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Back Bay veggie restaurant suddenly shuts down
By adamg on Thu, 08/24/2023 - 2:09pm
The Clover Food Lab outlet at 565 Boylston St. closed today, victim, the owner says, of a combination of long Covid-19 effects and a landlord who wouldn't negotiate a rent reduction.
CloverBBY took over the space of the failed Minigrow in December, 2019 - just in time to get whacked by the pandemic. Owner Ayr Muir writes today:
Fast forward. We’ve lost about $350k/ year operating this restaurant the past few years. The rent? Coincidentally, $350k/ year.
And taxes to the City of Boston? They doubled during the pandemic and are over $60k/ year!
And our sales? The lowest of any restaurant we currently operate or have ever operated.
Our Landlord there is the Community Church of Boston. I started talking to them about solutions a year ago. We’ve tried to find other interested parties last fall. I appealed again and again. In March we offered the Church an alternative tenant, a national operator who wanted the space. The Church didn’t respond. We stopped paying rent to try to force the conversation. I reached out to everybody I knew there to try to discuss some changes to our rent agreements, I offered to speak to their Board; they didn’t take me up on that.
None of the workers at the location will lose their jobs, Clover says - they've been offered positions at other Clover locations.
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Comments
a commercial lease is a business agreement
property owners don't have to negotiate the terms after the fact
They don't have to, but sometimes it is in the owners interest
It can better for the landlord to negotiate a smooth transition to a new tenant rather than going through an eviction process and then lawsuits trying to get money from a bankrupt entity and then *still* needing to find a new tenant. But the details matter and we don't have any here, at least not until there's lawsuits we can read.
We stopped paying rent ....
To try to force the conversation ...
Enough said...
Hee Hee Hee
When the real world bumps up against your bunny rabbit food.
I love it when people think of rent as a concept that can be made to go away because you don't think its fair.
Kids today amirite??
I understand that you don't understand but Clover generated $11m in revenue last year.
The real world?
There's only something like 270 million people eating that "bunny rabbit food" in India alone, but maybe that doesn't qualify as "the real world" for Johnny Boy here.
(Also, you know people who eat meat can also eat vegetables for some meals? You might want to try it sometime)
Bunny rabbits
John, do you hunt for all the food you eat, or do you go to the grocery store like the rest of us? Would you have had the same retort if it was a butcher shop that closed? I should be surprised that in 2023 that someone who spends his days commenting on 90% of the articles on a local news site feels the need to denigrate vegetables but this is the reality we live in
The Food Isn't That Good
Yet the attitude of Clover is that somehow they are superior in what they do to all others.
That's why the actions of the owner to his rent bill is just comical because the other side, here a very liberal and active religious group, told him to piss off.
I can't imagine...
Why someone wouldn't want to negotiate with such a charming and nice person like Ayr Muir.
I know about the back wages issue, what else has he done?
I know about the salary/hourly pay settlement from a while back, but i didn't know he had such a negative rep. What other drama is he known for?
Salmonella Denial
Clover utterly failed to take a salmonella outbreak seriously about seven years before the pandemic.
https://www.universalhub.com/2013/clover-locations-shut-due-salmonella-o...
They ended up having to shut down nearly the entire chain as they had infected employees serving food and an utterly nonexistent food safety program and culture.
https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2013/07/expert-popular-boston-restaurants...
Yes, it's always hard to
Yes, it's always hard to untangle sociopathy from business. It was never a love of food or mission to teach people how to eat well without meat. First and foremost, it was to grow quickly and make lots of money by finding an unfilled niche in our local fast food market.
Too close to the Prudential Center location
It made no sense to have that one and the one inside the Pru. They must have decided the on in the Pru is the better location.
wow
I wish I could stop paying my mortgage to get my bank to negotiate a lower interest rate.
I'm sorry that isn't how this works. You just don't stop paying to force a conversation. Especially a lease or a mortgage, that's a sign contract. You're required to pay or you're out. It's just that simple.
I can't blame them for not responding, even while he was paying rent. The minute someone says "rent reduction", I'd be not renewing your lease because there are plenty of other business that would like to rent my space.
And for a church. Yep they are a landlord, but I am gonna take a guess that their sole source of income is the leaseholders in their building, not the church itself. And considering their website says their services are free and there is no fee to become a member.
Their website also says they have been in that building since 1965 (wow!), so I think its safe to say that their sole source of income to keep their center there is from the ground floor retail space.
Now you could ask if $29,166/mo is the right asking price for rent. I knew retail space rents were absorbant but man, that's like a price of a low end car. Remind me not to rent retail space in Boston.. wow.
Regardless the guy's crying about rent and taxes. Um buddy, ever hear of the 'cost of doing business'. If it's too much for you, then you might want rethink having a business.
I don't think he's crying.
He's simply explaining the reason for the closure and publicly framing the eventual lawsuit.
Yes, but, he might want to chill on one thing
In his post (the link for which, arrgh, I managed to leave out initially), he writes:
No. I mean, they're lawyers, so they might actually be combative, but they're also following legal ethics: Lawyers aren't allowed to just contact people on the other side if those people are represented by their own lawyers.
tl;dr
But if you read the whole post (which Adam has now linked) he mentions that they've hade god interactions with several of their landlords during the pandemic, but that this one doesn't want to play ball.
The whole point is that this is out of the ordinary compared to other landlords which have been helpful keeping businesses around.
I dont think it matters
Point being is..
he stopped paying rent in order to get action. Sorry it doesn't work that way. Who cares if this worked for other property owners, he should have not done that.
I'll stick to my tried and
I'll stick to my tried and true pioneer....The Moosewood Cookbook.
Dirt Candy
Another good one.
tax
the churches