BRECKSVILLE, Ohio — Creekside Restaurant & Bar has been closed all week due to a lengthy power outage costing the business to lose all of its raw and prepared food.
Owner of the restaurant, Matt Harper, told me the power went out Monday morning prior to opening.
FirstEnergy confirms there were two outages that impacted the Brecksville area. Both were due to trees, a spokesperson said.
"We've had power outages before, and usually they come back up fairly soon, so we thought this one was going to be the same, but after a couple of hours it was like, OK, maybe this is a little different. We signed up for those texts from the Illuminating Company and so our manager was getting texts saying it'll be another 12 hours," Harper said, "And that kind of continued throughout the day and then finally, by the middle of the afternoon we figured, you know what, this is going to be a while, so that's when we decided we won't even make it to dinner."
As time went on, Harper said he and his team started to worry about their refrigerated product.
"We just hit the point of no return with all the refrigerated food, and there was refrigeration in the bakery upstairs, on the line, the coolers, everything," Harper said.
Harper estimates $30,000 worth of food had to be thrown out.
He didn't want to overflow the dumpster that is used by other businesses in the shopping plaza where Creekside is located in Brecksville, so he purchased a 10-yard dumpster.
"We estimated we had about 5,000 pounds of product that we had to throw out," Harper told me on Wednesday.
Without knowing when exactly his restaurant would have power again, he said he was forced to make a decision about whether to go ahead and order more food or wait it out.
He chose to restock.
On top of shelling out thousands of dollars to replenish the restaurant's goods, Harper said he lost roughly $50,000 in revenue over the course of being closed for three days.
Harper said even during the week, Creekside is normally packed, especially on Wednesdays for "Whiskey Wednesday" and happy hour.
The power did come back on around 8 p.m. on Tuesday, per Harper.
"We had to spend all day today (Wednesday) just prepping the food and getting everything from sauces and salad dressings and just everything that we need to get the restaurant up and going again," Harper said. "Every person we have in the kitchen was in this morning. It was great. It was great seeing the camaraderie working, and they were, you know, high-fiving each other and having a good time because they never all get to work together at the same time. You go through COVID, you do all these things at some point, you hopefully learn from it. It makes you stronger."
After spending hours prepping the restaurant for reopening, the power went out again very briefly Wednesday night while we were there.
Luckily, the outage only lasted a few minutes, but it gave Harper a scare.
"My blood pressure just rose a little," he said as the lights went out.
I reached out to FirstEnergy regarding Wednesday's outage.
A spokesperson told me via email, "The person out there may have been testing something that caused them to lose power for a second because we don't see an outage on our end, but I'd need to verify."
Harper said he does have business insurance that he hopes will cover the restaurant's hefty loss.
He's also hopeful, more so excited, that customers will return to Creekside once it reopens and business will continue as usual.
"This community's treated us so well. Next year is gonna be our 35-year anniversary, and this whole area has just treated us phenomenally," Harper said.
Even while we were there on Wednesday, about a dozen people tried stopping by for dinner, saddened to hear that it was still closed.
"I think this was just a freak thing that happened," Harper said. "We've never been out for anything close to this before, so, you know, sure, it could happen again. We have everything in place now that we've been through this; we kind of know what to do and how to do it."
Creekside Restaurant & Bar plans to reopen Thursday at 11 a.m.
