“We’d go up to Pineview and go swimming and that kind of stuff, and we’d always beg, ‘Please, can we stop for some ice cream?’ both ways,” Neal told the Standard-Examiner. “My dad would always say, ‘Oh, it looks like the parking lot is really full.’ You know, all those little excuses that parents who don’t want to pay make.”

Now, he and his wife, Cora — educators at Ogden-Weber Technical College and Weber State University, respectively — officially own the place.

Moreover, they have designs on reopening the restaurant this year.

“I used to have a restaurant in Northern California where we lived (previously). So, I would literally get up at 3:30, 4 o’clock in the morning, check out the restaurant, hop on the bus, go into San Francisco, work all day and then hop on the bus and come back to the restaurant to help close out dinner,” Neal said.

“My wife said, ‘You’ve got to do one or the other. You can’t do both.’ And, of course, I picked the nice-paying San Francisco job versus the restaurant job. She told me, ‘If you ever buy a restaurant again, I’m going to divorce you.’ … Fortunately, her mind has mellowed.”

Although he works as a culinary instructor at OTECH, jumping back into the restaurant game wasn’t part of some grand plan for Neal. Almost on a lark, he and his wife toured another historic canyon restaurant with realtor Braden Shupe last fall.

“We looked at the Gray Cliff Lodge, but that one just needed too much work,” Shupe told the Standard-Examiner. “So, I knew (The Oaks) had been on the market for a few years, but was off the market at the time.”

Nevertheless, arrangements were made for a showing. And after walking through The Oaks shortly thereafter, the Neals quickly realized they could do something with it.

“I think it was two or three years since it had actually functioned as a restaurant. And you can tell, restaurants go downhill pretty quickly,” Neal said. “But I just started falling in love with it. It’s a fun, little, quaint place to go. And I started thinking about all the traffic that goes up the canyon.”

Both Neal and Shupe said cars would stop at the restaurant with inquiries about a potential reopening when they were on site.

Although previous owners Keith and Belinda Rounkles retired in 2019 after nearly four decades of proprietorship — and subsequent revival efforts by other operators proved unsuccessful — The Oaks had remained entrenched in the Ogden-area lore.

Flash forward to last month, and the Neals were finally handed the proverbial keys to one of Utah’s oldest dining establishments.

For Shupe, being involved with its sale was a career highlight.

“My whole life, we’ve stopped in there,” Shupe said. “And that continued on to me and my family, you know, coming back from skiing, or pretty much every time we take the boat out to Pineview, my kids were always, ‘Hey, we’re stopping at the Oaks, right?’ … I’ve sold over 2,000 properties in my career. So, I’ve sold a lot, but this is just one that I know is big with the community and it’s actually big with myself, personally.”

Neal, meanwhile, is hard at work preparing the restaurant for its grand reopening, cleaning the building and working on essential renovations. The goal, he said, is to open the doors to customers new and old sometime in the next few months.

And while that process will mean at least some changes are coming to the restaurant that patrons from Weber County and beyond once knew, the Neals are committed to preserving as much of The Oaks’ legacy as they can, right down to their initial menu offerings.

“So, The Oaks is famous for burgers, fries, that kind of stuff. We’re going to concentrate on that,” Neal said. “Then, we’ll gradually start adding more complex dishes.”

They’ve got a solid resource in the legacy department, too.

“We still count on Keith because he knows every nuance of the building,” Neal said with a laugh. “You know, ‘Where’s the light switch for this thing?’ ‘Oh, you go down the stairs and turn left, and it’s on the wall over there.'”