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In 1973, my parents purchased and renovated a farmhouse along Route 202-31 in Hunterdon County, New Jersey and opened a small restaurant in the front dining rooms to accommodate 50 guests on Friday and Saturday evenings. They decided to call the restaurant Muirhead since the property was called by that name on historical maps. In the 1970s this area was considered rural, but residential development has blossomed around the fringes of the property over the last decade as more people move further from metropolitan areas. The celery green farmhouse stands prominently on a knoll on the southbound lane of Route 202-31 between Flemington and Ringoes. My Mom loves to cook and my Dad loves to work hard, so this was their dream come true when they decided to open the doors to customers in 1974. My Dad, a mechanical engineer and former sheet metal contractor, was the host of the restaurant, and my Mom, a former home economist who has written books about Colonial and Victorian cookery (Open-Hearth Cooking, The Pleasures of Colonial Cooking, and The Victorian Seaside Cookbook), ran the kitchen.
The restaurant business was a significant part of my younger years, because I was surrounded by restaurant activity on the weekends and grew up working with my three siblings and co-workers setting up tables at the beginning of the evening and extinguishing the candles at the end of the night along with cleaning stacks and stacks of dishes in a steamy hot kitchen. It was a great house to play in as a youngster even if Miss Jesse, the resident ghost, was thought to inhabit the attic.
My parents decided to hang up the dish towel after 20 years of operation and retired in 1994. My father really couldn't throw in the hat even though he retired from the restaurant business, so he developed a line of food products as a spin-off. One product, Muirhead Pecan Pumpkin Butter, won an award at a national fancy food show in New York City several years back and has been a big hit with customers ever since. An order form with the complete Muirhead of Ringoes, Inc. product line is available on the official Muirhead website. | 
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Ringoes