After three incredible seasons, our time operating Embers at Hillside has officially come to an end.

When Wesley and I took over Embers three years ago, we could never have imagined what it would become or how much this little campground café would come to mean to us.

We are grateful to Eric, who helped transform Embers from a simple campground food stand and introduced many of the ideas, including dinner specials, that we were fortunate enough to build upon.

Most importantly, we want to thank our staff.

We have been incredibly fortunate to work with a group of people we genuinely like, respect, and are proud to call our friends. You bought into some of our crazy ideas, tolerated the ones that probably should have stayed ideas, worked through some absolutely insane weekends, and helped us figure things out as we went.

You also understood something that was always important to us: Embers was supposed to be part of the Hillside experience, not something that kept any of us from enjoying it. Sometimes that meant closing early for an event, changing hours, or deciding that being together and having fun was more important than making a few more dollars.

Thank you for trusting us enough to come along for the ride. Everything we’re proud of at Embers, we accomplished together.

To our customers, thank you.

You trusted us with a small part of your vacations, weekends, celebrations, and traditions. Many of you became familiar faces and friends we genuinely looked forward to seeing each week. Your support allowed us to do far more with Embers than we ever imagined when we started this journey three seasons ago.

Since the season ended, so many of you have taken the time to stop us, thank us for the food, share what Embers meant to you, and tell us how much you enjoyed having us there. Some of you have invited us to spend time at your sites next season, and others have even invited us to visit during the off-season. We would be remiss if we did not acknowledge just how much those words, invitations, and expressions of friendship have meant to us.

What started as customers coming to Embers for dinner, breakfast, coffee, ice cream, or chicken tenders became something much more meaningful. We made friendships. We got to know people beyond their orders and their campsite numbers, and many of those friendships are ones we hope will continue long after our time at Embers.

We hope we gave you more than a good meal. We hope some of the memories you made at Embers became part of the memories you’ll carry with you from Hillside. The kindness so many of you have shown us as this chapter has come to an end has only reinforced how fortunate we were to have this experience in the first place.

We would also like to thank Bill, Wayne, and the entire Hillside staff. Operating a seasonal business inside another business requires cooperation from many people, often behind the scenes. We appreciate the opportunity we were given three years ago and the support we received along the way. We wish everyone at Hillside continued success in the years ahead.

Looking back, we have a lot to be thankful for and a lot of great memories from these past three seasons. Most of those memories have very little to do with food and everything to do with the people we met along the way.

There were busy dinner rushes, late nights, special events, ridiculous ideas that somehow worked, plenty of laughs, and more chicken tenders and French fries than we could possibly count. But what we will remember most are the people.

To everyone who worked with us, supported us, stopped by for a meal, shared a conversation, brought friends back the next weekend, or simply made Embers part of your time at Hillside, thank you for an amazing three seasons.

We are incredibly grateful for what this experience gave us and for everyone who was part of it.

Shawn & Wesley

P.S. Now that our final season at Embers has officially ended, we can finally confirm that the staff’s relentless attempts to unionize had absolutely nothing to do with our decision. Or onionize. We’re still not entirely sure which one they were trying to do — and we are pretty sure that don’t know either.