The English Tea Garden on Broad Street may close its kitchen doors next spring with the current manager, Sharon Sheedy, making plans to retire.

The Tea Garden, a café-style restaurant and gift shop, is part of an outreach project overseen by the Church of the Holy Trinity.

Sheedy, who has been running the Tea Garden for the last 15 years, has worked hard over her tenure there. Her duties include purchasing the food each morning and then cooking all the meals by herself. Sheedy also manages a team of 20 volunteers that are composed from the parish of the church and the community.

“The restaurant will probably close because there’s just nobody to fill in her place, but hopefully the gift shop will stay open,” said Dave Morse, the caretaker of the house. “It’s a home away from home for a lot of the women [that eat here].”

The closing of the Tea Garden will be seen as a loss to many residents because the restaurant has been a pillar in the community, raising money for charities and providing a haven for elderly women.

As part of National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, the Tea Garden has raised money on Wednesday for the New Horizons Domestic Violence Program and Battered Women’s Shelter. Sheedy said that fundraiser was a great success.

“We made about $500 in profits which all went to the women’s shelter. We hope to fundraise for them again in April,” Sheedy said.

The Tea Garden is located in a Victorian house and was originally bought by the church in the 1950s. Though the Tea Garden is a restaurant and gift shop, the house has served as a meeting place for parish member Anne Ross and her sewing group for decades.

Sheedy first had the idea of creating a restaurant while visiting Ross and her sewing group in the house during 1988.

The sewing group that Ross formed continues to meet in a room at the Tea Garden every Thursday. Together they sew various clothing items that they either donate or sell to raise money for charities

“We make quilts and booties for children at Middlesex hospital. We also sew wash cloths together and make pouches that are filled with soap, toothpaste, and other toiletries to give to the Eddie Shepard Home for the elderly,” Ross said. “We knit prayer shawls, too. We donate them to people who are ill or who just need a little comfort.”

To convert the house into a restaurant, the house first had to be renovated to make it meet the health department regulations. Parish members put in a new ceiling and floor in the kitchen, and they had to add furniture and new paint to many of the rooms. Fundraising for the renovations and getting them completed took a year to do, so the restaurant opened officially in December of 1989. Despite the renovations, the restaurant still has a friendly and intimate atmosphere.

“I thought, wouldn’t it be nice for ladies to have a place to have tea in the afternoons?” Sheedy said, “but I soon found out that what they really wanted was lunch, too!’

The restaurant offers soup, salad, and quiche Wednesday through Friday, 11 a.m.-2 p.m., as well as three other hot entrees. All food is homemade on the premises by Sheedy. The desserts are the real highlight, though, with a menu including apple crisp, puddings, and several different types of pies. According to Sheedy, much of the money that the restaurant makes goes to paying bills, but that the Tea Garden tries to give as much money as possible to charities such as Headstart Education, a children’s program in Middletown.

”It really gives people a little bit of a different feeling then the average commercial establishment,“ Morse said. ”Ladies here often know each other and always love to chat with customers. When [the restaurant] closes next year, it will really be a huge loss for the whole community.“