“It’s Friday night and we’re slammed,” says Nolan Konkoski, chef and owner of Soho in Ohio City. “You have a rail full of tickets in the kitchen to deal with and the power goes out. The cooking equipment still works because it’s all gas, but the hoods stopped working, the AC stops working and suddenly it’s 90 degrees inside. Diners are asking for their checks, everybody’s miserable. This is a nightmare, it always is.”
Widespread power outages over the holiday weekend forced many small businesses to abruptly shift into triage mode, dealing with an unexpected disruption to their livelihood. For many Cleveland restaurants, the chaos that comes from the sudden loss of power is just the start of a distressing trail of financial and logistical obstacles that will take hours, days and weeks to correct.
“We were having our best weekend ever and then the power went out at 8:30 on Saturday night,” says Matthew Fish, who opened Proof Public House in Ohio City just three weeks ago. “Unfortunately, we had to throw every single thing away that we have. We’re starting from scratch today; we’re just now putting everything back together.”
In a statement to customers, Cleveland Public Power said thousands of customers on Cleveland’s west side were affected by the power outages due to the prolonged extreme heat and Friday night’s storm. Because the outages involved substation equipment, repair and restoration projects took longer than usual.
For residents, the loss of power can be a major hassle resulting in the loss of air conditioning, the spoilage of fresh and frozen food, and more. For a local restaurant, those losses are just the beginning of a lengthy, stressful and expensive process of getting back in business.
“We spent six hours here yesterday, literally cleaning out every cooler, putting everything into garbage bags and filling our dumpster with it,” says Fish. “Every sauce, everything we made from scratch, all the raw ingredients. It’s time, it’s labor, it’s product cost, all down the drain. It’s very disheartening, to be honest with you.”
For Jonah Oryszak, owner of Heart of Gold in Ohio City, the loss of fresh and frozen food was just the start of his financial fallout.
“We lost power at 8 p.m. on Friday with a full dining room,” he explains. “Yesterday I went in to reconcile all the open checks and our POS system informed me that preauthorization for credit cards don’t stay longer than 24 hours. So we lost all of the money from the people who were eating dinner at the time the power went out. I wouldn’t even know how to get ahold of any of them. It feels weird searching for them on social media.”
For Konkoski, who runs Soho with his wife and business partner Molly Smith, power outages are nothing new. He has been running a restaurant in Ohio City since 2011, so he has been at the mercy of Cleveland Public Power for 15 years.
“There are infrastructure problems with CPP, I don’t think that’s a secret, but the biggest frustrations we always have is the complete lack of communication during these events,” he states. “Things happen, there’s weather, power goes out but it just happens more and more, the outages get longer and longer, and there are never any improvements that we’re aware of, so you’re just expected to live with it and deal with, and for most of us, that’s the biggest frustration beyond the immediate financial impact.”
Those feelings of powerlessness are shared by many residents and business owners in Cleveland, as FirstEnergy customers also saw lengthy outages.
Cory Hajde, owner of Rood in Lakewood and Cloak & Dagger in Tremont, feels that it’s time for the state to step in and compel improvements to our local grid.
“We spoke to our Councilman Austin Davis about our concerns and told him how much money we are losing and how much money our employees are losing every time this happens,” he says. “We can’t hold the power company accountable, we can’t hold our local government accountable, it’s the state level that is letting this happen through less infrastructure upgrades. I can’t even tell you how many claims I’ve filed with PUCO and I’ve never heard back. There are so many angry residents, so many angry business owners, we have organize something and do something. We need to be heard.”
As restaurant owners like Konkoski, Oryszak, Fish and others finish cleaning up, restocking and attempting to reopen their doors this week, what they need most is support from the local community. Most said that insurance will not step in to save the day, pricy generators would only set them back financially even more, and the loss of a summer holiday weekend will be a challenge to overcome.
“It sucks that we have to count on our community to keep our businesses open, because it shouldn’t have to be that we are in dire need like probably 40 other restaurants in the city,” adds Hadje. “If you can and you want to help us, that would be really great, right now especially.”
For Fish, who was riding the momentum that comes with opening a new restaurant, that support literally could be the difference between survival and collapse.
“It could be devastating, to be honest with you,” he admits. “I don’t have a safety net. I don’t have money in the bank to support things like this. I don’t have them. Everything that I was doing was on a very shoestring budget and a very tight budget, and I needed everything to work from day one. I needed business to be here. I needed the staff to click. I needed the food to work.”
Fish plans on reopening – possibly with a limited menu – today at 4 p.m. That’s assuming that there are no more unpleasant surprises standing between him and his first customer.
“We still have all the dirty dishes from Saturday night to wash,” adds Fish. “I have two hours of dishwashing to do this morning.”
Subscribe to CLE Bites, Doug Trattner’s weekly food newsletter.
Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
