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.