Dairy Queen renovations mix the old with the new

The Welling­ton Dairy Queen was closed tem­porar­ily this sea­son to allow the restau­rant to receive a makeover.

Own­ers Tom and Karyl Cleary said ren­o­va­tions started on Sept. 6 and ended on Nov. 18. Dairy Queen was closed for one month dur­ing that period.

“The foot­print of the build­ing is the same,” Tom Cleary said. “The din­ing room, serv­ing area, exte­rior, and sig­nage have changed.”

Tom Cleary said their two sons, Brian Cleary and Bob Cleary, will even­tu­ally take over the store, which was built in 1997.

“Dairy Queen man­dates that we keep it up,” Tom Cleary said. “Our sons will be tak­ing over even­tu­ally, so Dairy Queen man­dated that we do this to bring it up to stan­dard. With the ren­o­va­tions, we’re now a Dairy Queen Grill and Chill.”

Tom Cleary said they had been plan­ning the ren­o­va­tions for a year, but wanted to wait until after the sum­mer sea­son, the busiest time of the year, was over.

“We had to have it done by the end of the year to meet our cri­te­ria,” he said. “Busi­ness has been excep­tion­ally good since open­ing back up. We have twice the employ­ees we did at this time of the year last year.”

He said the changes have been accepted by the major­ity of the cus­tomers, but some have said they don’t like changes, and didn’t feel it needed to be done.

“Every­thing was 15 years old,” he said. “It needed dress­ing up and the town deserves the best. We still have some unique things, such as the clock, that we kept.”

Dairy Queen is located at 504 S. Main St.

Posted by Terra Carlson on Jan 5 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.