For the past few months we here at Clay’s have been working tirelessly day and night working on improving and expanding Clay’s Cafe. It has been a challenge keeping the doors open while also doing a renovation but we were determined to not block our customers’ access to the food they love and to keep our employees paid. So almost all of the work has been done in the evening, followed by countless hours of cleanup to make sure we can reopen each day.

Why is this important to you? Well we are making a commitment to offering the same quality of service both during our slow times and revamping the way we do things to be able to handle the busier periods to ensure you have an even better experience at the cafe.

So what are we all doing? One of the first improvements was installing a tankless water heater to save on space. Additionally, we are completely rearranging our cooking area to make it easier on our staff to handle the rushes, adding a brand new larger walk in fridge and freezer, installing a massive additional air conditioning unit to handle the ever increasing summer temperatures and we are adding more seats to be able to serve the growing community and seat everyone even faster! With this we will be able to increase staff even more, adding more servers and bussers to an even better dining experience. To further reduce wait times, we are also investing in new technology where you will be able to add yourselves to our waitlist remotely so you can just arrive before your name is called. On top of all that, we are adding a huge new board game area and adding as many board games as we can get our hands on (we are taking donations of new unused board games). We even hope to introduce exciting events such as game nights in the future. With the redesigned layout we will have the ability for you to reserve a more private space for larger parties. We will relocate our server area and improve upon it with additional beverage dispensers for quicker refills. That’s not the only change in equipment. We also have plans for a larger griddle, new grill freezer and fryers, an additional deck to our conveyor oven to name a few – all of which to allow us to make more food for our growing customer base. Speaking of growth, we will be paving our back parking lot to offer newly painted stalls. With our new logo coming soon will be a brand new website and accompanying blog and podcast. And to manage all of this an expanded office for our amazing management team.

Why are owners reinvesting so much into our restaurant? One because we love our community and feel it’s important for you to have high quality dining options. We have always thought of Clay’s as a family restaurant from the beginning. This is a place to spend time with your loved ones, have fun, and enjoy a great meal so we want to make room for even more families to come! As we all know, there has been major investment into our surrounding areas with Intel, Google, Amazon etc. launching large projects that will bring more people and business our way so we want to prepare in advance for that growth and get ready to meet that demand so we can continue to provide the high quality of service you’ve experienced here for almost a century.

To conclude we’d like to thank and give a huge shout out to all the local businesses that have helped us through this remodel: David Ford Electric for the constant electrical work; Professionals Refrigeration for helping install our new walk-in cooler/freezer and moving all of our hood systems; C N J Wolfe Construction for concrete demolition, reconstruction of our office, and roof patching; Glasmeier Plumbing for a new hot water systems as well as rerouting plumbing and gas lines; Look Communications for rerouting all of our ethernet cables for our POS system; KC Concrete for installing our new concrete pad outside, fixing our back kitchen floor, and demolition of walls as well; Charity Jenkins for building from scratch and working to launch our new website; Pendant Fire Protection for making sure we are staying up to code and safe as we rearrange our many heating elements; Greg at JBJ Architects for all of our wonderful blueprints to keep the goals of this project organized and for getting the approvals from the county. Last but not least the biggest thanks is owed to our staff that have stayed patient, flexible and open minded about these many changes.

As our patrons and beloved customers, we now turn to you to ask for your continued patience, flexibility and support. This journey started months ago and will take many more for our vision to be complete but we are so excited! … Hope to see you soon…

** If you wish to join our team for this journey and all the joy that comes after that we are always accepting applications at https://clayscafe.com/jobs/