After three years at 240 Foxhall Ave., Lone Wolf has announced their final call.

Taking over the space where the former Lis Bar was located, in a suburban section of Foxhall near the train tracks, owners and husband-and-wife duo Anton Kinloch and Lisa Dy felt like Lone Wolf was a good name after moving their business from New Paltz in 2023.

Despite their location being off the beaten path, the restaurant established a dedicated following who frequented the business for its carefully crafted cocktail menu and Asian-influenced bites.

But a financial assessment earlier this year produced grim results. Kinloch predicted they weren’t going to improve any time soon. They weren’t able to turn a profit in three years and, Kinloch said, during their entire time being open, he hasn’t been able to pay himself.

“I drained my life savings to make this happen,” Kinloch said. “I was hemorrhaging so much money.”

The endgame began, Kinloch said, when people began requesting a full dinner menu. This strayed from Lone Wolf’s original plan, which focused on an elevated cocktail menu along with a small menu of shared plates. As we put it in the original 2024 article this reporter wrote about Lone Wolf, the menu encouraged guests “to have a cocktail and a couple small bites before hitting Broadway for a larger dinner elsewhere.”

Regardless of this intention, Kinloch wanted to appeal to his guest’s requests and altered his menu to include dinner – adding more expenses to an already limited budget.

“We realized we were moving away from being a cocktail bar with a food program to being identified as a full-service food restaurant which is exactly what we didn’t want to be,” he said.

It didn’t take long for Kinloch to see that this alteration was fraying at the seams.

“We tried to backpedal and have a smaller, consolidated food menu and rum-centric drink menu to bring more passion back into what I was doing,” Kinloch said. Despite this, guests continued to request a full menu, many of which would walk out without ordering if they were denied this.

Kinloch said it came down to being “too ambitious” at the end of the day.

“I only have myself to blame for taking that on instead of listening to my gut and knowing that wasn’t possible,” he said.

In terms of the restaurant’s metrics, Kinloch said the majority of his guests were out-of-towners, whether from the tri-county area or further and that guests from Kingston made up around 3 percent of people who walked through his doors.

Kinloch, author of Kingston Wire’s “Something To Drink About” column, admits to being “outspoken about hospitality in our area.” He believes his beliefs are noble ones, rooted in the idea that people “shouldn’t settle for commercialized places” but should rather “aspire to try something new and exciting and pay a local person that’s providing several jobs that’s going back into the local economy.”

“Unfortunately,” Kinloch said, “the passion and ambition that I have can easily be mistaken for narcissism.” He says he understands this, but now that his business is approaching its end, he wants to be vocal about the “challenges with the economics” that he believes other business owners aren’t speaking up about.

Without owning your own building, having access to capital or functioning as a corporate chain, it becomes more than challenging to sustain a food and beverage business when the average person’s money is already tight and they can’t afford a meal or drink out as often as they used to.

“The odds are against all of us right now. It’s harder than ever when you’re dealing with factors that are completely out of your control.” He followed by saying that his sales are down 30 percent from last year already.

Whether you were a regular at Lone Wolf or still have yet to try their famous tiki beverages, you still have until Nov. 15, their final day of service, to check them out. After that, Kinloch is looking forward to taking his first vacation in eight years and spending quality time with his family. But, as is his indefatigable nature, he mentioned the possibility of a new iteration of Lone Wolf when he has time to reassess and strategize.

“Whatever comes next,” he said in his Instagram post announcing the closure, “it’ll look a lot more like who we were from the very beginning.”