Lynn eatery to hit quarter century mark

LYNN – Come Friday Richard Ford will be celebrating not only the luck of the Irish but a winning streak of his own as The Little River Inn turns 25.”It’s like it went from five years to 25 like I fell asleep,” he said. “I can’t believe it’s been that long.”Unless you are familiar with the area one might not recognize the tiny breakfast joint because it has no sign. Ford jokes that he lost his sign years ago and while he keeps meaning to replace it, he hasn’t yet.Pass by on a Saturday morning, however, and it’s easy to see why he doesn’t need one. Customers, many of whom have been coming for years, line up around the corner waiting patiently to get in.”It’s all word of mouth,” Ford said.It’s also recognizable to locals with it’s red, white and blue American flag paint job. Ford said they painted the place a few years ago as a lark with the intentions of painting over it a few months later. Customers, however, loved the look and it’s stuck.The name also raises questions from those not native to the area.Ford said he named the restaurant Little River Inn because the playground behind the place, now called Battery Park, was called Little River when his father was young.”And Little River runs right under us,” he said. “It runs underground from Flax Pond to the Saugus River.”Ford was working at General Electric in 1986 when he got the idea to try his hand with a restaurant but all he wanted to cook was breakfast.”I always loved to cook breakfast,” he said.The City Councilor said he had grown up in the Boston Street neighborhood playing ball in Battery Park. The restaurant in those days, he said, was an apartment that housed an ongoing card game. When the card game got broken up Ford said he asked the owner, an old friend, if he could try his hand as a restaurateur.”I think my wife would say she was not optimistic,” he said with a laugh.Linda Ford blamed her mother-in-law for Richard’s obsession with breakfast.”His mother made him bacon and eggs every day,” she said. “My mother was Poptarts and cereal. When he said he was opening a breakfast place I said ‘yeah, right.'”Linda Ford said she kept on questioning her husband’s plans throughout the construction right up until the day they opened. It was shortly thereafter, she said, she found herself taking orders and waiting on tables, which, much to her chagrin, 25 years later she is still doing.She works alongside Sue Timpani and Julie Strong, whom the Fords said have been with them since the beginning.The walls of the tiny breakfast joint read like a scrapbook. They are covered with pictures of sporting teams the Fords have sponsored over the years and those they have simply spoiled with pancake breakfasts and spaghetti dinners. There are also shots of professional athletes who have stopped by, including one of Ford in his minor league baseball playing days.Ford said he used to get mad at his wife because she had a tendency to give food away to the kids who would come in but Linda Ford told him it would pay off in the end and it did. Linda said those kids now come back at holidays and in the summer when they’re home from college and older ones come back with families of their own to eat.That kind of loyalty makes up much of their customer base. Richard Ford said you might not think a lot of people get up at 5 a.m. but they have a steady stream of lobstermen, GE workers, early bird golfers and locals from the neighborhood who fill the restaurant daily from 5 a.m. to noon.”Every day but Christmas,” said Linda Ford.Ford said they have no big plans for Friday, the actual anniversary of the restaurant’s opening, but Sunday, March 20 the couple will host a buffet dinner next door at the Old Tyme Restaurant from 4 to 7 p.m. and Richard Ford said all their friends, fans and customers are invited to stop by and help them celebrate.”We’ll do it again in another 25,” Richard Ford joked. “I won’t be here but we’ll have a party anyway.”