary for the founders' son, Vincent Hostetter, preserved online.

Lunch was the problem.

So Raymond and Winnie Hostetter opened a hamburger stand. Wimpy's own history calls it a small hamburger counter. Their son Vincent started working there at 8.

Then Osterville grew, and Wimpy's grew with it, one addition at a time. By 2005, the Globe wrote, you could get anything from filet mignon to seafood there, 362 days a year. Today the restaurant counts more than 200 seats, along with a pub, fireplaces and a seafood market.

Nobody drew that up in 1938. It just never stopped adding a room.

The best part of the story isn't on the sign. When Raymond and Winnie opened, their granddaughter Daphne Bumpus told the Globe, they named the place for Wimpy, the hamburger-loving moocher in the Popeye comic strip. By the spring of 1932, newspaper funnies pages across the country were printing his line: "I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger to-day."

The customer-appreciation farewell landed on a Tuesday.

Hostetter told the Times he picked the day with Cape residents and longtime customers in mind. Nobody has said it was a nod to the cartoon. Still, a restaurant named for a man who never settled his hamburger tab planned its big thank-you around 40-cent hamburgers, on a Tuesday.

Hostetter remembers a lot of lunches at Wimpy's with his grandmother, the Times reported this week. Then he went somewhere else for a while. He raced snowboard giant slalom for the U.S. at the 1998 Nagano Olympics.

In 2017, Hostetter and then-business partner Jeff Lindsey bought the family business back from Karen and Lawrence Siscoe. A Hostetter was behind his grandparents' counter again.

Today he works with a different partner, Adrian Pryshlak. The two also run Fancy's Market in Osterville and The Break on Hyannis Harbor. Hyannis isn't new ground.

When we wrote about the lease in February, Wimpy's was getting ready to leave and still looking for a new home. Extensions carried it through the summer.

The home turned out to be 488 South St. Hostetter and Pryshlak bought The Roadhouse Cafe on Sept. 26. The plan is to merge the two into one restaurant, eventually called Wimpy's Roadhouse, open year-round for lunch and dinner. The new name is pending state approval. Many of the Wimpy's staff are making the move, and the menus are being merged. The Roadhouse's piano bar stays part of the plan.

Last month Hostetter told the Times the goal was to be closed "not quite a week." The owners hope to open in Hyannis by mid-October.

The chowder goes too. It's his grandfather's recipe.

The recipes move. The name moves. A good part of the staff moves. What stays is the building on Main Street.

That's what 88 years in one spot does. A restaurant stops being a restaurant and becomes a direction. Meet me at Wimpy's. Turn after Wimpy's. Grab a chowder from the market at Wimpy's on the way home. Some families came as kids, then brought their own kids, and now bring grandkids through the same door. You don't have to have eaten there last month to notice when that door stops being the one.

Somebody kept that old menu for decades, long after anyone could buy a 40-cent hamburger, because it was true. After Saturday, "turn after Wimpy's" goes in the same box.

The details

Sources: Cape Cod Times (Oct. 4, Sept.); Boston Globe obituary of Vincent Hostetter, 2005 (archived); Wimpy's (Our Story); FIS athlete record, Adam Hostetter (fis-ski.com); Barry Popik, 1932 Thimble Theatre newspaper citations (barrypopik.com); Roadhouse Cafe (roadhousehyannis.com); Celebrate Mid Cape (Feb. 22)