Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Mollie’s Bakery is a part of Sweet Home history now.
The longtime Sweet Home eatery, which had gone through two owners in the last three years before it closed last summer, has been renamed Lorene’s Café after being reopened by Henry and Lorene Romandia.
Mollie’s was founded in the 1950s and was purchased by Mollie Andrews in the early 1960s after she worked for the original owners. Andrews ran the bakery, which opened at 2 a.m. on weekdays to serve breakfast to loggers, for some 40 years before selling it. Mollie’s was one of the few bakeries in the central Willamette Valley that made its doughnuts and other baked goods entirely from scratch.
Lorene Romandia has operated Lorene’s Cafe in Lebanon for seven years and also operated a restaurant with that name in Sweet Home for three years until the building, now Sam City, was sold. She had the option to buy it but chose not to.
The couple moved to Sweet Home from Bakersfield, Calif., 19 years ago. Lorene was visiting her brothers, Jim and Joe Ashcraft, and she told Henry, “I’m not coming home” and that he should move to Sweet Home.
He did, and he found out he enjoyed the small-town life away from the bigger city. He worked at Pacific Softwood in Philomath and then Morse Brothers in Sweet Home, Albany and Salem before starting a steam-cleaning service that he operated until the cafe opened last week.
Lorene sold advertising for KFIR for four and a half years and then went to work at the Skyline Inn until she was asked to take over a cafe in Lebanon seven years ago.
“My husband saw the (Mollie’s) building sitting empty and decided he wanted to get into the business,” Lorene said. She told him no, but he bugged her about it for about six months.
Lorene said they aren’t trying to be Mollie’s.
“It’s not Mollie’s,” she said. “It has nothing to do with Mollie. No one can take her place.”
Local cook Calvin Brown had planned to reopen the iconic Mollie’s Bakery last summer, but his plans fell through, opening the way for Lorene’s Cafe.
The Romandias spent the weeks leading up to the opening cleaning and “trying to make everything work as a cafe instead of a bakery,” Henry said. Much of the bakery equipment is stored off to the side, and the kitchen is now wide open. The restaurant had been remodeled prior to its last incarnation as Mollie’s Bakery.
Lorene’s opened on Jan. 3, serving a basic breakfast and lunch menu, omelettes, burgers, bacon and eggs and biscuits and gravy.
“I’ve been doing this since I was 13,” Lorene said. She started out selling fast food at swap meets and then went to work at Denny’s at age 16.
She blames her husband for the fact that she actually owns her own restaurant, though.
“He gets me into a lot of stuff,” she said.
“I just suggested if you’re going to stay in it, buy one,” he said.
Lorene works five days a week at the cafe in Lebanon, located on Sherman Street near Merlin’s, while Henry runs the Sweet Home cafe and will spend seven days a week there. She will spend two days a week at the Sweet Home cafe.
Both cafes are open from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m.
The Romandias say they are happy to be here again.
“We love it,” Lorene said. “It’s nice to see old faces. Half of them would visit me over there. Some of them we didn’t get to see till we came back.”
They employ seven people between the two cafes, and they get a lot of help from family.
They have two daughters, Kristy, 24, and Lora, 21. Lora is working in an internship at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, Nev., at the Emeralds Restaurant where she is a pastry chef.
Kristy works as a waitress with Lorene.
They also have three grandchildren, including the “Little Boss,” Caleb, 5.
He has been helping out at the Sweet Home cafe, Henry said. He even has his own little office complete with computer and TV.