A pop-up carryout restaurant located at the former Grove restaurant in Grand Rapids has shut its doors. This, as owners prepare to re-open two of their most popular sites.
“We’re grateful that we can open our dining rooms back up. It’s going to look different, and it won’t be forever, but the minor inconveniences that we all have to practice, will allow us to be social again.” And the better we do it now, the sooner we can get to the more normal.
That’s James Berg, managing partner of the Essence Restaurant group, which owns The Greenwell, Bistro Bella Vita and the former Grove restaurants. He’s talking about what their restaurants will look like following three months of being closed due to COVID 19. Berg says COVID-19 gave them a “time-out” to reassess, revamp designs and make their spaces COVID-friendly.
“We really used this time to analyze where we were as an organization and how we’re going to approach these initial guidelines, cause they’re going to be restrictive.”
Due to all the happenings with COVID 19, The Essence Group had transformed its Grove Restaurant in early May into Jimmy’s Chicken Shack with take-out gourmet chicken, but Berg says after figuring out it the carry-out there was not the best use of that space, they decided to close and develop a new vision for the fall.
“We felt long term that wouldn’t be the best location for that concept, this was we can focus on Bistro and Greenwell opening and then, we’ll come back, this fall we have a concept, at 919 Cherry.”
Berg says There will be soft openings for each, but Greenwell is set to formally open on June 15th, while Bistro Bella Vita opens on June 23rd.
