Quick Pickins sold: Downtown deli will yield to Groovy Grub

The Sun, Lowell, Mass.

Oct. 31--LOWELL -- After nearly 14 years of slinging mostly soups and sandwiches, Bob Barker last week handed the keys of his Quick Pickins deli on Merrimack Street to Katie Kelley.

He'd watched in June as a deal with another buyer went sour as a dill pickle at the 11th hour.

People reassured Barker and his wife, Nicole, that the "right" buyer would come along.

She did, in August. Kelley, a petite redhead from Tewksbury with a winning smile, walked in. She'd peered into the closed deli-sandwich shop the previous night.

"I hear the place is for sale," she said. "Yup," Barker said, once-bitten. "You going under or anything?" "Nope."

Actually, the tendonitis in his knees and ankles was bothering him. His doctor told him getting up at 3:30 a.m. and working long days wasn't helping.

Barker, a cook for three decades who worked at UMass Lowell's Fox Hall and Lowell General Hospital before buying Quick Pickins in 1994, looked back at the young woman.

"Then I'll buy your place," she said.

She signed the papers a week ago. Last weekend, Kelley, 25, whose restaurant experience is a 10-year stint as a waitress at Vic's Waffle House in Tewksbury, began to make the place her own. Her family pitched in.

Some of the colorful old booth seats from Skip's Restaurant moved in. Colorful funky vases line the window sill. The walls are shades of green, including a lime shade borrowed from the Brady Bunch palette. New art on the walls.

A 2001 graduate of Shawsheen Valley Technical High School and a 2005 graduate of Worcester State with a bachelor's degree in health education -- and, not unimportantly, a minor in art -- Kelley quit Vic's last week. By then she'd already bought a book on starting your own business, and had crafted a business plan, hammered out spread sheets and seen the folks at Enterprise bank about a loan.

"People look at me like I'm crazy," says Kelley. "We're in a depression, they say, and you're buying a place now? I figure, it's the perfect time. Microsoft started when things weren't good, and things can only go up."

Barker, 51, has stayed on to help, no charge, through the transition, as has his wife.

It will be gradual. But as they say in politics, change is coming. Smoothies, burgers (including a veggie), a beefed-up breakfast menu, with waffles, omelets, burritos and a chewy delight known as Granny's Breakfast Bar, crafted from Kelley's grandmother's recipe. Whole grains and flax seeds will arrive, as will a $1 menu.

Kelley says the name will change, too, in January, to Groovy Grub, and the hours -- now 6 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, will stretch to 6-4 weekdays, except Thursday, when it will be open until 9 p.m. She is adding weekend hours, 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays.

"I'll sleep when I'm old," she says.

"It's been a deli for 14 years and that's what made it popular. I'm going to keep the same stuff, but add stuff to the menu. You can always improve things, and I want to attract kids from the colleges on both sides of me, UMass Lowell and Middlesex."

The ideas flow. A bulletin board for community events and services, perhaps an acoustic night, eventually, and sales of homemade jewelry.

For this Bob Barker, more than the price was right.

"People said after the first deal fell through that it wasn't meant to be, something better will come along," says Barker, who is soft-spoken and friendly. "And there you go. Katie appreciates the place and is working hard at it. If anybody can make a go of it, it's her."

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