Dining Review: Shady Acres Diner in Foster

This culinary couple shifted from running an over-the-top Providence bistro to leading the simple life at a Foster diner.

February 3, 2025

Karen Deutsch,

Breakfast sandwich with eggs and cheese on an English muffin. Photography by Angel Tucker

Running a restaurant is not for the delicate or weary, nor is it an easy gig for anyone with kids. COVID made more than a few chef/owners reassess their jobs and the number of hours they could work without losing their minds or their families. Even if a restaurant made it through the pandemic somewhat intact, it’s become more common for owners — tired of working twelve-hour shifts — to call it quits when their lease comes up. In the past year alone, the Salted Slate, Broadway Bistro, Hunky Dory and Metacom Kitchen all shut their doors for good.

Chicken and waffles with a vanilla milkshake. Photography by Angel Tucker

The dynamic is familiar to Desi and Eric Wolf, who opened Loie Fuller in 2007 and shut it down in 2020. The pandemic made shifting their highly stylized eatery into a survivalist takeout operation impossible, and hiring new help after most of their team left the service industry was too daunting.

Finding something reliable in the restaurant world seems inherently ironic, but the Wolfs had already set their sights on operating a diner out in Foster, near the Connecticut line, which they bought before the pandemic set in — and before closing Loie’s. (This is not news: When the economy crashes, $10 meals are often the only privilege that people refuse to forfeit.) They had previously moved in 2012 to a 1771 historic farmhouse in Foster on a twenty-five-acre farm abutting another 200-acre farm that they lease.

The diner had been functioning since the ’60s but needed a refresh. The couple began to update the space — just enough to avoid the ire of regulars who were tied to the status quo, while still meeting a twenty- first-century vibe. The result of their work lies directly between deep sincerity and unabashed kitsch. The fifties-style illuminated sign out front says Shady Acres and then, underneath, Apocalypse Cafe.

The retro interior of Shady Acres. Photography by Angel Tucker

The retro exterior of Shady Acres. Photography by Angel Tucker

Both are true. “When everything got shut down, I went online and bought a neon sign that said Apocalypse Cafe and hung it over our takeout window,” Desi says. “It’s pretty much the only reason we were able to stay open.”

Many of the patrons, and much of the menu, are old school: familiar, reassuring and nostalgic. Even the grandfather of the diner’s former owners still comes in two to three times a week. But there’s something slightly tongue-in-cheek about this endeavor as well. Many of the contents of Loie Fuller are housed out back in a Quonset hut, ready in case anyone shows interest in wanting to rebuild it.

In the daylight, Shady Acres reads idyllic; after dark, the wooded picnic tables and baby swings take on a slightly Hitchcockian air as the headlights of cars pass by in the deep night.

It’s this duality that lures in not only diners but the Wolfs as well. Eric and some of his Loie Fuller staff still handle the kitchen while Desi handles the front of house with the help of a manager and a team that is mostly Foster locals. A sixties-era sunrise was painted on the entry wall by the Wolf children and their friends during COVID, and seasonal holiday decor hangs from the ceiling and clings to the walls.

If this was anyone’s first time in a diner, they might think this is the way the great American icon was born: full of eggs and pancakes, with a healthy dose of New England chowder. But Shady Acres also has chicken and waffles, a sixteen-ounce sirloin with homemade steak sauce, and Miller High Life. In other words, this diner isn’t about retooling institutional beliefs, but filling out the edges of a well-established blueprint.

Grilled cheese club sandwich served with a side salad. Photography by Angel Tucker

Dinner is where you’ll find more of the meanderings — Shady Acres closes at 8 p.m., so, like in all good diners, meals should be taken early. There are requisite club sandwiches (including a grilled cheese club which seems long overdue) and meatloaf and mashed potatoes, as well as burgers and fries. A popular burger is covered in queso and thick fried pickles sandwiched between a soft white bun.

This should tell you something about the Wolfs’ willingness to tinker with tradition: If Providence’s Frank & Laurie’s has set out to entirely rewrite the script of casual American dining, then Shady Acres is simply colorizing the original black and white film. The tuna salad of yesteryear is now a rare ahi tuna steak with ginger dressing; croutons are made from fried polenta; fries are a holdover from Loie Fuller and topped with mushroom gravy and cheddar. You can, however, still get yourself a five-dollar hotdog with fries or chips, or the increasingly rare relic of the past, a baked potato.

The irony here is that Desi Wolf is a pescatarian, serving up a menu that excludes her on a regular basis. But, in the case of nearly all old-school diners, the central focus is not on proving anything about the owners or the person manning the kitchen. It’s always about maintaining a cultural moment, a culinary photograph that is fully preserved, impervious to shifts in time or technology.

So while there might not be cutting-edge creativity in the perennially popular marriage of eggs and cheese, there’s a reason that the combination endures through every age. Here, they are piled onto toast or English muffins — bagels strike a tone that’s too New York or at least too contemporary for this spot. Pancakes and waffles are double dosed with ice cream or bananas and caramel but, for the most part, the till 2 p.m. breakfast menu feels like it could be locked in a time capsule to capture the most enduring American meal of the last hundred years. Will home fries and buttered toast change the world? No. Do we still want to eat them in an unpretentious dining room that looks almost exactly as it did when we were kids? Absolutely.

Clam chowder and a cup of coffee will keep you warm on a winter day. Photography by Angel Tucker

Perhaps it’s only fitting that the Wolfs — capable of running a modern restaurant in the city — would choose to devote their attention to something in the restaurant world that’s less poetic and more prose-oriented. After all, America’s prototype for what became the diner was a wagon selling sandwiches on the streets of Rhode Island a hundred and fifty years ago. It’s clearly a concept that we have no intention of giving up and it reminds even food critics that, sometimes, we just want to eat without deconstructing the plate in front of us.

It’s true that there may be something relentlessly retro about Shady Acres. Maybe
it’s the location, right next to the Stone House Motor Lodge. Maybe it’s the counter seating where you can drink a straight-up coffee — nothing foamed or steamed, and definitely with cow’s milk.

What’s certain is that we’ll never lose our affection for a counter-top meal that won’t cost more than $20 and that will always bring us back to a place we sat in before our feet could touch the ground. Or as Desi Wolf puts it, “Loie Fuller was a serious endeavor. Shady’s allows us to not take ourselves so seriously.”

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