Community helps hard-hit burger joint
When Roy Asselstine’s phone rang early Monday afternoon, you couldn’t blame him for thinking “what now?”
Asselstine, who — with Nicole Comber — opened their Peterburgers establishment at the corner of George and Lake streets late last year, had high hopes for 2020. A unique restaurant in an ideal location with a hungry fan base left room for optimism.
COVID-19 dealt the first blow. Like many other eateries, they were initially shut down, and even in the second phase of reopening, they still can’t have indoor seating.
Two weeks ago, their walk-in freezer died and they lost a good $2,000 in inventory and sales.
On Monday night, there was more bad news.
“My wife and I went to a cottage on the weekend and we got a call about 1 p.m. from Peterborough police about a report of a possible break-in at the restaurant.”
They were more than two hours away, so they asked friends to check it out. The friends met with police when they arrived. Someone had pried open the back door, found the cash register empty, threw a few things around inside, and
left the walk-in fridge open when they left.
Asselstine said he can monitor the inside of the store on his phone but hadn’t noticed anything. They think it happened the night before.
Once they arrived home, they got to work with a temporary door fix, but they were busy Tuesday ordering food, a new door, and getting rid of the meat and produce they had in the fridge.
There was no way of knowing how long the fridge had been open, so they found the Indian River Reptile Zoo would be willing to take the food off their hands.
After the first problem with the fridge, they kept a smaller inventory of meat on hand, but Asselstine figures the loss, along with lost sales, will likely cost them about $2,000 again. They’ve also ordered a steel door for the back.
The insurance deductible is too high to make a claim worth the effort.
“This hurts bad,” he said. It’s been one thing after another.
If there is any silver lining to any of this, he says it’s the reaction from other businesses in the community.
When the fridge quit two weeks ago, the Bridgenorth Delicatessen offered to replace the beef.
“We didn’t take it, but it was an amazing offer. We just said, ‘You’re a small business too. You can’t do this. We’ll be OK.’”
At the same time, another restaurant had offered storage space until their new fridge arrived. And on Tuesday, the Brick House restaurant offered to help if they needed to get up and running quickly.
It’s not just the restaurants. On Monday night, one of their customers offered to bring down a spare door from his place to replace the broken one until their new door arrived. Sometimes, Peterborough gets a bad reputation, but something like this just shows there are good people here ready to back you up, Asselstine said.
He said he hopes to reopen by Thursday at noon at the latest.