Grazers Restaurant in Kent to hold farewell open house before closing for good
- Jeremy Brown
Grazers Restaurant in Kent will permanently close on Saturday, Feb. 21.
The one-of-a-kind eatery at 123 N. Water St. was established by Carl Bauer and Stacey Lasher in the summer of 2015. The restaurant catered to those looking for a healthy meal and worked directly with customers who had specific food allergies or orders from their doctor to make them something that fit their needs.
Grazers will be open on Feb. 22, the two-year anniversary of Bauer’s passing, for a farewell open house and a celebration of Bauer’s life.
Bauer and Lasher were elementary school teachers at the Edge Academy in Akron when they got to know each other and discovered that they both put themselves through college working in restaurants. He had been a cook, and she had worked the front end. Upon further discussion, they learned that they both had food allergies. Bauer was allergic to poultry, which could cause an anaphylactic reaction, and Lasher is allergic to monosodium glutamate.
Grazers offered several vegetables and toppings for their customers to choose from. Jeremy Brown/The Portager
“I’d go to a restaurant and say, ‘Does this have MSG,’ and people would be like, ‘No, no,’ and then I’d end up getting sick,” Lasher said. “So, we commiserated about how difficult it was to eat out. At the end of the year we said, we should open a restaurant where everyone could eat: people who were vegan, people who were vegetarian, people who have gluten intolerances, celiac disease, people who can’t have food preservatives, like me. It would be somewhere where people could come and be, I feel comfortable saying I have this food issue; can you accommodate me? And we would say, yes, that’s what we’re here for.”
With Lasher's skill of running the front end of a restaurant and Bauer's love of cooking, they knew they would make a great team, so they took a school year to talk about and plan the opening of their restaurant. In 2014, Bauer and Lasher were at the Kent Farmers’ Market when they noticed a for-lease sign in the window at 425 Franklin St., so they inquired. That became their first location.
They quit their teaching jobs and spent about a year remodeling the space and creating recipes for the menu. Grazers opened for business on Aug. 15, 2015, the exact day they would have returned to their teaching jobs. While they never did return to their school as teachers, that year, they catered the teachers meeting before school started, which Lasher said was a sign that they were doing the right thing by opening a restaurant.
Grazers served tailored bowls, wraps, salads, baked potatoes and pitas, which customers could top with their choice of several healthy toppings, including a broad array of vegetables, meats, tofu, falafel, vegan bean chili and more.
The restaurant quickly became a hit with customers and won awards every year since its opening. In 2023, Bauer and Lasher were elected small business persons of the year and were honored at a Kent Area Chamber of Commerce awards ceremony.
Kevin Dreslinski was one of their first customers. He was working in downtown Kent when, on a lunch break, he decided to scout around for a place to eat. He discovered Grazers and quickly became friends with Bauer and Lasher.
“I was working for a small start-up software company that was located above the Pufferbelly,” Dreslinski said. “I was exploring different restaurants, and I came into their restaurant. They were really good people; I could tell right off the bat. I just wanted to help them out and build them a new website, just to kind of help them get their business established. I believed in them; I always did. I was thrilled that they took a good amount of their retirement savings to start up that company, and they had the drive for it.”
Carl Bauer and Stacey Lasher at their food wagon at Oktoberfest in 2023. Submitted photo.
In 2016, Bauer and Lasher began negotiations with Aramark to establish a Grazers at the Kent State University Student Center. Dreslinski continued to help them by offering his assistance with managerial expertise, and he also designed computer menus for the new Kent State location and helped set up that location, as well as the Water Street location. The location at the university opened on Aug. 28, 2017.
Eventually, Bauer and Lasher decided they couldn’t lose Dreslinski, so they hired him in a managerial position.
“I helped train over 70 or 80 employees on how to do food service handling, the specific food allergies, mostly college students. It was an enormously awesome time,” Dreslinski said. “I learned so much about teamwork and believing in people. The big thing with Stacey and Carl and I, we would always have this idea that we are here to make the restaurant successful, but we are also here to be mentors to our staff, and we really believed very strongly in that, so we took that to heart. I even ran into one of our former employees and she said, ‘You know, you guys were actually mentoring me for life.’ And that was always our mission.”
Dreslinski parted ways with Grazers in 2019 and took a job as a dog trainer, but he remained good friends with Bauer and Lasher.
Greg Wood, who has been dining at Grazers since its Franklin Street location, also became good friends with Bauer and Lasher. Wood had a heart attack five years ago.
“They cook in a manner that was positive for me, because I had some health issues, and I found a doctor that gave me a food program, and they pretty much accommodated it,” Wood said. “I’m a pain to go to a restaurant with because I ask a million questions, and then I end up not being able to eat; I’d have to take my own salad dressing, because I don’t eat any oil. Oil’s bad for me. I’m a strict vegan, and Grazers is one of the few restaurants I can eat in. You can have a baked potato with chili on top, and you can have carrots, red, yellow and orange peppers and red onions. There’s always been a variety of things, and if I wanted to experiment I always could. I’m going to be sad to see Grazers leaving.”
Carl Bauer in the hospital in 2024. Submitted photo
Bauer had opened his own restaurant when he was 22, but complications from a heart attack led him to close the business. About nine years ago, he was diagnosed with antiphospholipid syndrome, an autoimmune disorder that causes abnormal antibodies to attack blood cells and vessel linings, which causes blood clots. On his birthday on Dec. 27, 2019, he received a pacemaker. Bauer’s health took a turn for the worse in February of 2024. He died that month, at 5:55 am on Feb. 22.
It was then that Lasher realized that it would be difficult to run Grazers without Bauer. He had put his heart into the eatery and, without him, Lasher was overwhelmed. Her philosophy is to never make a decision after a traumatic experience, so she waited over a year until she decided she’d have to close the restaurant.
Lasher said Bauer loved angel numbers, which are numbers that repeat, are sequential or are patterned.
“I said to him before he died, what angel numbers are you going to send, so that I know that you’re with me,” Lasher said. “After he died, I was crying and driving to the Restaurant Depot, and I said, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to do this,’ and I pulled up behind a car and the license plate said 555. And I said, ‘He's with me.’”
Lasher has decided to spend the next year writing a book about Grazers and the people that surrounded her and Bauer in their endeavor to bring healthy food to the Kent community. She will post updates about her book on the Grazers Restaurant Legacy Facebook page, and she wants friends and customers to comment on the page about their favorite meals, memories and stories about Grazers, so she can share those details in her book.
Stacey Lasher interacts with customers on Feb. 17, 2026. One of Lashers favorite jobs at Grazers was making friends with the customers. Jeremy Brown/The Portager
“This is not another sad story about a local restaurant going out of business,” Lasher said. “We’ve been a valued part of the Kent community for 10 and a half years, and we have plenty of loyal customers. Closing is a choice I’m making because running Grazers after Carl's passing has been difficult, both emotionally and physically. That’s what I want people to know about Grazers.”
Jeremy Brown