Lynde's Restaurant

The story of an historic restaurant where everyone knows your name.

By: Dan Emerson | From the issue: May 2010

Photo: Marshall Franklin Long

Lynde's Restaurant, now in a new and improved facility, is home to many regular customers who use it as a local hangout.

One day several years ago, Mark Lynde was taking contractor estimates to replace the leaky roof on the century-old wooden building in Osseo that housed his family’s business, Lynde’s Restaurant and Catering. “One guy said it would cost $5,000,” Lynde recalls. “I asked him: ‘Don’t you have to measure the building?’ He said that’s what it would cost to bulldoze the place.”

The century-old wooden building on Highway 81—originally a combination grocery store and chicken coop—had housed the Munchkin Eatery when Mark’s parents, Chuck and Jan Lynde, bought the business in 1981. (Before that, it had been called the Brown Derby.) They ran Lynde’s Restaurant and Catering until they retired in 1995, and Mark and his wife, Cathy, bought the business.

For a restaurant with a hallowed tradition of cooking most dishes from scratch, starting from scratch with a new building sounded like a good idea. The Lyndes wound up purchasing adjacent land from a neighboring business, doing a land-swap with the county, and building a new 7,200-square-foot facility on 2.5 acres. The bulldozing finally happened last May, when the new place was ready to open.

The new structure houses the restaurant, catering business, and a landscape maintenance side business the family started back in the 1980s. The new place doubled seating from 78 to 160 seats, with a meeting room available for overflow diners.

While the building has changed, most of the faces remain the same, on both sides of the counter, Mark Lynde says, “In the old restaurant we probably knew 80 to 85 percent of our clientele on a first-name business. Now we know about 50 percent.” And they know some of their regulars’ habits REALLY well. “We know George is going to come in and sit at Counter 2, stool one, at five after 6 a.m. and order the pancakes with eggs on the side. They call it ‘their’ place,” says Lynde. “If we are busy, they get their own coffee.”