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With his typical decisiveness, Glenn changed the hours and added a lunch menu. For the first time the Leafe opened at 11am for lunch.
Even with his boundless energy Glenn discovered that running a restaurant that was open for 15 hours a day was no easy task. Add to that the fact that Glenn was also coaching the Tribe Wrestling team at the same time, and you see that quite obviously, he needed help. He needed good people who were not afraid of hard work. Students and locals dropped by to fill out applications. One person hired in those early days of the 90’s was Kevin Abley, a former Montanan and now Williamsburg local, certainly not afraid of work (or anything else for that matter). Hired originally as a cook, Kevin eventually learned how to fill every position in the house and worked hard enough to become indispensable to Glenn’s operation of the Leafe.
Not one to ever be happy with the status quo, Glenn knew that even as good as the Leafe was that it could be even better. Early in 1994, Glenn saw the craft beer revolution and knew that it was the perfect fit for the Leafe. The Beer menu was bumped up to include more imports and selections from the west coast where craft beer was already getting a strong foothold. By October of 1994, the Leafe had one of the widest bottle selections in all of Virginia and had just revealed a 10??? Tap draft system. The only people more excited than the Leafe regulars were the employees. Everyone was used to the 4 taps that had been there as long as anybody could remember. Most people were impressed with the fact that the Leafe offered Guinness on nitro, now they would have trouble choosing which draft to try next. (But nobody was happier than the busboys who thanks to lines drilled from the basement keg coolers no longer had to carry kegs up the stairs to the underbar keg-coolers).
The tap system brought a fundamental change to the Green Leafe. It was still the local hang-out, still the old stand-by, still the refuge from the real world in fact, the beer selection was yet another thing to add to the list of things that only the Leafe had. But now the Leafe had a unique window on the world. There were beers from countries people had never heard of, beers from the “left coast” that had never been drunk east of the Rockies much less on the east coast. People in Williamsburg started to realize that Belgium was a pretty important country at that point. In a sleepy little colonial town sitting in the shadow of an Anheuser-Busch Brewery/Factory, people’s palettes were suddenly awakened to a whole new world. Life in Williamsburg had never been better.
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