Review: At Hilltop Restaurant, the sort of local place you should try to save in 2025

Price hikes and more threats to family restaurants mean it’s time to champion one

Better-than-grandma’s-meatloaf lives up to its name at Hilltop Restaurant.

The Hilltop Restaurant & Bar is the rare locally-owned family restaurant these days: It has a full house many nights of the week.

The Lockport restaurant, opened a decade ago by Anthony Conrad and Crystal (nee Bitsas) Conrad, has worked its way into the lives of Lockportians with old-school touches like housemade bread with entrees, a takeout window for easy pickup, and family packs for one-stop family feeds.

Tapping into their restaurant family tree, Anthony and Crystal are serving up baklava cheesecake and Bunyanesque meatloaf platters in the sort of locally flavored restaurant that any neighborhood would be happy to call its own. Those are the places especially threatened by the cost increases American restaurants will face in 2025.

That baklava cheesecake is made at Country Club Family Restaurant in Medina. That place is owned by Crystal’s brother James Bitsas, who with wife Melinda Sechowski also owns Olive Leaf in Lockport and Cusimano’s Pizzerias. Her sister Angela owns Bill’s Diner in Newfane.

Grilled top sirloin with cinnomon-glazed sweet potato fries at Hilltop Restaurant & Bar.

You don’t have to grow up in a restaurant family to make a living feeding your neighbors, but it helps. Even if money is short, restaurant kids can absorb hard-won lessons passed down by elders, find extra hands when things go sideways, and feature specialties sourced from other branches of the family tree.

That’s why the Hilltop gives you the feeling these people have done this before. They have the answers.

When I walked into a mostly full restaurant on a Friday night, and ordered a tableful of food, that was a standard challenge, service-wise. Then I got a text, and asked our server to play on hard mode.

“Can I get a fish fry to go, and what’s for dessert? I’m in a hurry all of a sudden.”

TV-equipped bar at Hilltop Restaurant & Bar.

One test of a capable restaurant team is dealing with awkwardness without losing focus. If you ask nicely, they will do everything they can to sort out your issues.

So when Amber returned and reported the fish fry was sold out, I asked her to fire an order of cannoli-filled beignets, and pack slices of baklava cheesecake and pumpkin spice cake to go. Then I called the Shamus and ordered the necessary fish fry, ready in 20 minutes.

Amber made it work, no big deal.

Housemade bread with snazzy butter comes with Hilltoop entrees.

But it was a huge clue to that busy parking lot. At the Hilltop, they know what they’re doing.

Entrees come with soup or salad, and fresh housemade bread and jazzed-up butter. We got both soups, cheeseburger and creamy clam chowder with potatoes. They were both diner ideals, meaning if all you could afford was a bowl of soup you would still walk away sated.

Frozen dumplings are warmed up in many kitchens, but Hilltop folds pasta around fingers of ground pork and cabbage for its potstickers ($13). They arrive with garlicky teriyaki and housemade pickles.

Pork-and-cabbage potstickers and housemade pickles at Hilltop Restaurant.

Crab and lobster cake appetizer ($15), two inch-thick well-browned patties of lump lobster and crab. On a bed of baby arugula, accented with lemon-dill aioli, it satisfied people with Baltimore crabcake experience.

Another seafood appetizer, scampi shrimp Tortuga ($15) sported shrimp sautéed in cilantro lime scampi sauce, with olives and candied jalapeños. We mopped it up with bread and I appreciated the South American flavors.

Cheeseburger soup, house salad, house bread board at Hilltop Restaurant & Bar.

Better Than Grandma’s Meatloaf ($18) lived up to its name. Unless grandma has taken to wrapping bacon around seasoned ground beef and offering it in gravy-moated towers, with garlic green beans and whipped Yukon potatoes. Closer to savory cake than fudgelike versions, it was everything I needed in meatloaf. Including the foundation of tomorrow’s meatloaf sandwich.

Retro Mac and cheese ($18) is noodles baked in a matrix of asiago, sharp cheddar, and parmesan cheeses, arriving under a quilt of golden breadcrumbs. Mushroom sacchetti ($20) offered fungi-filled pasta pouches napped in cream and more mushrooms.

Hilltop’s tavern steak and fries ($28) starts with center-cut top sirloin and brings an automatic upgrade to sweet potato fries, glazed with cinnamon syrup. Grilled vegetables round out the plate for nutritional purposes.

Anyone who has been fortunate enough to eat doughnuts warm from the fryer knows they are superior. Hilltop’s dessert menu boasts beignets ($8.50), a pair of frycakes filled with cannoli filling or seasonal fillings like sour cherry.

Cannoli-filled beignets, Hilltop Restaurant & Bar

Baklava cheesecake and pumpkin spice layer cake ($9 each) went home with a co-diner, professional baker and Terroir General Store operator Jessica Dittly.

The cheesecake triumphed with NY style cheesecake sandwiched between thin laminations of baklava with a honey syrup, she reported. The cake still offered “lovely crumb texture, and pronounced clove profile with buttercream.”

This year, the Hilltop Restaurant & Bar notches its first decade of service to Lockport neighbors and hungry travelers. In the last six months, family-owned restaurants with well-known names are going dark in bunches.

Worse is coming. Normally I’m not much for predictions, but profit margins will drop across the restaurant landscape in 2025, sure as sunrise.

More than 80 percent of U.S. fruit and vegetable imports will be more expensive, since they come from Mexico or Canada. Immigrants, essential to harvesting American fields and orchards, are exiting or hiding. Who will harvest?

That tells me two things: Prices are going up, and you don’t want to be in the shoes of owners trying to guess what that’ll do to spreadsheets already intermittently flashing red.

The next time you feel the impulse to visit Applebees, or one of its cookie-cutter corporate cousins, think of your future.

Baklava cheesecake, Hilltop and other family locations

See your old friends now while you can. Pick out a restaurant you want to be there for you, and become a regular. Bring your friends. Go to their favorites. Make your dining budget an investment in your dining future.

Put your money where your mouth wants to eat tomorrow.