Dotty is retiring from the cafe

If you want one last omelette or fried chicken from Dotty’s Cafe, you have just a few final days before Dotty leaves her grill for retirement.

Dotty Manns, now in her 70s, who has been a fixture in her restaurant in Hartsburg since the mid-1990s, says that her health will no longer allow her to cook and run the restaurant on a regular basis, so she sold it to Jim and Cindy Nilges.

“They will come in and re-vamp the restaurant and be open Sept. 1,” Dotty said. “I’m sure they will do well.”

Dotty said she will have a sale of her restuarant’s memorabillia – collected momentos from Hartsburg and Southern Boone – on August 3rd. More details of the sale will be available in an upcoming edition of the Journal.

Dotty and her husband, Jerry Manns, built the current Dotty’s Restaurant in 2006. Before that she worked in the restaurant business as a server at Denny’s on Providence Road in Columbia and, after living nine years in the Warrenton area, as the Denny’s catering director. She was hired in that same position at the Holiday Inn.

Dotty says she has enjoyed working in the food service industry, especially meeting the wide variety of customers, often brought in by the Katy Trail.

But owning a restaurant, Dotty agrees, is as much of a lifestyle as it is a job.

~ Get more of this story in today’s Journal ~

By Bruce Wallace