When the city announced it would be using CARES Act funding to help the Charlotte businesses, restaurant owners were among those who rushed to apply. Among them were the owners and operators of the city’s newest restaurants, ones that unsuspectingly opened just before the pandemic or had no choice but to open in the middle of it. Those same owners have now been shut out of the grant money. 

In order to apply for the various grants being awarded by the City of Charlotte, businesses had to be in operation in 2019, disqualifying the restaurants that opened their doors amid the pandemic. 

“The federal government requires CARES Act funds must provide evidence of alleviating COVID 19 impact,” a representative for the city said. “This date was set to demonstrate in a federal audit a business receiving CARES Act funds had been in operation for a period of time that revenues had the ability to be made and impact would be realized.”

Glen Nocik, owner of Alchemy on the C3 Lab campus in South End, opened his restaurant in June. With a limited seating capacity and added expenses of operation during a pandemic, Alchemy isn’t yet covering its expenses. Though his restaurant was a business on paper in 2019, with plenty of expenses, there was no income — a necessity to prove you lost business and receive grant money.

“This has been a two year project for us,” Nocik says. “We were a business in 2019, we just weren’t operating. But we had staff that we were paying, we just can’t show revenue like they’re asking because they weren’t selling things.”

Nocik calls the guidelines frustrating. For many industries they make sense — without verified paperwork, it can be difficult to tell whether businesses are actually in need of the money. The restaurant industry, however, has been hard hit across the board, and restaurants that opened in 2020 are facing many additional hurdles.

Chris Coleman, executive chef of The Goodyear House, shares Nocik’s frustrations. In Charlotte, the excitement around new restaurants leads to a sales boom right from the start, allowing restaurants to recoup some of the money they’ve spent in the months (or years) working to get a restaurant open. Coleman says he is appreciative for what the city is doing for small businesses, but feels his restaurant and others that opened this year were shut out of funding though they need the grants as much as anyone. The city’s $10,000 to $20,000 grants — offered initially through the city’s Open for Business program, then a program geared specifically towards hospitality — would cover a month’s payroll at The Goodyear House.

“We are disappointed that they excluded restaurants and businesses that opened in 2020 because we definitely were among the hardest hit,” Coleman says. “We literally opened weeks before the pandemic struck and then we were forced to shut our doors, so we didn’t have a chance to kind of build that base or build any cash reserves. You spend a lot of money opening a restaurant and then you hope to recoup some of that from the early buzz of a restaurant opening, and we weren’t able to do that.”

Nocik says the grant would prevent him from having to dip into his own savings in order to keep Alchemy open. If the winter brings another closure — which many restaurant owners are anticipating will happen — he’ll have to cover even more costs.

“Obviously we don’t know what could happen if there’s a hiccup in the winter — we’re knocking on wood hoping there isn’t,” Nocik says. “But we just don’t know, so we’re in survival mode, honestly. We’ve got a lot of staff that we’re responsible for and trying to do the right thing. And that is a little frustrating when you can’t even apply for a grant because I don’t know how they came up with that.”

The City of Charlotte declined to comment on what funding might become available in the future, and whether restaurants that opened in 2020 would be eligible for them. All of the CARES Act funding allocated to the city from the federal government must be spent by December 31 or it must be returned, meaning there will be no funds left over for restaurants that opened in 2020 once their tax paperwork is filed.

Unpretentious People Say...

Other Articles You Might Enjoy