By Elissa Ely
You open the door of The Wellington Tavern and are seated. Soon after, a man comes by to welcome you. His accent is richly British and he is winningly attentive. You find him familiar. Once the beloved co-owner of Stone Hearth Pizza, Joe Arkinstall is the manager here, now. Unless it’s Sunday morning, he will almost always find you. Sunday mornings are for family church. “It keeps the soul nice and clean,” he says.
Restaurant management is a profession of perpetual motion: overseeing front-of-the-house cleanliness and appearance; overseeing back-of-the-house payroll, inventory, staff schedules, supplies; meeting with the head chef and owners. Endless logistical brushfires need dousing. (On the other hand, there are Wellington steak tips, and a tomato soup that tastes “absolutely gorgeous.”) Days are 10 to 12 hours long, but at the end of them, there is “a good fatigue.”
A manager’s mandate, in Joe’s view, is also “bringing a culture. It’s a brotherhood atmosphere, treating the dishwasher and the bartender and the owner the same—no bad blood, no bickering. If something happens on a shift and an employee feels unhappy, we jump on it and take care of it right away. The culture will ooze onto the floor, customers will feel it, and they’ll come back.”
Usually, we understand someone’s life through its timeline. In this case, it would be more useful to understand Joe’s life through its geography, tracing his movements between continents. There have been many.
Joe Arkinstall. Photo courtesy of Joe Arkinstall
He was born to British parents in Switzerland, one of five close siblings (he lives downstairs from his sister). “I was a wild child,” he recalls, sounding a little pleased. The Arkinstall kids skied together, hiked together, got lost in the backcountry together. Relocating for their parents’ work, the family always had one another, and they still do.
He went to schools in France until, with his father’s promotion to a Boston biotech company, they moved en bloc to Belmont. “The choice was between Lexington and Belmont,” he says. “My mom liked the name Belmont. It sounded French.”
Middle school is always rough entry, especially from another country, yet some of Joe’s closest friends are still from Chenery. Belmont High School was different, at least at first. “I had to reprogram my ADD brain,” he remembers, “It was hard within four walls.”
After a teacher caught him in the hallway tossing a rugby ball with friends, one happy result was cofounding the Belmont High rugby team. Next thing the boys knew, they were learning the game from their newly appointed coach, Joe was recruiting friends and the friends of friends, and a team was born. His playing days are over, but his high school rugby loyalty is strong. “They’re crushing it,” he says, with no attempt to dampen his ardor. “You’ll definitely hear me in the stands, and see me in the bleachers. I still have one of the stolen jerseys.”
Some of his family lived in the Welsh mountains, and England felt like home when Joe moved there for college and graduate school. Academic demands there scaled up quickly. “It was like releasing a manual clutch,” he says. “Not gradual, but ‘let’s go —10-page essay due Tuesday!’”
Joe knew he wanted to be in marketing and sales; it fit his temperament and sociable gifts. In business school, he volunteered with a South African nonprofit. His placement was in a small coastal town that was scrambling back after the 2008 recession had demolished their tourist industry.
Joe had ideas: one was to remanufacture recyclable waste into flip-flops, attractive pots, clothing—the kind of goods that would tempt slowly returning tourists and provide jobs for the locals. “University is a bubble, but this was an amazing way to pop it,” he says. “Here was the real world facing you, looking you dead in the eyes.” Looking back was profitable for the town, life-changing for him.
Back in Belmont—for Belmont had become home—Joe joined a different real world in a series of traditional sales and marketing jobs. “They put you in a grey booth with a squeaky chair to do the same thing day in and day out. It drove me mad. I need social interaction for fuel.” The fit with his sociability and temperament was poor.
COVID-19 was catastrophic for the country, but an opportunity for him. His sister co-owned Stone Hearth and in 2020, 10 months into the pandemic, Joe and a friend bought out the other co-owner (who, in the small world that is Belmont Center, also owned Champion Sports.) Here was the fit. “We had something, we really had something,” he says. “Stone Hearth opened the door. It was almost a homecoming.”
Creative survival strategies were imperative. They changed menu items, changed hours, hosted outdoor dining where alcohol was allowed, built a customer base from Joe’s school friends and the parents of school friends, delivered food themselves.
He was cashier, waiter, and dishwasher, sometimes all at once, up at 5 AM for supplies, and building the dynamic culture between staff and employees that he believed in; a brotherhood that oozed out welcomingly to customers. “We had the community on our side.”
The pandemic came under control, but 25 years of operation took its toll on the restaurant. First, the air conditioning died. Then ingredient costs rose, and the threat of governmental tariffs loomed. “It was sad, very very sad. We couldn’t keep the credit cards from going out. It chipped away at our little savings.”
When the last piece of large equipment broke irreplaceably, Stone Hearth had to close. It had been a community fixture for two and a half decades. “It makes you feel like a failure in a town you love,” he says. “Friends reached out to me when I left Stone Hearth and said, ‘Joe, are you done with Belmont?’ I said, ‘I’ll never be done with Belmont’.”
Across the street, Il Casale had always been a generous neighbor. He knew the Belmont owners and they knew him; a kind of competitive brotherhood. Once, when a Stone Hearth carbon dioxide-producing machine ran out (“you just cannot run out of soda in a pizza place”), the Il Casale brothers donated a new tank.
And so, the geography:
On June 20, 2025, Stone Hearth Pizza closed.
On July 6, 2025, Joe flew to France to be with family.
Soon afterwards, the brothers offered him a management position.
On August 20, 2025, he went to work at The Wellington, where he is about six doors down from where he started, the shortest distance he has ever traveled.
Elissa Ely is a community psychiatrist.
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