Bantam Grill and Pearl Restaurant will reopen on Tuesday, owner Harris Welden said, ten days after closing both eating establishments following a positive test for COVID-19 for one of his employees.
After receiving word that one of his employees at Bantam tested positive for coronavirus on Oct. 18, Welden made the decision to immediately close both restaurants out of an abundance of caution.
“We could have stayed open as long as we quarantined the people who worked that night,” he said. “But at that point I didn’t know how far it had spread.”
Tuesday will mark two weeks since the employee, who didn’t show any symptoms until two days after their last shift on Oct. 13, last worked at Bantam.
“They weren’t showing symptoms when they were at work,” Welden said.
In the time since the employee received the positive test results, Welden said every employee in both restaurants have been tested with all results coming back negative, and hired a professional cleaning company to sanitize both Bantam and Pearl. Welden offered to pay for employees to get tested if they did not have insurance to pay for it, but only will end up paying for six or seven out of the more than 40 employees in both restaurants.
Welden said they have been lucky up to this point with no employees or family members of employees contracting COVID-19, but he now sees how one positive result can change everything.
“You want people to feel like they can trust you, but in a way you feel like you failed them, even though it’s completely out of my control,” Welden said.
He said for the last six weeks at least one employee has gone for a COVID-19 test, which have come back negative outside the one, but it puts a strain on people missing work.
“That’s the game we’re playing right now and it’s an impossible game,” Welden said.
Welden said he alerted the state on Monday, Oct. 19 about the positive test, but a slow down in the contact tracing chain made it so he didn’t hear back for four days. At that point he was told of his possible exposure, something he was already well aware of.
The cost to the business for the shut down is hard to take.
“That one person that worked for me that got sick is probably costing me $50,000,” Welden said, between the loss in revenue and food, the cost of cleaning and paying his employees during the closures. “When you lose revenue from sales, it’s gone forever.”
He said his employee was devastated over the positive test and what it meant for the restaurants, but Welden said he reassured them it was not their fault and that it could happen to anyone.
He is fearful for the restaurant industry as a whole.
“There’s going to be a point in time when there’s going to be a certain percentage of restaurants that are done and not coming back,” Welden said. As of now he is doing okay, but there’s only so many hits he can take.
“All it takes is one employee getting sick and it puts you into a tailspin,” Welden said.
Welden said he decided to make the positive test public because he wanted to be honest with his customers and the community. What hurts is when that information is taken by news outlets, like an NBC-10 Boston report on Friday, and it’s used to infer there’s some sort of outbreak associated with the restaurant, Welden said.
“That hurt our staff and hurt the industry as a whole,” Welden said, with some people still skeptical about the safety of eating indoors. “It could have been positive and about all the steps we’re taking.”
Welden said he was contacted by Bob Wilkins of SoClean, who delivered the Peterborough company’s latest air purifying and sanitizing products the next day for when they reopen.
While Welden feels safe to reopen, he knows another positive test could mean another shutdown.
“I can only do it so many times,” he said. “Over time they’re going to start to add up and I’m going to get knocked out.”