Restaurant gets funds from Barstool Sports
Donations from popular website to pay utility bills
Prior to mid-december, Cheryl Bergendorff could not have told you who Dave Portnoy is.
“I guess maybe I’d heard there was a guy who did something with sports online and tasted pizza,” said Bergendorff, owner for the past 24 years of La Conca D’oro, an Italian restaurant in this riverside village 35 miles south of Albany.
Fortunately, Bergendorff ’s daughter was more familiar with Portnoy, who just paid off 10 months of La Conca D’oro’s utility bill.
Portnoy founded a print publication in the Boston area in 2003 called Barstool Sports that grew into a sports and pop-culture website with 8 million visits a month. He has a special affection for restaurants, which resulted in pizza reviews that became a highlight of Barstool Sports.
Disgusted by federal inaction to help the hospitality industry and small businesses in general during the coronavirus pandemic, Portnoy used $500,000 of his own money to launch a bailout fund.
In less than two weeks, the fund has grown to almost $17 million from more than 130,000 donors. According to Bergendorff and published reports, businesses selected as recipients will receive funds throughout the pandemic.
“If you get approved into our fund, you tell us how much you need — whether it’s for rent, taxes, payroll — and we’ll be there until this thing is kinda over,” Portnoy said.
“I don’t know how much it’s going to be total, or how long it’s going to last, of if we have to ask for it every month, or even what ‘end of the pandemic’ means,” said Bergendorff. “I do know this is going to help a lot.” She said she has already received one disbursement from The Barstool Fund, adding that it fully covered the restaurant’s utility bill, which had been mounting, unpaid, since March.
Bergendorff, who said business for 2020 was down by more than half over the previous year — “and getting worse each month” — made a video about the restaurant, her life as its owner for more than two decades and 2020’s pandemic-related struggles. It may be viewed on the fund’s page.
“COVID has changed everybody’s world,” Bergendorff says in the video. She says she adapted to takeout, previously a minimal part of the restaurant’s business, and built a system for online ordering. “We tried anything and everything to keep afloat and keep our loyal customers happy, and I decided I am not going down without a fight,” she says.
The video was submitted on Christmas Eve, according to Bergendorff, and her phone rang with a Facetime call on the morning of Dec. 26.
“I’d never done Facetime,” Bergendorff said, referring to Apple’s videocalling feature, “but my daughter was saying, ‘Answer it! It’s got to be Dave!’”
It was.
Portnoy told her that La Conca D’oro was one of the more than 50 businesses, from yoga studios to pestcontrol services and many restaurants, selected so far to receive aid from The Barstool Fund.
“I burst out crying,” Bergendorff said Monday. “I think I’ve cried every day since when I think of how much of a gift this is.”