Skip and Lynn Telgard are very much in the thick of things as they work to reinvent one of Leland’s cultural institutions.

The third-generation owners of the Bluebird Restaurant and Tavern are at the site often as crews work to build a new version of the restaurant that delighted locals and visitors for almost 100 years. The work is intense, expensive and sometimes stressful, but they’ve been buoyed by the community’s support.

“Every day there’s people who walk by and want to talk to me about it,” Skip tells The Ticker. “They love hearing about it. They’re dying to get back in there.”

But the Telgards are leery about taking anything for granted. The “Bird,” as it is affectionately called, was founded by Skip’s grandparents, Martin and Leone Telgard, in 1927. And despite a century’s worth of memories and goodwill, the Telgards are far more focused on looking forward, not back.

“(Our history) doesn’t mean we automatically get a pass,” Skip says. “We still have to perform. We still have to build a building that’s exceptional, something that we can be proud of and the rest of the village can be proud of, and we take that as a challenge. Every person who walks in that door is going to want a special experience.”

Despite an initial hope to open the new Bird in 2024, the Telgards say that spring of 2025 is a more likely target for full operations. And what was once tabbed as a $3.6 million rebuild is now likely to be considerably more, the Telgards say, due to a variety of unforeseen and under-budgeted items.

“We've run into quite a few things, roadblocks and regulatory stuff, a lot more than we thought we would. So we got pushed way back,” Skip says. “We would still like to open prior to the holidays and get open for a while to get our systems in place and hire people, so that next spring, a year from now, we are 100% ready to go.”

“There have been a lot of hurdles,” Lynn adds. “When you remodel an old building, you get a pass on a lot of things. But with a brand new building, you don’t get a pass on anything. There were things that have popped up and we’ve said ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. We have to do that?'”

By the time the old building closed for good after the 2022 season, it had grown into a 10,000-square-foot eatery that could serve 300 people divided between a dining room and tavern. It was a great setup for decades, Skip said, but became harder to staff and was simply too big to manage.

“It was a lot of fun, and it was exciting and profitable for years,” he says. “But things change, things evolve, and we couldn’t get as much staff as we used to.”

Another fundamental problem was that the old restaurant setup largely ignored the Leland River, which flows behind what was the back of the building. The new building, both in its location and design, embraces and focuses on the river. It will have seating for up to 100 inside and about the same outside along the water’s edge, utilizing a much smaller footprint.

“Here we had this beautiful property, and the old building took up two-thirds of it. We just weren’t using the property to its fullest potential,” Lynn says. “We knew we needed to change for multiple reasons, so how do we make this property work its best magic for us?”

Still, the decision to demolish the old restaurant, which was steeped in history, was not an easy one. Locals – and of course the Telgards themselves – had a deep connection to that space, despite its flaws. Ultimately, the Telgards believe the sense of community that was built in the old building was less about the structure itself and more about the interactions that occurred within its walls.

“It goes through my head all the time: how do we recreate (that familiarity) in our new space? Well, you can't. You can do something better, something different,” Skip says. “But that good feeling that people got came from the people – how we treat people, how we serve them, how we take care of them, and that’s something we want to continue.”

Skip and Lynn are of course aware of online commenters who grumble about the appearance of the new building, which some claim isn’t a good fit for small-town Leland. But for every complaint there seems to be three or four supporters cheering the Telgards on.

“What I find fascinating is that the complaints, we don't have to respond to,” Lynn says. “Everybody else is responding to them.”

Besides, the Telgards say, their new brick building will fall in line with several older buildings in Leland, including the Leland Mercantile, which for many years had its brick façade exposed.

“If you peel off that wood there, it’s almost identical to what we’re doing,” Skip says. “People who say there’s no tie to history are wrong.”

“What goes around will come back around eventually,” Lynn adds. “And that's where we are now with the brick building, going back to history.”

The Telgards thoughts also drift to the previous generations: founders Martin and Leone Telgard, and Skip’s parents Jim and Nancy Telgard, now all gone. Would they understand the reasoning behind Skip and Lynn’s decision?

“We talk about what we're doing often and whether they would be happy with it, whether they would understand it, whether they would support it. And there are times that we question what we've done, but more often than not, we think that they would accept the fact that in order to support the next generation, we needed to change,” Lynn says. “They never sat still themselves. They added on to the building when the building needed to grow to fit the demand and the need. They were always innovating and changing.”