LOST PROVINCE: HYPER LOCAL AND COMMUNITY GROWN

Lost Province

Hyperlocal and community grown

BY JILLYAN MOBLEY

Boone is home to many types of businesses. What’s unique about businesses in Boone is how unique one is. Just like community built Lost Province.

Lost Province Brewing Company opened its doors in 2014 as a brewpub owned by Lynne and Andy Mason. Over the past eight years, the Masons have expanded across the town of Boone through a hyperlocal focus that promotes healthy expansion and community.

Lost Province, located in downtown Boone, serves house-made farm-to-table elevated pub food with Southern inspiration. With hushpuppies and cheeseboards to traditional Neapolitan pizza and Nashville hot chicken sandwiches, the restaurant has become a must-go for locals and tourists alike.

Despite its huge presence, Lost Province and its sister restaurants are all family owned and operated by Lynne and Andy alongside their adult children and their spouses, Carolyn and Richard Ward and JP and Megan Mason.

Lynne grew up in Chapel Hill and Andy grew up in central New York, moving down to the South in 1978. The couple met in 1980 while in graduate school, Lynne studying for her Master’s Degree in Social Work and Andy for his PhD in Medicinal Chemistry.

After a short-lived adventure in Pennsylvania, the Masons made Boone their home in 1995. Lynne immersed herself in the community, serving as the director of Hospitality House and serving as a Boone Town Council member for 18 years. While working, Andy was an avid home-brewer, using his chemistry knowledge to make beer for almost 30 years before opening the brewery.

In 2013, the couple began looking for a potential spot for their brewery and settled into 130 North Depot Street about a year after starting their search. On Aug. 8, 2014, Lost Province opened.

Despite their consistent and evident growth and success over the past several years, the Masons said, at first, it was a lot of sleepless nights.

“I think anyone who’s doing a small business knows — if you plan carefully and you manage it carefully and you have a good product and you’re connected to the community, I mean, there’s so many different things that need to be going on — even with all of that, it takes a good three years to really get roots with a business,” Lynne said. “We were fortunate to participate with a program called Scale Up WNC through Mountain BizWorks. They’re located in Asheville, so we’ve learned all about the hockey stick principle where you kind of ride along and then all of a sudden you start the growth that broke the curse. It was kind of at that point we started sleeping again.”

Andy said that something they learned early on is that “there’s only a very small number of people who are going to come through your door out of the total proportion that know about you and so one of the keys is to get enough people that know about you such that that proportion that actually comes to your venue makes it self sustaining.” He said one thing he wished they had done differently is being proactive with marketing.

“If I would knock us for anything, it’s not doing enough work ahead of time, or even while we were building the business, etc,” Andy said. “Do that marketing, do that outreach and stuff like that to make that population large enough. And I think that there’s a couple of classics mistakes that small business people do — that’s one of them.”

Even with long nights and growing pains, the Masons were ready for growth just about three years after opening the doors at Lost Province.

In 2017, the couple and their growing business team began discussing expanding beer production. With the help of relators and community connections, the location at 289 Daniel Boone Drive Suite B was brought to their attention. They thought they could start developing Lost Province Hardin Creek in 2019 before it came to a halt.

“We are independent and a family owned business. We have no shareholders or anything. We’re not independently wealthy. We invested what we had saved in the business and we fortunately good credit and we’re fortunate to get the funding for the downtown location,” Lynne said. “And we were working on the same for here and pretty much in the finals stages of getting things secure and COVID hit — shut down all conversations with banks abruptly.”

With plenty else to worry about, the Masons put their efforts into maintaining their downtown location and keeping their patrons and employees safe when they were able to reopen.

“We have the most amazing employees and almost all of them came back. We maintained all social distancing — we were rather neurotic about it. We just wanted to

PHOTO BY FRANK RUGGIERO J.P. Mason mans the wood-fired pizza oven.

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keep people safe. We were out in the parking lot we sanitizing everything over and over because no one quite knew how this virus was spreading at that time, and we were back in a good position again,” Lynne said.

Though the lenders they were previously working with for the Hardin Creek location decided to not move forward, Lynne and Andy were persistent and found a lender. They then went from “application to approval for funding in 30 days.” They entered a formal lease at the location soon after.

Andy said there was a sense of urgency in setting up the barrel tanks. Throughout the pandemic, canning became their “lifeline,” selling at grocery stores and through take-out. When they reopened and old accounts were coming back, they had trouble keeping up.

“We’d have guys out there selling beer and stuff like that and I’m trying to tell them like, ‘Wait a minute, I’m going to need beer for my pub,’ that’s the kind of crunch we were under,” Andy said. “So we’ve been open just a little bit more than a year now. The funny thing about it is I thought it would take us about three years to bring this to the max capacity and we’re probably going to be max capacity before two years or maybe shortly thereafter, so the timeline has really been accelerated.”

After opening their second location, the Masons were not eagerly looking for a third. But when approached to take over operations at Coyote Kitchen, Lynne followed a lesson she learned by not impulsively saying no.

“We are family-owned and operated so both of our adult children and their spouses are involved, everyone has a different role which makes this work. And Andy and I will be slowing down in years to come so we discussed it with them to see if it was something they’d be interested in,” Lynne said. “We’re very passionate about independent and locally-owned business, which that was, and it was also one of our family favorite

PHOTO BY JILLYAN MOBLEY Andy and Lynne Mason are the owners of Lost Province Brewing Company, both Downtown and the Hardin Creek location, and Coyote Kitchen.

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1126Blowing RockRd. 195 NewMarket Centre Boone

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restaurants.”

With the support and encouragement of their children and their spouses, the Masons moved forward in taking over operations at Coyote Kitchen, which has been a staple in the community since 2006. The family is “committed” to maintaining the Southwest and Caribbean theme as well as the gluten free, vegan and allergy friendly focus. With these consistencies in mind, some new aspects will come, including plans for a tap room that will change the restaurant name to “Coyote Kitchen and Lost Cantina.”

With their presence in the the town spreading, the Masons are passionate about continuing to support their employees and the community.

Through her work in the nonprofit world, Lynne learned the restaurant industry can be “very rough,” including low wages and poor working conditions. She said that when opening Lost Province, they wanted to professionalize how restaurants can be run in a “socially responsible way.”

“We just strongly believe in trying to the best we can for our employees because they are our most important asset,” Andy said. “Take care of your peeps.”

In addition to their passion for caring for their employees, the Masons have a “hyperlocal” focus in Boone.

Everything is sourced as locally as possible, from T-shirts to produce, Lynne said. The restaurant works with a lot of local farmers in purchasing ingredients and donating by-products from beer production for livestock. Musicians are a staple of the downtown pub space and Andy said they have had “the best time” getting to know musicians locally and regionally for their line-ups.

Another aspect of their hyperlocal focus is giving pack to nonprofits and organizations that serve the community.

“One of our mentors has been John Cooper, owner of Mast General Store, and he taught me early on the importance of giving back to the community,” Lynne said. “So even in our toughest days, we embarked on finding ways to give back and we initiated a program called ‘Get Lost for a Cause.’ We sponsor a nonprofit one day each month, and we give them 10% of the sales proceeds. Plus, we designate a percent of sales from a designated beer for the month and it’s a fun way to bring community together.”

The High Country Breast Cancer Foundation, Hospitality House, Hunger and Health Coalition, Watauga Humane Society and Blue Ridge Women in Agricultural are just a few of the organizations that have partnered with the Get Lost for a Cause program.

Lost Province has made a name for itself as a safe space for members of all community. A hanging LGBT+ flag that reads “Abide no Hate” hangs front and center over the bar, gender neutral bathrooms are the norm and a diverse staff works at all levels of the restaurant operations.

“I just think that it was really important for us from very early on to create a safe space for everybody and I think we follow through,” Andy said. “I think that goes with our philosophy of trying to create a welcoming space for anybody, no matter who you are.”

Lynne and Andy have made Boone the home for their family and their restaurants. Lynne said she loves Boone and thinks there is a “very unique sense of community and quality of life and there’s this wonderful dynamic with it.” Andy said he does not believe Lost Province would be what it is if it was anywhere other than Boone.

“This is the lost province in North Carolina, and that’s how I got the name. The lost province was isolated culturally, geographically, physically from the rest of the state, and I think that caused two effects. No. 1, people developed this fierce independence because they knew nobody was going to take care of them. But the other thing is, there are other larger projects that everybody knew that they had to get together to do,” Andy said.”So you have this almost yin and yang of extreme entrepreneurialism and this strong cultural cohesion of community and I was struck by that, I’ve never seen any place that has that mixture before. I think that’s part of what makes this area unique and what makes Boone so special.”

Lynne Mason in front of the Lost Province Hardin Creek location.

PHOTO BY JILLYAN MOBLEY