One of Haines’ few year-round restaurants closes
- Chilkat Valley News
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
Owner of Alpenglow Woodfired Pizza points to costs, landlord cites unpaid rent; alcohol license effort halted
By Rashah McChesney
Chilkat Valley News
On March 30, Alpenglow Woodfired Pizza – one of Haines’ few year-round restaurants – announced it would be closing its doors.In a social media video, owner Nolan Woodard said the restaurant would close for the week but open one final time on Saturday for a combined three-year anniversary and goodbye party.
The move came after the building owner posted a lease nonrenewal notice on the building, giving the business a month to vacate – bringing the breakdown in negotiations between Woodard and landlord Chris Thorgesen into public view.
Woodard shared a proposed lease with the Chilkat Valley News that contained provisions he called untenable: like one requiring him to carry a $1 million insurance policy on the building, removing a 48-hour notice requirement for entry, and allowing the landlord to seize equipment within 15 days if he fell behind on rent or violated the lease.
“I basically said to him that I don’t feel comfortable signing an agreement that gives you the right to basically take away things that would disrupt the operation of my business.”
Woodard said he understands repercussions for deferred payments, but “if the punishment for not paying you is something that disrupts the flow of me being able to operate my business, then I can’t pay you,” he said. “That would sink us.”
The lease dispute accelerated a decision Woodard said he was already weighing, as the restaurant has operated at a loss each year, since he bought it in 2023.
Community reaction
The closure drew strong reactions in the community. Local restaurant owner and Haines Chamber of Commerce president Travis Kukull called the lease terms unethical and compared the arrangement to sharecropping in a post on Substack.
In the post, Kukull wrote that landlords hold disproportionate power in small markets with limited commercial space. “The landlord, on the other hand, risks very little, pays no wages, and takes most of the harvest.”
Kukull wrote that he thinks the best lease agreements are those that include the tenant’s success and are mutually beneficial. He suggested things like landlords providing funding for tenant improvements and rent being set as a percentage of business sales.
Thorgesen commented on the post, disputing Kukull’s characterization of events and arguing that landlords also carry financial risk.
He wrote that he does not normally “concern myself with the thoughts of sheep,” but felt compelled to respond given Kukull’s role as Chamber president.
“You say, ‘a small, independent business like Alpenglow cannot and should never take on the risk.’ Then why should a small independent landlord? Your inherent Marxism blinds you to any true win-win relationships so long as one is the bourgeoisie,” Thorgesen wrote.
He also disputed the idea that the landlord is offering nothing in this situation.
“Why don’t you go and buy a crappy building spend an exorbitant amount of money fixing it up, another small fortune in throwing away the trash that had been built up for decades, and fight with bureaucratic middle-managers who don’t know the difference between bologna and mayonnaise, only so you can let someone else use your building with no recoupment of costs,” he wrote.
In an email to the Chilkat Valley News on Wednesday, Thorgesen did not agree to an interview or address the specific lease provisions Woodard objected to. But wrote that Nolan’s three-year lease ended on the last day of March.
“As of today, Nolan owes me $10,262.10 in back rent,” he said. “When you don’t pay your rent, people tend not to rent to you.”
A difficult financial situation
Woodard said the lease disagreement was the immediate trigger, but that the last few years have been increasingly financially precarious.
While his gross sales have gone up year over year, he has been struggling financially – for one thing, costs have gone up.
“A simple example is that when I first started this business, my flour was $70-80 a bag. It’s now over $100. So I spend, on average, $300-500 a week on flour.”
The demand hasn’t kept up, he said. “I’ve had days of summer, I’m not even kidding, where we have had $250 in sales the whole day. It doesn’t even offset the cost of the dough.”
He’s had to rely on flexible payment arrangements with vendors, gone through periods where he couldn’t pay his staff, and said he has fallen behind on the rent.
Former owner Olen Larson said the outcome was genuinely surprising.
“Myself and my wife doing the cooking, my wife doing the prep, me doing the books and a dishwasher. We made that survive for the three years we owned the business and we still came out on top. We were in the green,” he said. “Yes, I saw my challenges of course – wintertime being the hardest due to the lack of tourism and lack of year-round residents.”
When they sold the business to Woodard, the couple retained a 25% minority ownership and acted as advisors from afar.
When they sold the business to Woodard, the couple retained a 25% minority ownership.
“It must have been inflation and the economy starting to turn. I’m not too familiar with what started driving the business down as far as numbers go,” he said.
Larson said he doesn’t know what caused the breakdown over the lease negotiations to occur but called a nearly 10-year run of a pizza restaurant in one place in Haines incredible.
Larson said he would check in with Woodard every few months and said he never heard anything negative other than that the winter months were slow.
“My wife and I wanted to be able to support him and the crew as much as possible so we kind of deferred payments and kept pushing payments back and back to where it would allow him to use those funds to continue to have the cash flow into the business and keep it alive.”
Now, he said, the couple is focused on helping Woodard navigate the debt, liquidation, and closure of the business.
The fallout
As more details about the situation became clear, particularly the revelation that Woodard owed thousands in back rent, some early reactions began to shift.
Kukull said he initially read Thorgesen’s lease proposal as more of an eviction notice. “Nobody in their right mind would propose this,” he said.
But, he said restaurant closures are rarely driven by a single issue. Rather, they come from a combination of financial strain, operating costs and timing.
“All of a sudden, it just spins out of control and before you know it, you’re just scrambling to cover your ass in every direction, asking people for favors you shouldn’t be asking for,” he said.
In this specific case, he said he didn’t think people should go around looking to lay blame on any one person and that he wants people to read his column as a place where he’s advocating for a small business owner to review their leases and fight for their best case scenarios.
“I have sympathy for [Thorgesen] as a property owner. I don’t know all of the problems he has with all of his businesses and leases. But if something’s not working for him and it’s not working for [Woodard], can we try to figure out a different option here?” he said.
In hindsight, Kukull said, he could have offered to mediate a discussion between Woodard and Thorgesen. It could have gotten more people in the community talking about how to create a more small-business-friendly environment in Haines.
“Stories like this are detrimental and they don’t make people want to move here, they don’t make people want to try to open a small business. It just stops everything,” he said.
Woodard said people have asked him if he would move the restaurant into another building, including two vacant commercial buildings on Main Street.
But, he’s looked at a few and at least one needed extensive repair before he’d be able to open. “I don’t have $100,000 of repair money,” he said.
He’s considering his options and the future is uncertain.
“I still owe a lot of people a lot of money,” he said. “I’m not fully out yet. I still have some irons in the fire. But the way it’s currently looking, the most likely occurrence … we will liquidate the business, recoup as much as we can in terms of costs with that and then from there, make the final decision on whether or not I have to file bankruptcy. I’m trying to avoid that, but also be realistic about the fact that it might be our only option.”
A loss for the town
One of the darkest parts of the closure of Alpenglow is that Woodard was within sight of getting a beer and wine license.
He spent the past two years working to get a beer and wine license, pushing the issue through borough meetings and state hearings before the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board approved two more licenses for Haines in February of 2025.
Those licenses became available March 1, 2025 and Woodard said finalizing a lease was the last step needed to move forward with his application and get it in front of the licensing board this month.
Without the lease, that effort stops short. While it would not have guaranteed success, it could have provided some breathing room, particularly during the slow winter months.
“All of that work he’s done over the last few years is basically trash,” Kukull said. “To put that much effort into anything and he didn’t see any benefit for himself … I hope everybody’s pissed.”
• This story originally appeared in the Chilkat Valley News. The Chilkat Valley News rents office space from Chris Thorgesen and has maintained a commercial advertising trade relationships with both Thorgesen and Alpenglow Woodfired Pizza.
