“The ceiling fans are new! And I couldn’t help but notice the stools,” said Jan Frost as she waited for dessert at the reopened Peterborough Diner on a recent Monday.

She and Don Gordon, both of Peterborough, were looking around as their slices of lemon meringue pie arrived. 

“Forever” was their answer when asked how long they had been coming to the diner, although it might not have been before 1949, which is when the diner opened. The stools they notice might have dated from then, but co-owner Melanie Neily had them sandblasted and given new chrome rather than get new ones.

“It would have been less costly to replace them, but we didn’t want to redo the diner; we wanted to preserve it,” said Neily.

Nelly’s business partners are Krystal and Greg Sherwin, Realtors she met while purchasing the diner. Krystal has brought a retail and marketing background to the operation, and on a recent afternoon, Greg was putting the finishing touches on the front dining area, which include glossy black-and-white tiles that suggest 1949 rather than 2025.

“We didn’t expect the outpouring of support we’ve received from the community,” said Neily, referring to the goodwill they’re experienced leading up to the closure for a few weeks. 

An emotional high came in August when the cast and crew of the Broadway production of “Our Town” came to Peterborough to get a sense of the setting of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play written at MacDowell. The New York crowd ate at the diner and posed for photos, and when the crew from the diner attended the show, they were called up on stage before the curtain fell. 

Krystal Sherwin has brought a tech savvy to the operation that was unheard of in 1949.

“In the fall at one point we had 2,400 Instagram followers, but when we shared online images of the Christmas lighting we did with the trees out front, they got 22,000 views,” she said. 

Unchanged is the menu, on which Melanie says the reuben and fish chowder are favorites. Real maple syrup from Grand Monadnock Maple Farm was being delivered on a recent morning. Soups at the diner benefit people beyond just patrons.

“We have a soup of the day or soup of the week, and we take 100% of the receipts from the sales of those soups and donate them to a different charity each month,” said Neily. Recent donations from these soups have been made to the Monadnock Human Society and the Sunshine Fund.

Also tucking into lunch on the day the diner reopened were sisters Lina McLean of Falmouth, Mass., and Jeannie Sandonato of Weymouth. 

“We’ve never been here before,” said McLean.

Asked about their experience before heading out to a knitting retreat in Temple, Sandonato said, “We absolutely loved it.”