When their power was cut off, they bought a generator. When their doors were padlocked, they bought saws.
On a Monday night in early December, Baret Lepejian called his son Lucas: He wanted to know what he thought about California governor Gavin Newsom’s newest order re-shuttering the state’s beleaguered bars and restaurants as coronavirus cases climbed across the country.
Lucas Lepejian, who has been managing the family’s saloon, Tinhorn Flats, while his dad is overseas for business, didn’t agree with it, but there wasn’t much he could do but wait it out.
“I go, ‘It’s Monday night for you, right?’ He’s like, ‘Yep.’ I’m like, ‘Thursday morning, you’re reopening,’” Baret Lepejian recalled in an interview with National Review. “He started laughing. He thought I was joking. He’s like, ‘You know there are 30,000 restaurants in L.A. closed?’ I’m like, ‘100 percent fully aware, and I said there’s going to be 29,999, and there’s going to be one motherf***er that’s going to be open, and that’s going to be us.”
That was the beginning of the Lepejians’ fight against what they see as government tyranny and heavy-handed and unlawful edicts that have forced too many small businesses like theirs to close for good in California during the coronavirus pandemic.
While most businesses across the country abided by government-ordered restrictions during the pandemic, some fought back. Mac’s Public House in Staten Island, N.Y., declared itself an autonomous zone last winter and refused to close. In Minnesota, the owner of a coffee bar was arrested in late April after defying lockdown orders over the winter.
The struggle in Burbank, Calif. — dubbed “the Battle of Tinhorn Flats” by supporters — has turned into one of the nation’s nastiest fights over pandemic-related restrictions yet.
In March, a judge ordered the Western-themed bar’s electricity and phone line to be cut. So Tinhorn Flats employees brought in generators to keep the business open and the beer flowing. City officials padlocked the bar’s doors shut. Employees cut them off and sawed their way in. Finally, the city erected a chain-link fence around the bar. Lucas Lepejian countered by temporarily setting up a food truck outside and serving “non-comply tacos” and “freedom burgers.”
Lucas Lepejian has been arrested three times so far, twice for violating court orders, and once for allegedly removing sandbags placed in front of the bar to prevent people from entering, according to local news reports. Baret Lepejian said he stopped keeping tabs on his fines once they crossed the $50,000 mark. The business is now closed.
“It’s been a nightmare. It really has,” Baret Lepejian said. “Not that I’d do anything different, but they’ve definitely succeeded in making my life very difficult.”
The shuttered saloon has become the scene of regular anti-lockdown protests. To their numerous supporters, the Lepejians are freedom fighters standing against government overreach. But to their many detractors, they’ve selfishly and irresponsibly helped the deadly coronavirus spread, and they’ve used misinformation to justify bad decisions. Some nearby businesses owners and residents have called Tinhorn Flats a bad neighbor.
Baret Lepejian, a self-described “huge Trump supporter,” doesn’t deny that the pandemic is real. It’s not a hoax, he said, but he doesn’t believe the government data on deaths linked to the virus. Even so, early on in the pandemic he followed all state restrictions, he said. Nobody knew what was going on, he said, and anyone who said they did was full of baloney.
He converted his business to take-out only, even though that was a financial dead end.
“The biggest single loser you can be as a restaurant is takeout,” Lepejian said. “You’re now digging your own grave so that someone can shoot you in the head and kick you in.”
By the fall, restaurants and services businesses were just starting to recover from the shutdowns and restrictions imposed early in the pandemic. But when coronavirus cases and deaths began to rise dramatically, Newsom said in November he was “pulling the emergency brake” on the state’s reopening plans. He reinstituted the strictest pandemic-related rules. Indoor worship was banned. People had to wear masks when they left their homes. In-person dining was prohibited — indoor or outdoor. Restaurants were limited to takeout and delivery.
By then, Lepejian had had enough. Even though COVID-19 cases were surging, he no longer believed the business closures and lockdown mandates were about public health or science but were instead about government control, he said. He declined to elaborate.
“Then I knew this was an attack on the middle class,” he said. “This was an attack on small business. It was almost like a camera that hit perfect focus.”
Tinhorn Flats reopened, but only its outdoor patio, Lepejian said. His staff wore masks, he said.
Lepejian said he doesn’t care if people were offended by his decision to reopen Tinhorn Flats.
“They don’t have to come in. Who’s forcing anybody?” he said. “In some ways, the people that are really offended by it are kind of pretty much the people who annoyed me before.”
He believes the government should compensate him for his losses and for ruining his reputation in their attempt to make an example of him. He’s demanding that his permits be reinstated. And he refuses to pay any fines.
“The second I pay a penny of fines, that means I was wrong,” he said. “I will never pay a fine.”