A general sense of shock pervaded the greater ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä area when two restaurants, The Tidewater Grill and The Chop House, closed down for good with no notice over the weekend.
For so many reasons, this shouldn’t have been surprising, and yet it still was, to some extent.
The restaurants, owned by Mainstreet Ventures Restaurant Group, were located at the ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä Town Center mall, which has been in a death spiral for years. According to ownership, both restaurants were hit hard by COVID, and never turned a profit even after the pandemic faded.
Restaurants are risky business to begin with. Anyone in the industry will talk of thin profit margins that take a while to establish and a struggle to maintain steady customer flow after the newness of a particular place has faded. That’s why restaurants come and go with such regularity and old eateries are recycled so often. (There’s a reason a good portion of South ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä residents refer to a restaurant in their downtown area as “Mexican Shoney’s.â€)
Given everything these two restaurants were facing in the best of times, should anyone be so surprised that they’re suddenly gone?
Actually, yes.
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First off, these weren’t just any two restaurants. The Tidewater Grill had been around for nearly 40 years, and The Chop House for more than 20. In the restaurant industry, those are very strong runs. So, even if they were at a struggling mall, there’s at least one generation of customers who are used to those establishments being there.
Secondly, this all happened very suddenly, which is as horrible for the employees as it is startling for customers. Ownership didn’t offer up a comment as to why no one was informed in advance, but did tell the Gazette-Mail that the restaurants had been struggling for a long time and couldn’t wait on upcoming improvements to build back a customer base.
Fortunately, other restaurants and businesses have offered support for those who lost their jobs.
Of course, the over-arching theme of malaise and decline at the Town Center is hard to ignore. Developments have been slowed by bureaucratic processes, disputes between property owners and just about every other type of problem one could conjure. Traditional brick-and-mortar retail is outdated, and there’s no better symbol of the problem than a decaying mall occupying a significant portion of downtown space. It’s a difficult and expensive situation to rectify.
There’s a new sports complex on the way, along with other developments that should bring life back to the area, even if it’s not in a traditional retail sense. But those things do take time, even if no hiccups present themselves. It’s understandable that some businesses can’t afford to wait for what’s coming someday, although it would have been nice if, in this instance, ownership could’ve done better by its employees.
