It’s been gone 12 years, the man who built it passed away in 2022, and the building it occupied is now a real estate office. But while JP’s Hard Luck Diner is no longer part of Traverse City’s culinary scene, its legacy will live on in a unique way, thanks to a brand-new song by major country artist Ryan Hurd. Titled “JP’s Hard Luck Diner, Permanently Closed,” the track weaves a quirky tale about the once-legendary Traverse City eatery – even though Hurd himself admits he never set foot in the place.

Known both as a country songwriter (he’s penned hits for the likes of Luke Bryan, Blake Shelton, Diplo and Morgan Wallen, Tim McGraw, and Lady A) and as a performer (“Chasing After You,” his duet with former partner Maren Morris, made it to No. 23 on the Billboard Hot 100), Hurd has made a name for himself in Nashville circles. Speaking to The Ticker, though, he says he still considers himself a Michigan boy through and through. Hurd was raised in Kalamazoo, and even named his new album Midwest Rock & Roll, filling its nostalgic, emo-tinged country songs with memories of Michigan winters, lighthouse-lit summer nights, and small-town romances.

“JP’s Hard Luck Diner, Permanently Closed” didn’t appear on Midwest Rock & Roll when the album originally released in March. When the time came to put together a deluxe edition, though, Hurd gravitated toward the song for its Michigan-centric narrative.

“I write a lot of music for other artists in country and pop music, so a lot of my writing is just writing; I don’t really know where the songs will end up,” Hurd explains. “Some of them end up on my projects; some of them get pitched to other artists. But when we were putting together the deluxe edition and wanting to have one more original song on there, it made too much sense to pick this one, just because it was such a Michigan song.”

Hurd got the idea for the track after visiting Traverse City in 2023 for a friend’s wedding.

“I was staying in a hotel on Front Street,” he recalls. “I checked in, and then I looked at my phone, wondering, ‘What’s the closest place to eat?’ JP’s Hard Luck Diner popped up. I clicked on it, and it said ‘permanently closed.’ And I was just so struck by the irony of the name. They called their shot. To me, it was so poetic.”

The song plays up that irony, imagining a fictional version of JP’s Diner whose inevitable doom was, perhaps, always spelled out in its “Hard Luck” name – “Every cup of coffee, foreshadowing the end,” as Hurd puts it in the chorus.

A week after the wedding, Hurd sat down with fellow country singer-songwriter Carter Faith to write the song.

“I didn’t know anything about this restaurant, and I didn’t know why it closed,” he says. “But it turns out it was a really beloved place, and I think it’s really cool to be able to bring it back to life for a second.”

Since releasing the song, Hurd says he’s been inundated with messages from past and current Traverse Citians, all sharing their fond memories of JP’s. One of those Traverse Citians was Ellen Pellar, the daughter of the eponymous JP, who says she found herself laughing and crying in equal measure when listening to the song for the first time.

“I thought it was hilarious, because my dad would have loved all of it,” Pellar tells The Ticker. “He was a huge country music fan, but he was also a storyteller. He was a mountain man, and he had all these crazy stories. So, the humor and irony of Ryan’s song, it couldn’t be more spot on for who my dad was. But there’s also a kind of sorrow to the song that I think resonated even more with me, because I lost my dad three years ago.”

JP – Joe Pellar – passed away in February 2022 after nearly a decade of declining health.

“My dad had a pretty massive stroke in 2012, and he lost the ability to talk and walk,” Ellen says. “He recuperated, and we stayed in business for about a year after that, but it was really hard because nobody could replicate what my dad did. And he never wrote anything down. He was not the man that was going off a recipe book. He did Friday fish fry nights for years, and his batter, no one else knew how to make it.”

Recipe book or not, Ellen says her dad had a “cult following” for cooking breakfast in Traverse City, with a broad clientele that frequented his restaurants for 20 years. “He knew every cop, every lawyer, every judge, every blue collar worker,” Ellen says. “I work at Floor Covering Brokers, and I still meet builders who say, ‘Oh, you’re JP’s daughter.”

JP got his start at Ham-Bonz, another erstwhile TC restaurant. He went out on his own in the early 2000s, opening the Hard Luck Café in the 810 East Front Street building now occupied by the Traverse Bay Café. In 2008, the business moved a few doors down, to 830 E Front Street (now home to the Keller Williams real estate office) and rebranded as JP’s Hard Luck Diner. Around the same time, JP’s started experimenting with an all-night diner model – inspired, Ellen says, by the then-recent closure of The Clock, an all-night eatery that operated for years in the now-demolished Calypso space on Munson Avenue.

The closure of JP’s Diner marked the end of several eras for Traverse City’s dining scene: the end of Joe Pellar’s 20-year breakfast empire, the end of the Hard Luck brand, and the end of all-night diners in Traverse City. With Hurd’s new song, though, Ellen says everything has come flooding back – from her family living in the upstairs apartment over the original Hard Luck Café space, to the many years she spent working for her dad, running front-of-house operations at JP’s.

“It was my whole life,” she says emotionally.

Hurd says it’s been humbling and gratifying to witness the outpouring of love for “JP’s Hard Luck Diner, Permanently Closed”  from Traverse City locals. It’s even made him want to find a way to perform the song in the town that inspired it. In the middle of his video call with The Ticker, Hurd turns to his manager and says: “We should play Cherry Fest up there next summer.”