Executive editor {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. AUBURN — The new owners of the former Parker's Grille & Tap House didn't need to think too hard about what to rename it. Dustin Culver and Michaela Nicpon, who closed on the popular downtown restaurant Thursday, reopened it that afternoon as Parker's 129.
The number comes from its Genesee Street address. "Everyone's still gonna call it Parker's," Nicpon told The Citizen. She and Culver needed to rename the restaurant as a condition of buying it from Pete Mitchell, founder of Parker's Grille & Tap House and its five locations in the Finger Lakes.
He sold four of them this year, along with 84 Fall in Seneca Falls and Halsey's in Geneva. Culver and Nicpon, who's managed the Auburn location for four years and worked there for seven, decided to buy it last year. The new owners have fielded anxious questions about the future of the restaurant from staff and customers alike, they said.
But Parker's itself will change about as much as its name has. "We want to continue to be the Parker's that people know and love," Nicpon said. "We still want it to be someplace people want to bring their families, people want to meet their friends and have a good time.
We want to keep it very true to what it is, because we love what it is." Dustin Culver and Michaela Nicpon discuss their decision to buy Parker's Grille & Tap House in Auburn, which they have renamed Parker's 129. .