About 10 minutes after the doors opened on Saturday morning, it was standing-room-only for a pancake breakfast at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Ligonier.
The occasion was a benefit for employees of Ruthie’s Diner, just a few minutes down the road on Route 30, which was destroyed in a late January fire.
“We’ve been going to church here for 20 years and we went to Ruthie’s a lot,” said Brian Huber of Ligonier, who joined his wife to eat their pancakes at the edge of a small stage downstairs at Covenant, where the tables were full by 9:10 a.m. with a line nearly extending out the door.
“It’s really going to be missed,” Huber said.
In the kitchen, Tim Habecker was doing his best impression of a Ruthie’s short-order cook. He was in charge of scrambled eggs, manning four cast iron skillets at a time as other volunteers held aluminum catering trays waiting to be loaded up and carted to the breakfast line.
Habecker is part of the church’s Men’s Fellowship Breakfast Prayer Group, which met for decades at Ruthie’s.
“We didn’t know everyone’s names, but we’d be there every week and they’d be ready,” Habecker said. “When some people at the church came up with this idea, the fellowship group jumped on it pretty quick.”
The diner, which sat on a more than 4-acre property along Route 30, has been owned by the Stevens family since 1986, according to Westmoreland County property tax records.
Owner Ruthie Stevens, who died just three weeks after the fire, inherited the restaurant from her late aunt, Ruth Clark, who had rented the building to another family. It was called Burnsey’s Diner at that time, according to an archivist at the Ligonier Public Library.
Ruthie’s Diner was known for its fresh baked pies and diner classics — including grilled ham and cheese and Reuben sandwiches, fried oysters, liver and onions and pork chops. Stevens used to make homemade candy to sell in the diner, such as peanut butter meltaways, chocolate-covered cherries and buttercrunch.
In the Covenant kitchen behind Habecker, there was no liver or onions to be found, but church volunteer Kathy Brown of Ligonier was keeping busy whisking a giant metal bowl of pancake batter.
“We bought 80 pounds of pancake mix, and we had an anonymous donor who provided us with 1,000 sausages,” Brown said.
Brown said about 25 volunteers worked to organize the breakfast, helped along by donations from local businesses like Giant Eagle, Wow Outlet, Keystone Candy, Country Cupboard, Hoffer’s Ligonier Valley Packing, Berkshire Hathaway, Dark Side Coffee and The Pie Shoppe.
“The people in this church are capable,” Brown said, “and within three days after the fire, we’d gotten together and decided this was something we wanted to do.”
