Napavine Grill Relishes Serving the Community Quality Meals

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NAPAVINE — Husband and wife Ronda and Michael Aughe Sr. sat at their bar at the Napavine Grill with their son, Michael Aughe Jr., mulling over their future on March 19.

It was the day after the one day they had to close their restaurant to regroup and figure out the new statewide restaurant guidelines at the start of the pandemic. Having to switch to to-go orders, the Aughes saw their amount of customers drop that first day reopening to almost zero.

“I sat here and literally cried,” Ronda said.

Napavine Grill had been open just seven months, which meant they didn’t qualify for any of the federal bailouts for small businesses, because they hadn’t had their doors open for at least a year.

“I said, ‘God, if this is the will, if this is where we need to be, let me know, otherwise we’ll find something else.’” Ronda said. “The very next day, and from then on, we have been supported and engulfed by this community in a way I can’t even describe.”

The Aughes were forced to work 13-14 hours every day to make ends meet and took feedback from the customers and community to figure out what exactly they wanted during the time of to-go orders. That meant adjusting their menu to introduce new meals and taking others off.

Listening to the community paid off as business started booming. They reopened for in-house dining at 25 percent capacity on Memorial Day Weekend. First-time customers from the outskirts of the area, folks from Toledo, Winlock and Onalaska, began venturing out of their small towns to try new foods and restaurants. 

“We noticed two or three new people everyday, and pretty soon they were regulars,” Aughe said. “Then the next day we’d have two or three new customers, and then they were regulars.”

It got to the point where Napavine Grill had nearly tripled its business prior to the pandemic. Their best week ever in 16 months of being open came Nov. 1-8.

Good things don’t last forever, however, as COVID-19 cases boomed recently and Gov. Jay Inslee placed new restrictions on restaurants, shuttering in-house dining again and forcing the Aughes to revert back to take-out only.

“It’s a significant, a significant blow to us again,” Aughe said.

Napavine Grills is now forced to regroup again and look for new ways to adapt back to the to-go-only orders. Aughe said she plans to come up with some family-style meals, such as a roast chicken dinner with stuffing and potatoes that feeds a family of four or five. Things like that that customers can take home, because she knows people are getting tired of eating regular takeout, such as burgers and chicken nuggets

“I want to offer something a little more wholesome, but it’s also got to be affordable,” Aughe said. “Some of these people haven’t worked or paid their rent in nine or 10 months, and now they have Christmas staring at them. It’s a scary time. It’s a super scary time.”

Napavine Grill is the Aughe’s first brick-and-mortar restaurant but they were no stranger to the food business. They had run a 29-foot food trailer in the area serving the rodeo circuit for the five years previously. Before long, they had outgrown their trailer.

“It snowballed,” Ronda said. “It got to where we were asked to be in three different places on the same weekend. We were just getting so terribly busy that we thought, ‘the menu must be good enough. Let’s go ahead and find us a spot to put our roots down.’”



It didn’t take long for them to find the community of Napavine and what was previously the building that housed Taste of Alaska on East Washington Street. They bought the building on June 17, 2019 and opened up on July 3, 2019.

Since then, they’ve kept a similar menu to their food trailer, described by Aughe as upscale diner fare, such as ribeye steaks, burgers cooked over an open-flame grill, an assortment of sandwiches, french dip, a full breakfast menu and much more.

Everything is fresh. Literally. None of that “fresh-frozen” stuff. The restaurant doesn’t have a walk-in refrigerator or a walk-in freezer. The Aughes order their food items four times a week to make sure every ingredient is brand-new and fresh. The pork and corn beef are both roasted in-house and they offer prime rib on Friday nights.

“We do really quality stuff, as best as we can possibly do it,” Aughe said. 

The level of quality became difficult during the beginning of the pandemic in March, April and May, when beef processing plants began to shut down. The Aughes were forced to pay four times the usual amount for their fresh beef patties. They still paid the extra amount without raising their prices because they didn’t want to serve frozen patties.

Now Napavine Grill has built itself into a community staple. It fed the Tigers’ football team before games last year, cooked pancake breakfasts for the local booster clubs and has a booster table that sells Tigers gear where 100 percent of the proceeds goes back to the school.

The Aughes are now on first-name basis with 75 percent of their customers. They have become less like patrons and more like a second-family to Aughes. Some customers literally walk back to the kitchen and thank them every time they come in to eat. It’s been a rewarding experience running the grill and serving the community, Ronda said, and one they hope will last for years to come.

“We really want to be the community hub, like it used to be when it was the Wild Turkey back in the day,” Aughe said. “We’re here for the community.”

More Information on Napavine Grill

Owners: Ronda Aughe, Michael Aughe Sr. and Michael Aughe Jr.

Location: 114 E. Washington St., Napavine

Hours: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., Monday through Saturday

Phone: 360-266-6323

Facebook: facebook.com/thenapavinegrill

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Reporter Eric Trent can be reached at etrent@chronline.com. Visit chronline.com/business for more coverage of local businesses.