Owner: Pandemic Has Changed Restaurant Landscape
A staple of the Broad Ripple neighborhood in Indianapolis should be celebrating its 30th anniversary but instead, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the owners of Old Pro’s Table to close. Co-owner Nicole Harlan-Oprisu says the decision was made due to several reasons, including a loss of revenue from being shut down during St. Patrick’s Day and the cancellation of March Madness. She says there are challenges facing restaurants and bars that many people don’t think about.
In an interview on Inside INdiana Business, Harlan-Oprisu said the decision to close OPT was a tough one.
“It had a couple different factors to it. Our lease for that building was up at the end of March. So, you know, we had to really factor in the loss of this year, you know, we lost St. Patrick’s Day, all of NCAA, all the basketball playoffs and, you know, those revenues really ride not just Old Pro’s Table, but sports bars in general through the leaner summer months.”
She says they had to weigh the cost of those losses with the possibility of no professional or college sports throughout the rest of the year to decide whether or not it was worth trying to stick it out and stay in business.
“At the end of the day, it just wasn’t worth it given this uncertainty going back into it, so we made a tough call.”
Harlan-Oprisu and her husband, Tim, operated the bar, along with other restaurants on the city’s north side including Northside Social and the Delicia family of restaurants. She says restaurants and bars are facing numerous challenges as they slowly start to reopen.
“Some of the concepts don’t have outside dining; some people are trying to figure out how to make that work. When this whole thing started, we had to basically switch to entirely different restaurant models; we changed our menus, our hours. We had to lay off a large quantity of our staff. We’re trying to figure out how to do a totally different thing than what we had been doing for, in some locations, 10 years or more.”
She says now as they start looking to reopen, they’re starting to see the same challenges in reverse.
“We’re going to be operated a full-service restaurant at some point and also a carry-out restaurant at some point and those two things, for most people, did not exist simultaneously.”
Harlan-Oprisu says there is also a concern for the safety of employees. “There’s a possibility that they are not going to be able to return to anywhere close to the income they were making previously and they’re putting themselves at risk to do so.”