Rodizio Grill adapts to new world, aids local hospital
With three local hotels and one of the local franchisees for Rodizio Grill, Roshan Amin’s Dynamic Group Management has been hard hit by both the drop in travel and the month-long shutdown of local restaurants due to coronavirus pandemic.
But Dynamic’s leaders decided last month to try to weather the storm and pivot some of its business rather than close up shop. To keep as many of its employees on the job as possible, the 5-year-old Rodizio Grill in the Holiday Inn hotel downtown contracted with a local supplier to begin selling hand sanitizer to spur a new type of sales. At the same time, the restaurant began offering takeout food and donated deliveries to essential workers in the area to keep the kitchen staff busy.
“We wanted to find some innovative ways to keep our core staff on the payroll so they could keep their families fed,” Amin said. “It also helped us keep our key kitchen and restaurant staff working so that when we reopened for indoor seating as we did over the weekend, we didn’t have to retrain anybody or look for other workers.”
The Rodizio Grill downtown opened for limited inside seating over the weekend. Ahead of the reopening, the restaurant made food donations last month to a local fire hall and to the Lookout Mountain Conservancy as part of its 50th anniversary celebration of Earth Day.
On Sunday night, Rodizio Grill also gave 30 meals, along with free 3-ounce bottles of its hand sanitizer, to the night staff at CHI
Memorial Hospital in Glenwood.
“We just appreciate all that you are doing for our community during this difficult time,” Jonathan Armstrong, regional director of sales and marketing at Dynamic
Group Management, told Memorial hospital employees.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic entered the Chattanooga area this winter, more than 80,000 items have been donated to CHI Memorial Hospital, with everything from mask to gloves to food.
“We’ve had a tremendous outpouring of support from the community,” said Lisa McCluskey, vice president of marketing for CHI Memorial Hospital. “I think our teams have been fed by someone almost every day, ranging from donors who have called up Cici’s Pizza and ordered 200 pizzas to go to Memorial Hixson to a variety of restaurants which have donated food to our staff.”
Most of the donations have gone to day staffs, but Rodizio Grill decided to also provide some food and donations to the night staff at Memorial.
The Dynamic Group owns and operates the downtown Holiday Inn hotel on Chestnut Street, the Townplace Suites in Cleveland, Tennessee, and the Quality Inn on Shallowford Road.
Dynamic is also building a 104-room TownePlace Suites by Marriott in East Ridge.