Geppettos

345 East Main - 541-482-1138

Geppettos takes a fresh breath!

After 33 years running one of Ashland’s favourite icons, Ron Roth and Kathleen McNeil

have turned over the Geppettos reins to their one-time chef / kitchen manager

John Trapp and his wife, Tiffany Runyan. 

John and Tiffany are preserving Geppettos neighborhoody feel, and the family-friendliness

is reinforced  as their boys, - Parker, 10, and Dakota, 13 - pitch in to help wait and

bus tables, get drinks, etc. 

There are indeed menu changes in the air, pairing back some of the non-specialty items in

favour of what the place excels at (isn’t that one of the first things Gordon Ramsey does

when he’s helping a restaurant get it’s mojo back - cut the menu by half and focus on

what’s perfectly executed?), but never fear: locals favourites, such as the eggplant burgers

and those wonderfully gooey wontons, are safe from the axe! 

I got a chance to talk with John between lunch and dinner shifts the other day ... about

his commitment to bringing Geppettos back to it’s heyday - a time when it was the go-to

place for everything from weekend breakfasts to coffee and pie with a friend to the place

you took out-of-town guests for dinner.  Sourcing locally (Trapp shops the local farms,

buys his meats from Emerson and grains from Eagle Mill), making as much of his menu

as possible in-house from scratch (for the record, it’s about 95%:  the only thing he doesn’t

make on site are the sesame buns for his burgers), and more personalized service are just

some of the things he hopes will draw back locals who have over time drifted away.

The restaurant biz in general and Ashland in specific can be a tough gig for those just starting

out, so I had to ask:  Why Ashland?  Trapp’s answer put a smile on my face.  “Ashland’s pretty restaurant-friendly”, he told me, citing an atmosphere of support for good places to eat,

“but really, it’s the community - the people here.  I’ll tell you a little story:  When we first

opened, we didn’t have a Visa machine for like our first three weeks.  Now, you know that’s

how 80% of people pay these days- credit or debit cards - but I just wasn’t able to process them. 

So I’d tell them, ‘You can just come back and pay me later’.  By the time I got the machine

set up, I had a stack of tickets about this (two inches) thick, but do you know every single one

of those people came back and paid me.  I even had a guy call to tell me his bill had been

about $40 but we made a mistake and only charged him $5.  He sent us a check for the rest. 

I love that about the people here.”

“What we do here is down-home, unpretentious cooking.  People come in dressed up

sometimes, sure, if they’re out for the night, but they come in with cut-off jeans, too,

and they all feel at home here”. 

Geppettos is currently running a $5 burger basket special for lunch (that, by the way, includes the aforementioned eggplant burgers, as well as the tofu and veggie and - oh yeah - meat burgers!)