How Not to Leave Town: Restaurant Edition

 

In a textbook example of kicking your host on the way out the door, restaurant owner Desmond Reilly has blamed crime at the Mall in Columbia as the reason for the failure of his three restaurants: Bennie’s, Chicken & Whiskey, and Walrus. 

‘The Mall in Columbia has become a different world’: Restaurateur blames crime for closures, Matti Gellman, Baltimore Banner 

This sounds a lot like the song sung by chef and owner Ashish Alfred in Baltimore not that long ago when he shut down Duck Duck Goose, Osteria Pirata, and Anchor Tavern in Fells Point. Baltimore residents took a dim view of this explanation. Since then the story of those restaurants has turned out to be a good deal more complicated than Alfred’s excuse. 

Blaming failure on someone else is cheap and easy. Perhaps it is done to deflect attention away from oneself. But I can’t help thinking that, had Reilly been nothing but gracious, that’s how Columbia would have remembered him and his restaurants. 

Truth in advertising: I have never been to any of Reilly’s Columbia restaurants. I have no opinion on their quality whatsoever. 

Here’s one thing that concerns me far more than the current conversations about this topic on social media. It looks as though Reilly closed Chicken & Whiskey without notifying staff. That is reprehensible. It is far worse than casting aspersions on the Mall. I’ve written about this before, when Mutiny closed.

High and Dry, Village Green/Town², 1/31/2024

People who work in restaurants are no different than the rest of us. They need to eat, pay rent, care for their kids, pay for doctor bills and medication. Just because we as patrons see restaurants as places for recreation doesn’t mean that the employees work there for fun. It’s hard work, often hard physical labor. The hours can be grueling as well. Twelve-hour shifts are not uncommon.

Imagine that you got up and went to work on Monday morning and your job didn’t exist anymore. What would you do? How would you feel? Do you think it would make a difference if your place of employment gave you advance warning? I do. It takes time to file unemployment and have it go through, for instance. 

Closing a restaurant without giving your employees advance notice prevents them from doing the kind of thinking and decision-making that will be necessary for them to take care of themselves in a financial crisis. 

Could crime have contributed to the demise of Bennie’s, Chicken & Whiskey, and Walrus? Possibly. I think we’ll eventually discover that the answer is far more complicated than that. 

For me, the takeaway is simply this: the kind of person who would close a restaurant without notifying staff is not someone who cares about the most basic component of the hospitality business: people. I don’t think I’d want to eat his food at this point, no matter where it was available. 

Village Green/Town² Comments