Charles-Ten Restaurant A Venerable Institution in Windsor Locks

At 63 and battling breast cancer, restaurant owner Ann Tenerowicz knows she should be cutting back on her 70-hour-work weeks.

 Her prognosis looks good after months of a hormone treatment shrunk her tumors. But the side effects has caused achy bones, swelling and often drains her energy. Despite her tiredness she routinely arrives to work by 11:30 a.m. and stays until 1:30 a.m.

Friends say this is Stella and Charles’ kid - stubborn, determined and opinioned – to do things her way – or the family’s way - in running Stella’s Charles-Ten Restaurant, the town’s oldest restaurant.  For Tenerowicz, her drive, her desire to push on, is about preserving her family legacy.

“I feel an obligation,” said Tenerowicz, an only child, who has about 75 relatives living in the surrounding area. “This is our one little corner of the world.”

That corner is a brick building on South Main Street built by her father and his five brothers. Inside the walls are lined with 70 years of town, family, town and war photos and memorabilia. Her mother and father ran the place for years before they died; her father in 1970, her mother in 1993.

Today she’s the whole show – cook, cleaner, bookkeeper and even furniture polisher. But Tenerowicz, who is single, admits she couldn’t work the long hours without the support of her “faithful” bartender, Brian Rocheleau, an employee for 31 years.

“I can’t begin to describe how valuable it is to have someone as honest and dependable as Brian,” she said.

Tenerowicz said she relies on the love and support of relatives, friends and 5th-generation customers to get by. When asked how a cancer survivor is able to single-handily run a restaurant Tenerowicz is quick to correct saying she’s not a survivor until after her May operation.

“I believe God has a birth date and death date on his big calendar in the sky,” she said. “Nothing we do in between changes that. This is the path my life is suppose to take.”

Through her sickness she’s seen how she has been an integral part of the community. In July, more than 500 people showed their support by attending a pig roast fundraiser which helped offset her medical bills.

“I had no idea people felt that way about me,” she said.

Until her surgery Tenerowicz intends to continue her same schedule, she said. Like the way in which her mother did she prepares meals microwave-free and cooks with cast iron frying pans on a small five-burner gas stove.

 When work gets hectic or she needs a day off, she calls in Cousin Marcia or a neighbor, she said.

Tenerowicz graduated from Windsor Locks High in 1965 and attended Chandler School for Women in Boston. After college she stayed in the city working as a secretary for an insurance firm. She had plans to be a career woman, marry and raise a family.

But when her father become ill in 1970 she returned home to help her mother run the restaurant. She never returned to Boston and never had any regrets about her decision to stay, she said.

Her bout with cancer has been like God’s “tap on the shoulder,’’ and made her consider selling the restaurant, she said. She doesn’t want to end up like her parents, who never retired, but got sick and died while working, she said.

As for her future plans and upcoming surgery Tenerowicz is upbeat and optimistic. If she did sell she’d work part-time and check off a few items on her things-to-do-list. Among those things would be visiting more friends and relatives, attending concerts and dabbling with ceramic crafts.

“I want my life back while I still have a life,” she said.