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Linn’s Restaurant co-owner Aaron Linn and his mother, Renee, show off the specialty of the bakery, olallieberry pie. They sell any and all things olallieberry: from olallieberry preserves to cabernet.
It’s early Easter morning 2006 and a Cambria family’s life’s work is going up in smoke as an aging ballast in a fluorescent light fixture overheats, explodes and ignites a hot water heater’s gas line.
John and Renee Linn’s landmark restaurant in Cambria’s East Village—Linn’s Main Street Bin — is gutted in the ensuing inferno.
If the Linn name is familiar, it’s because you may have shopped for pies at their retail outlet in Paso Robles or eaten at one of their restaurants or cafes in San Luis Obispo or Cambria over the years.
On that date in 2006, after almost 30 years of hard work, sacrifice and taking chances as small-business owners, the Linns faced starting over.
The story of the Linn family’s beginnings, work ethic success, setbacks and ultimate resurrection as business and community leaders began in the late 1960s when John was accepted into the English master’s program at the University of Kansas at Lawrence.
While there, he met Maureen McGonigle, the second of nine children of Bill Mc- Gonigle, owner of McGonigle’s Market in Kansas City, an establishment whose claim to fame is that it’s believed to be the best meat market in one of the best beef towns in the world.
Maureen, who goes by Renee, was studying fine arts graphics at the university. The two met, married in 1972 and, with son Justin in diapers, moved to Denver to start a business.
Adding son Aaron and daughter Aimee to the brood, though, focused the couple’s future goals as a family.
“What’s the best thing we can do for our children?” John remembers. “Where can our kids grow up with a strong work ethic?Where they can be productive and not have their hands out? Where they can be accountable for their actions in a small town and not hide in a city’s anonymity?”

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