A & Dubs reopens in Lincoln Park, demand quickly overwhelms staff

A & Dubs reopened on June 12 in Lincoln Park, and by the next day the tiny drive-in was already overwhelmed by hungry customers. The surge turned a quiet comeback into an immediate test of whether one of Duluth’s most familiar summer stops could handle the demand it still draws after two summers off.

The restaurant had to close early because it ran out of supplies, and a Facebook message from the business said, “We apologize so much.” That shortage captured the immediate challenge facing the new owners, Michael Koralia and Ryan Spears, who inherited not just a restaurant but a long line of neighborhood expectations built over generations.

A & Dubs sits at 3131 W. Third St. in Duluth’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, and its roots go back to 1948, when Lloyd and Shirley Tillman opened an A&W there. The business separated from the A&W chain in the early 1970s but kept the classic drive-in format that made it a local fixture, with car-side service, homemade root beer and a menu built around burgers, fish and chips, fries, ice cream and other diner staples. Syl and Sandy Hantz took over in 1978, and the restaurant later came to be seen as one of Duluth’s earliest drive-ins and one of the final ones still operating in the area.

That history is part of why the reopening landed with so much force. The Hantz family said in April 2024 that the restaurant would not reopen for that summer because of health issues, leaving the site dark for two seasons. Anticipation built for months before the June 12 return, and the first full day made clear how much pent-up demand had accumulated while the window was closed.

Koralia has said his connection to A & Dubs runs through family ties and personal memory, including childhood meals in the family pickup truck. He and Spears have said they wanted to preserve the same food and experience that made the place matter in the first place. That is the business challenge now: serving a crowd that still treats A & Dubs like a summer ritual while keeping enough of the old-school feel to make the comeback believable.

If the new owners can balance those pressures, A & Dubs could remain what Lincoln Park has always made it, a neighborhood drive-in that still feels like part of Duluth’s own memory bank.