After just having reopened with a quick-serve concept earlier this month, the husband and wife owners who opened Corner Kitchen five years ago have decided against operating during the pandemic and posted this on their Facebook Page today:
It is with a profoundly heavy heart that we write this, but we cannot ignore the situation in which we find ourselves. We are officially closing Corner Kitchen indefinitely.
Throughout the Miami Valley, we have felt so much love and support from the day we opened five years ago. We know that the passion of our hard-working staff provided so many memorable dinners and led to many, many friendships. However, the challenges of the current pandemic and the affect that it has on restaurant businesses has made us analyze the viability of continuing to operate. While we reopened with a change to our concept, we realize that we had to make a departure from what has come to be expected of us and the Corner Kitchen dining experience.
A restaurant operates with a tacit public trust that the top priority is the health and well-being of the guests that they serve and the staff that they employ, and that has always been paramount for us. Neither our new model nor our previous model can survive in this current climate with our expense load and reduction in volume. We simply cannot find a financial model in any iteration of the dozens of scenarios that we have explored without either operating in an unsafe environment or incurring insurmountable debt.
Although this is the hardest decision that we have ever made, it is one that would be irrational to delay or foolish to ignore. Our initial hiatus and reopening planning during stay-at-home provided us with precious time as a family, a challenge for all restaurant owners, and that perspective has also made us rethink and focus on our future at home.
We implore you to continue to support our local, independent restaurants. They need you more than ever.
We shall cherish all of the memories that our community shared with us. We are sorry that we couldn’t do more, and we are utterly heartbroken, we will miss all of you – we will miss the joy that you brought to our lives. Thank you for helping make our dream come true.
With great regret we say goodbye to Corner Kitchen,
Jack and Natalie
We can’t imagine what an agonizing decision this must have been, and we wish the Skilliter family the very best for their future. A true loss for the Dayton culinary world.
