Owners of a prominent wining and dining spot in Fairbanks announced Wednesday that the restaurant will close later this month, citing economic uncertainty.
Lavelle’s Bistro has been a fixture downtown for nearly 25 years, serving dinner and drinks out of its location on the ground floor of SpringHill Suites on First Avenue.
Co-owners Kathy Lavelle and Frank Eagle founded the bistro together in 2001. Eagle said they were taking their first orders less than two weeks after 9/11.
“When we opened up 10 days later – although people were still shocked – they now were at least commiserating, and going out, and living life again. And Lavelle’s just took off. We were absolutely packed right from the beginning,” he told KUAC Thursday.
“It’s just been a pleasure serving the Fairbanks community,” he said.
With pricey but elaborate entrees, like honey apple halibut and oven roasted duck, Lavelle’s Bistro has earned a reputation as a go-to place in Fairbanks for date nights or celebratory meals.
Tourism sites and travel blogs often feature the restaurant as one of the top eateries in town. It didn’t place in last year’s Fairbanks Daily News-Miner Readers Choice Awards for fine dining, but the bistro has claimed first place in the category previously.
Lavelle and Eagle were ready to sell the business to the restaurant’s general manager and executive chef so they could retire. But Eagle said a 30% drop in revenue struck between March and April. He said that month-to-month change was at a scale he’d never seen before.
“We’d been at it a long time, and although it’s a labor of love, our love had sort of run out,” he said. “And so we made the mutual decision to just close it.”
The owners’ decision to shutter their bistro echoes the changing attitudes recorded in a pair of statewide surveys administered by the Alaska Small Business Development Center. Those surveys quantified a noticeable decline between late 2024 and early 2025 in business owners’ confidence in financial conditions. They found that, in late 2024, 60% of responding businesses expected good or very good financial conditions; by April 2025, that had fallen to 46%.
Eagle didn’t point to one particular economic factor or policy change as the variable that caused their business calculations to no longer pencil out.
He says the ballot measure voters approved last year increasing Alaska’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2027 and requiring one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked may have posed future hurdles for labor costs. But Eagle attributes the recent plummet in revenue to nationwide economic forces underpinned by Trump administration priorities, like the loss of federal jobs and the initial impact of tariff announcements on the stock market.
“I think people got worried and didn’t want to spend their discretionary monies on going out to eat,” he said. “The restaurant business is a tough business, even in the best of times.”
Lavelle’s Taphouse, which is also in downtown, operates as a separate business under different ownership, and it remains open. The final day Lavelle’s Bistro will be open is May 31.
That will mark at least the second longtime business in or near Downtown Fairbanks to close in recent weeks after Garden Island Deli’s ownership announced they were calling it quits last month.
Garden Island’s last day of business was May 2. The deli, liquor and convenience store had been open for about 60 years, according to its management.