Memo's House of Pancakes, a staple in Walkerton, closes abruptly

WALKERTON, Ind - Memo’s House of Pancakes, a staple restaurant in Walkerton, closed unexpectedly Tuesday.

Now the community is looking for answers.

“When I arrived to work on Tuesday, I got here about 10 minutes early for my shift and the doors were locked,” said Shelby McCoige, a server at Memo’s.

The unexpected closure not only left their customers confused, but also staff, who say they were not even notified the restaurant was shutting down.

McCoige, who’s worked on-and-off at Memo's for about two years, felt blindsided by the abrupt closure.

“When it comes to this, they didn’t even give us a warning to tell us to go look for other jobs. I arrived here and nobody was here, they laughed and told me to go home,” she said.

McCoige, who is 34 weeks pregnant, said she has yet to be paid and that it might be hard to find work right now.

She also said that she's developed a family at Memo's and it's sad that she will never work with her co-workers again.

“All of our workers, we were a big family and a lot of it was because it was a comfort. We were there for each other and we were just a big family and not even that, our regular customers that would come in all the time and the bright shining faces, and it feels like home and the big hugs and laughs we would get,” she said .

One frequenter, Cathy Helmboldt, who came in every Monday through Friday and ordered a Mountain Dew and the soup and salad special, feels the loss of this local staple.

“And for them to close is a big inconvenience for me because now I have to go somewhere different that I didn’t really, different atmosphere. I liked it here. The girls that work here are awesome,” said Helmboldt.

Customer Rhonda Ludwig, who's lived in Walkerton since 1973 and whose granddaughter also worked at Memo's, is disheartened by the closure.

“I used to come here often with my sister and my daughter, who is my granddaughter's mother. I loved breakfast. I used to come here often in the morning, they had good food and I liked the manager, she was an excellent manager,” said Ludwig.

We have reached out to the owners of Memo's and they declined to comment on the reason why they shut down.