Exonian Profiles
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Christopher Moutis ’82: ‘Local Boy
Makes Good (Food)’
As a child of a PEA faculty member, Christopher Moutis ’82 grew up on campus and always expected he would attend the Academy, just as his older brother and sister had before him. But just as he was about to enroll, his father, Nick Moutis, an administrator in the PEA physical education program for 25 years, was offered a job at Springfield College and the entire family moved to Massachusetts. But Chris Moutis’ attachment to the town of Exeter was strong enough to draw him back, not once, but twice: the first time, in 1979, to enter the Academy, and then as an adult to establish himself here as a restaurant owner. In 1992, he opened the Tavern, a popular bar and restaurant in downtown Exeter. Ten years later, after selling the Tavern, he opened his second restaurant, the Townlyne Grille, on the Exeter/ Hampton line. “ I so enjoyed growing up here,” Moutis says. “As a child, the town and the Academy were one in my head. I feel I had the best of both worlds—my father was a faculty member, while my mother, a science teacher at a public school, was active in town affairs.” Moutis also had the best of both worlds in another sense: “I had grown up on campus, where there was lots of freedom yet a terrific amount of safety and security. When I came here as a student, it was like coming home, but I lived in a dorm as a boarder, so I wound up getting the total experience.” After college at the University of New Hampshire and a year in
Washington, D.C., as an intern for N.H. Senator Warren Rudman,
Moutis came back
to Exeter for good. He laughs now when he recalls a story his parents
have told him. “Both my grandparents owned restaurants in New
Jersey, five blocks apart,” he says. “At age 6, I told
relatives that I wanted to have my own restaurant. Already, I was
drawn to the constant change and challenge of the business.” Although
his parents both were educators, Chris followed his grandparents’ vocation
and entered the restaurant business, but in the “notoriously
difficult restaurant town of Exeter, which upends business people
who don’t understand the incredibly mixed economic demographic
and the necessity of offering broad appeal.” People who stop by the Townlyne Grille today will likely find Moutis
there, no matter the hour, whether he is overseeing restaurant
business in the mornings,
tending the bar in the late afternoon hours or greeting customers in the
evenings. He couldn’t imagine doing anything else. “The best thing about
the restaurant business is the constant change,” he says. “No one
day is like another and each day brings a different set of problems and a different
set of gratifications.” The Moutis name still carries weight. Customers
will occasionally ask about his parents, like a former advisee of his father’s
who remembered Moutis as a child growing up in Merrill Hall. —
Janice Reiter
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