Littler, the downtown Durham restaurant that emulated the cozy feel of an intimate dinner party or New York City bistro tucked into a side street, will close its doors on June 21.
The closure marks the end of a nine-year run for Littler, which opened on East Parrish Street in 2016. It’s also the second closure in two years for owner Gray Brooks, who shuttered his modern diner concept, Jack Tar and the Colonel’s Daughter, in 2023. His popular wood-fired pizza restaurant, Pizzeria Toro, remains open.
While Brooks attributed Jack Tar’s closure to diminished downtown foot traffic post-COVID, he sees Littler’s challenges as more structural: the restaurant’s exceptionally small size, with just 36 seats, made financial viability an ongoing struggle.
“The numbers worked when we didn’t have a sous chef, but that just put a really inhumane burden on the chef,” Brooks says. “When we did have a sous chef and were able to provide normal, good jobs for our kitchen staff, the financial burden on the restaurant was just too much.”
That said, “COVID could have played a role in a way that I didn’t realize at the time,” Brooks says. Littler closed for the first two years of the pandemic and permanently shortened its hours upon reopening, closing an hour earlier each night than it had pre-pandemic. “It kind of bled us out.”
Brooks says that adding four or five tables to the restaurant could have made the difference between survival and closure, but expanding wasn’t possible in the tiny space. He explored taking over the adjacent former Atomic Fern location, but city permitting requirements would have necessitated up to $300,000 in fireproofing and sprinkler system upgrades before any renovation work could begin.
Brooks says he also thought about relocating the restaurant, “but the space was such a huge character in the story.”
“I was reading an interview with Michael Stipe a couple months ago, and he was talking about the demise of R.E.M. and how they never do reunions,’” Brooks says. “He was saying, ‘We got together, we did this, we made a thing, and now it’s over.’ With Littler, it’s like, ‘We did this thing. We did it the way we wanted to, the way we loved it.’ It’s either go out the way we want to, or change what we are into something that’s not the same.”
Over its tenure, Littler gained a following for its rotating menu of seasonal New American cuisine.
The restaurant’s current offerings include salmon crudo with Cara Cara oranges and tarragon, smoked hamachi pâté, carrot cavatelli with harissa yogurt, celeriac au poivre with beluga lentils, and braised beef short rib with savoy cabbage and crispy shallot gremolata.
Looking ahead, Brooks plans to focus his energies on bolstering Pizzeria Toro. He’s recently acquired a mobile oven for catering and is developing a Toro-style version of New York pizza.
“That’s the upside,” Brooks says. “Hopefully, now I’ll have a little more time to work on that.”
Reach Staff Writer Lena Geller at [email protected].Comment on this story at [email protected].