It’s been a Deli-ght!

On a cool Autumn morning in Deloraine, Barb Harvey and Grant Ward sit in the business they have shaped over nearly three decades, surrounded by the timber and handmade fittings that Grant fashioned himself across many late nights after trade. The coffee machine hisses. A regular ducks in, waves, and finds their usual seat without interruption. It is a small scene, unremarkable to anyone who doesn’t know the history, but on 13 June the Deloraine Deli will serve its last meal, and scenes like this will belong to memory.

For the Meander Valley community, it is not simply the end of a business. It is the end of an institution that, by the account of those who shaped it, helped define what kind of town Deloraine has become.

Harvey and Ward bought the deli on 1 September 1997. It was then a modest coffee shop two doors up from the newsagency on Emu Bay Road, with a small deli cabinet and little else. The couple had spent years working long hours across hospitality jobs in the region and had come to a simple conclusion. “We needed to buy a job,” Ward says. “We thought we needed to be doing this for us.”

The business plan they wrote in those early weeks was quickly scrapped. Customers came faster than they had anticipated, and the two owners found themselves going home after service to do the accounts, baking cakes through the night and occasionally falling asleep mid-task. “I’d burn the cake and feed it to the chooks in the morning,” Harvey says, “and then we’d have an empty cake cabinet.” They hired help quickly, and the business kept growing. Over its lifetime, the deli has employed 21 people.

Ward credits some of the early momentum to something that now seems obvious but was then genuinely novel. He noticed that people in Deloraine wanted outdoor dining, like they had seen in Melbourne and Sydney. There was nowhere in town doing it. He began buying director’s chairs and fold-up tables from the hardware store, two at a time, placing them on the footpath as demand grew. “Someone would walk past and go, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t mind sitting out there having a coffee,’ ” he recalls, “so up I went and got another couple of chairs.”

It sounds incremental, almost accidental, but the footpath dining at the old Deloraine Deli location is credited as something that helped change the character of the town’s main street. Other businesses began putting their wares outside. More cafes followed. When Meander Valley Council undertook streetscaping works, the architect consulted Harvey and Ward directly about Deloraine’s outdoor dining requirements.

There were grumblings along the way, the kind that tend to accompany anything new. Some locals thought street dining was dirty. One man complained and pushed through the crowd at a wake the deli was hosting because he wanted to buy a newspaper and didn’t wish to walk around the mourners. Ward negotiated with Meander Valley Council over a dining policy and the question of an annual fee for occupying the footpath. Harvey suggested the fee be set at a dollar. “We’re providing footfall,” she explains. “People are walking up and down the streets, buying things from other shops.” Eventually, the fee was quietly dropped altogether.

Harvey and Ward ran themed dinner events, each one researched and cooked with serious intent, drawing on Indian, Moroccan, Spanish and Greek cuisines among others, with the pair dressed for the occasion and the room invariably packed. “You name the culture, we’ve probably done it,” Harvey says.

In 2014, after years in the original premises, a difficult landlord prompted Harvey and Ward to act. The building that now houses the deli, further up the main street, was vacant. With approval from their accountant and the bank, they bought it. The move was swift and chaotic. They traded at the old location on Saturday, catered a function and served coffees to ANZ staff on the intervening days, and opened the new premises on the Wednesday. Some in town doubted it would work. The newsagency down the road is still directing people to the new address to this day.

Parts of the business are not as well known to regular customers. A catering arm serves businesses and organisations across the region without ever being heavily promoted. Daily food and coffee deliveries to Deloraine workplaces and community members grew just as quietly.

Harvey and Ward also served as founding members of the Bendigo Bank community branch, working for years to get it established in a town that had been at risk of losing its banking options. They sat on tourism boards and made the case, at a time when few in authority were listening, that visitors to the Meander Valley were worth as much to the local economy as agriculture and forestry. “I was trying to explain to them that people come into this town and ask me where the bank is, where can I get my hair done, where’s the chemist,” Ward says. “All those sorts of things.” Council eventually came around.

What strikes both of them most, looking back, is not the awards or the longevity but the kind of place the deli became in people’s lives. Families that first came in with prams are now bringing their own children. Staff who joined after school left for university, went overseas, and came back again. A running list on the kitchen fridge logged the names of regular customers so no one would go unrecognised. “Treat people like they’ve come to your home,” Harvey says. “That was how we trained our staff.”

Grant Ward remembers the cross-section of people who would come through on any given day, a Liberal Party minister at one table, a logging family at another, environmental activists on the street outside, Bob Brown at a footpath chair. “Politics seemed to disappear,” he says. “They felt comfortable enough to be here.” One longtime community member told him years later that when the deli first opened, it had helped balance out the town, giving it a different kind of centre of gravity.

There was also, less formally, a role as a safe place for children. Ward picked children up from the school bus when parents were held up. He looked after two young kids for hours one afternoon when their father failed to appear, not knowing them, unsure how to locate their family, eventually staying until the man turned up and leaving without a word of thanks. A few days later the boy came back with a box of chocolates and his mother.

The decision to finish up was not made lightly, but neither does it come as a surprise to those close to the business. The years since COVID shifted the ground beneath hospitality in ways Harvey and Ward describe honestly. Customer patterns changed. Staff availability became less reliable. Costs climbed. “It changed the game,” Harvey says of the pandemic. “I don’t think hospitality will ever fully recover.” The business was set back six years financially and the rhythm permanently changed.

The building is on the market, along with the business. Harvey and Ward say they still hope the right person will come along, and take the business further, given the potential they see in the space and the goodwill built over three decades. But they are realistic. “We don’t have the energy to drive it to where it needs to go,” Ward says.

For now, the booking diary is filling up. People are ringing to reserve tables for the final weeks, groups wanting to come one last time. Harvey says she wants to sleep, to not answer the phone immediately, to grow fruit trees in the garden of their new home in town, to cook the recipes she has been meaning to try for years. And take as long as she wants to visit friends and family right across the country. Ward wants to see parts of Tasmania he has never had time to visit.

After 29 years of feeding and sheltering and connecting one small community, that seems a reasonable ask.