In a small wooden cabin primed for to-go orders, just big enough for a stand mixer and pizza oven, Hound House co-owner Dave Diehl is working to satisfy the Friday night rush. He stretches and rolls dough into creations named after townspeople — the Guy Guy, the Elaine.
Out of the oven, staffer Nellie Alexie cuts pies into slices with a large ulu, like clean pieces of fish.
Hound House is the only joint in town. In fact, it’s the only restaurant in an expanse the size of Oregon outside of Bethel.
“It’s good. No competition means more business for you,” Diehl said.
While Diehl half-jokes, his wife and Hound House’s founder Esther Downhauser maintains that it would be nice to have other places to eat out in town. She started the business more than 30 years ago and has seen other restaurants come and go from Aniak. Now, Hound House remains the only joint in town.
In fact, outside of Bethel, it's the only official restaurant in the entire Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. But bypass mail price hikes could threaten the iconic eatery’s future.
Tonight, business is booming. But it’s quiet compared to the wintertime rush, when the Kuskokwim River freezes and becomes a highway throughout the region.
“When the ice road's in, our business, like doubles and triples,” Diehl explained. “Then we had the regional basketball tournament up here, and the whole village, the whole river — Akiachuck, Akiak, Tuluksak — we were working till about one o'clock every night.”
Out here, far from the road system and flanked by miles of wilderness between villages, it hasn’t been easy to keep Hound House in business.
Once every three weeks, Diehl and Downhauser receive a bypass mail order from a wholesale supplier in Anchorage.
But recently their setup was thrown a hurdle. This summer, the Trump administration announced a 9% price increase for bypass mail rates. It’s a way to bring money back to the U.S. Postal Service, but a decision Alaska’s most rural communities are feeling the brunt of. Esther Downhauser said the increase has cut into their profit so much they’re barely breaking even.
“I mean, it's just so hard to keep going,” Downhauser said. “It's like, every, every time you turn around, something else goes up. And it's, it's, you just get tired of fighting.”
Diehl said if prices were to increase further or bypass mail eliminated altogether, he’s not sure how much longer they could stay in business. Joe Joe Prince is a bus driver in Bethel. In the winter, he says he regularly drives his car the nearly three-hour stretch of ice road upriver to Aniak.
“It's just amazing food there, and they're such wonderful people,” Prince said. “It's fun catching up there. And I would hate to see it go.”
It’s a sentiment Downhauser shares. She says when she started Hound House back in 1994, she had no idea it would last this long.
“There's definitely a need for a place to go around here, the winters are long, and people just, they just need something else, something different,” Downhauser said.
She said it’s the people that keep her going, which extend beyond just Aniak. Hound House also delivers: they’ll send half-baked pizzas strapped in a bundle as air cargo out to nearby villages upon request. It’s a service that’s well-known across the Delta. But Diehl said the bush operation is difficult to sustain.
Aniak has two grocery stores. But bush prices are steep, especially at Hound House’s quantities. A pound of mozzarella cheese goes for nearly triple what it would in Anchorage, Diehl says it’s just too expensive to buy products locally.
And there are other hidden costs that come with running a restaurant in the bush, like high costs of gas, stove oil and electricity to keep the eatery going.
“You're not going to make a killing, but you can make a living,” Diehl explained.
Currently, a Hound House Special, extra large, goes for $42. A large pepperoni pizza is $32. Diehl said they don’t want to raise their prices any higher. Historically, when prices have ballooned for a period or they’ve lost money on spoiled bypass mail deliveries, they’ve eaten the cost internally.
“There's only so much money that people have,” Diehl said.
He said it might be getting time to retire, with grandkids to spend time with. But that could mean the end of Hound House and its almost legend-like reputation in the region. Diehl said Aniak is the kind of small place that when holes are left, other things are slow to rush in and fill the gap.
But for now, Friday nights in Aniak can still include Hound House pizza. And as for outsiders, it remains worth the trek, be it by bush plane, boat, or ice road.
