Restaurant at Hotel Metro closes after 2 weeks
Coury Hospitality of Tulsa on Monday suddenly closed the new finer-dining Oggie’s restaurant in Hotel Metro downtown, just two weeks after it opened.
The restaurant’s staff of 17 was fired Monday morning.
Oggie’s was part of a recently completed $4 million renovation of the hotel. It had hired Thomas Hauck, previously the chef-owner of the well-regarded c.1880 restaurant, to lead the restaurant, and the hotel had just become part of the Marriott Autograph brand.
Hotel Metro, at 411 E. Mason St., is owned by John Ogden but managed by Coury Hospitality.
“Oggie’s has temporarily closed and will reopen at a later date,” the hospitality group said in a written statement. “Unfortunately, the pandemic had a greater impact than anticipated with the closure having no reflection of our dedicated team.”
The hotel remains open, the company notes.
A human resources representative flew from the company’s base in Oklahoma to Milwaukee to tell the staff Coury was closing the restaurant immediately, Hauck said when reached by phone. He said he was told the restaurant might reopen next year.
“Obviously, I’m very disappointed,” Hauck said. “I understand the times are tough, but you opened the restaurant in a pandemic, you knew what you were doing.”
Hauck said there were no discussions with him of trying to proceed with cost-saving measures, such as eliminating lunch service or switching to carryout only.
As it was, he said, the restaurant was operating with the minimum number of staff needed, including two cooks at night. “We didn’t even have a daytime dishwasher. We were lean,” he said.
“We had a really good weekend. It’s hard to gauge — we’ve been open two weeks,” he said, suggesting it wasn’t enough time for the restaurant to build its clientele.
“I was really excited, people were really happy. It was good to see old regulars,” Hauck added.
On Twitter, Hauck said he was “beyond gutted and angry for our hardworking staff and purveyors.”
Coincidentally, he was already scheduled to speak in a Facebook Live panel discussion Wednesday about saving restaurants, which have suffered financially in the pandemic.
The hospitality sector has been hit hard during the pandemic, and hotel occupancy is rebounding slowly. In July, usually the busiest month for hotels in downtown Milwaukee, occupancy downtown was at 35.1%; nationally, it was 48.9%, said industry consultant Greg Hanis. That’s up from June, when occupancy was at 25.9% downtown and 46.2% nationally. But last year, the July occupancy downtown was 72.7%.
Paul Coury, the founder and CEO of the hospitality group, said the economic fallout from the pandemic “is just beyond anything we’ve seen.”
The Milwaukee food and beverage market, he said, is “more buttoned up” than other markets where Coury operates, such as Dallas. “I don’t think I really understood how the market was until I went” to Milwaukee, he said.
“That launch probably shouldn’t have happened, particularly at the level it was staffed up,” Coury said. “We could quickly see that it wasn’t going to support having a restaurant opened.”
He said the company considered whether to “limp along” by offering only takeout or taking other measures. “We decided we would just do damage to the brand,” Coury said.
He added, “This was a tough call, but to run a restaurant properly and staff it properly, you’ve got to have a lot more business than is in that market.
“It’s an unfortunate situation and bad for the employees.”