Hungry Beaver Pizza, Wrangell’s longest-running pizza restaurant and part of the Marine Bar, is operating at reduced hours until the owner, Patty Kautz, 78, can hire some help.
Kautz said she can’t maintain her usual pace of work. For the foreseeable future, pizza will be available only during high-demand days: Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, from 5 to 8 p.m.
“I’m 78, I can’t keep doing it,” Kautz said.
The pizza spot was closed for a week before it reopened last Friday. “You talked us into it,” she said on Facebook.
Kautz has owned and operated the Marine Bar and Hungry Beaver Pizza since the early 1980s. She started making pizza in 1983, she said, a couple years after buying the bar. Back then Wrangell didn’t have a pizza restaurant, and after doing some research and buying a recipe she thought it would be a good business opportunity.
“At 16 I started washing dishes and making salads,” Kautz said. “Then they didn’t have a waitress one day and I started waitressing, then they didn’t have a bartender when I turned 21 so I started bartending. It just progressed from there.”
It has been a struggle for her to find workers, Kautz said. Several of her employees work multiple jobs, which limits the amount they can help. Other employees that were recently laid off have decided against returning, too, because they make more money on unemployment benefits, she said.
Kautz invited anyone looking to work in the kitchen to give her a call.
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