Opening postponed for The Northport Hotel Restaurant; staff laid off amidst “difficult decisions”

Updated Friday, August 25: The Northport Hotel Restaurant bar is closed until further notice. Visit the hotel’s social media pages for the latest updates.

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“Your reservation has been canceled by the restaurant.”

That’s the notification provided by Open Table, an online reservation service company, many eager patrons of The Northport Hotel Restaurant received earlier this month, nullifying plans for dinner on opening day and beyond, and foreshadowing a series of events that prevented the restaurant from opening to the public at all.

While officials at the restaurant originally predicted the postponement to last just a few weeks, hotel and restaurant co-owner Kevin O’Neill told the Journal on Tuesday that an early October opening is more realistic. “We’re not ready,” he said. “We tried to do things the right way and we had a failure. But you know what? We have to keep moving forward.”

According to O’Neill, it was realized at the hotel’s private friends and family event in late July that the restaurant was not operating to the standard the owners envisioned. “It’s on me,” O’Neill said; while trying to get the hotel up and running, he trusted management to handle staffing and prepare the restaurant. He feels he may have missed some cues while out readying the hotel for opening day.

“We tried to make a go of it, in terms of staffing and training, and the race to the finish to try to get the place open, but we got into a situation where all of a sudden we’re at the opening for friends and family night and we were not going in the direction that we wanted to be in,” he said.

“Terminating all positions effective immediately”
Restaurant employees and waitstaff continued training as usual after the friends and family event (though the head chef was let go immediately, sources told the Journal). The restaurant opened on August 1 for hotel guests only; all rooms were booked for a local wedding and O’Neill and fellow hotel owner Richard Dolce wanted to make sure guests were served. Management had to “piecemeal” a bit that first week, O’Neill said, and made the decision to not yet open the restaurant to the public. Reservations for the first few weeks of August were canceled by the restaurant.

On Tuesday, August 8, the restaurant’s general manager walked away from his position.

Three days later, on a Friday afternoon, an email was sent out to members of the restaurant staff with unexpected news. “We have made the difficult decision to postpone the opening of our restaurant to ensure that everything is in order,” the email, shared with the Journal by a then-employee, read. “Our top priority is to provide our guests with the best possible experience, and we believe that taking a little extra time will help us achieve that goal. As such, we are terminating all positions effective immediately.” Hotel guests would no longer have the option of dining in.

An employee who spoke to the Journal on condition of anonymity said that when the email was sent, waitstaff was readying for a mock service later that evening.

“It could have and should have been handled in a completely different way, in my opinion,” the employee, a Northport resident with years of restaurant and hospitality/hotel experience, said. “I’d like to think it could have been done thinking about the employees whose lives were affected.” Hired in June, the employee had been training at the restaurant for a few weeks and was looking forward to working there long term.

The employee acknowledged mismanagement within the restaurant, from ownership down, that began during the hiring process through to training; he claims the process was “shoddy,” operations disorganized, and that much of July training happened in the middle of construction and other distractions.

“Just to make these small wages and sit through this process, when we could have had other jobs, left a really bad taste in my mouth,” he told the Journal. “The team that got fired didn’t deserve that.”

From a business standpoint…
“We don’t take it lightly that we brought people on and then we couldn’t [keep them],” O’Neill said. But when management was moving in the wrong direction, he continued, and with the kitchen closed, the business became unsustainable and difficult decisions had to be made. “We feel we did the best we could. We tried as hard as we could to keep people on board. We put a lot of faith in our management and made changes. Hard changes,” he said.

“I think there are some people who think we are immune to payroll and expenses, and hemorrhaging at a time when we are going in the wrong direction,” O’Neill said. “If you’re going in the wrong direction, you can do one of two things: you can continue to do the wrong thing ‘righter’ or you try to do the right thing. And we tried to do the right thing, and that required a significant departure of key management people and bringing on new people. Instead of doing it piecemeal and ripping the bandaid off one hair at a time, we had to make a major change.”

O’Neill said he feels terrible about the people who left jobs to be at the restaurant and hopes they are interested enough to come back when the restaurant is closer to opening. All terminated waitstaff were given a $500 severance in their final paycheck, he said.

What’s next?
The Northport Hotel Restaurant bar is currently open to the public every day, starting at 4pm. The kitchen is closed for the foreseeable future, while management and staffing is retooled, and new relationships formed. “We are very excited about the direction we are going right now because we have some serious people that are aligning themselves with us, between management and staff,” O’Neill said. “I think people are going to be very pleased when we do open.”