As most restaurateurs relish the return to normal, the consequences of the pandemic are just beginning for those who chose defiance.
F irst they cut the electricity, so the Tinhorn Flats employees hooked up generators.
Next, city officials padlocked the doors. Employees used saws to cut them off.
When the city finally erected a chain-link fence around the Burbank, Calif., bar and grill this spring, Baret Lepejian’s son, Lucas, set up a food truck outside.
For months, when state and city leaders ordered all California bars and restaurants closed during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, Tinhorn Flats opened. For people with COVID-19 fatigue, the cowboy bar with swinging saloon doors became a refuge.
But with California finally set to fully reopen by mid-June, Tinhorn Flats is now the one shuttered by the state for defying health orders and drowning in fines — and it’s not clear when or if those saloon doors will swing open again.
The coronavirus pandemic was a financial nightmare for many small businesses around the country. A study released by the Federal Reserve Board in April found that roughly 200,000 more U.S. businesses closed permanently in 2020 than in a normal year. Service-oriented businesses and restaurants were hit especially hard, particularly in blue states where some Democratic governors instituted draconian and often long-lasting restrictions.
Most business owners complied. But some, including Lepejian, ultimately refused.
To some, these dissidents were heroes fighting unconstitutional orders handed down by tyrannical governments. To others they were acting selfishly, helping the deadly virus spread, and often citing misinformation and bogus reports to justify bad decisions. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who emerged as one of the most prominent critics of heavy-handed lockdowns, has pardoned everyone who violated his COVID-related health orders. But in states such as New York and California, the lockdown defiers are being made to pay the price.
National Review reached out to business owners who defied government shutdown orders last winter, or who fought back in other ways. Several of their businesses are now closed.
In all of the cases, the business owners said they initially abided by the government restrictions imposed early on in the pandemic. It was only later, often when their businesses were about to go under, that they rebelled. Most said they believed the shutdown orders were unlawful. None of them said they regretted their decision to fight.
“Small business is the heart, it’s what represents America,” said Lepejian. “When you start killing small business, on purpose, that’s really a very alarming thing. That’s something to fight for.”
The following are the stories of other business owners who fought government shutdowns. Click here for more about “The Battle of Tinhorn Flats.”
The Interchange | Albert Lea, Minnesota
The way Lisa Hanson tells it, she had two options last December: She could close her small coffee shop for good, pack it in after a good 7½-year run, or she could reopen. That was it.
After more than eight months of mandated shutdowns, seating limits, and skimping, Hanson’s business, The Interchange Wine & Coffee Bistro in Albert Lea, Minn., was out of money.
“We just had nothing else to work with,” Hanson said. “We were basically done.”
In mid-December, Hanson reopened her business in defiance of Governor Tim Walz’s lockdown orders at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. And she kept it open for nearly two months.
But now, as summer approaches and other restaurants and businesses around the state are reopening without restrictions, The Interchange is closed with no reopening date in sight. Hanson’s food license has been revoked. And in April, she was arrested on nine misdemeanor charges of violating COVID-19 restrictions.
The grandmother of ten said she complied with the governor’s initial restrictions. She closed when she was told to in March 2020, and she converted to takeout only when that was allowed. She invested in an online ordering option. She laid off all but two of her ten workers. She turned off lights and tried to cut her air conditioning and heating bills. She even bought cheaper toilet paper.
She received some government grants and loans, but they weren’t enough. She poured her retirement savings into the business and loaded up her credit cards with debt.
She shut down again when Walz reordered restaurants closed in November. It was at that point, she said, that she thought she would have to shutter permanently.
Then she discovered ReOpen Minnesota, a grassroots organization that was building a coalition of businesses throughout the state to defy shutdown orders. On December 16, The Interchange was one of about 160 businesses that reopened against government edicts. “It should have been 1,600 at the very least. It should have been 16,000,” said Hanson, who turned out to be one of only a handful of owners who flouted the state orders for more than just a few days. Eventually, on February 9, she had to close again.
Hanson argues that Walz doesn’t have the authority to unilaterally shutter businesses during a public-health emergency. And she believes she’s been targeted by the state because “they wanted to make a spectacle out of us.”
Hanson is representing herself in court with the help of some consultants, and she has collected about $10,000 through a Go Fund Me account. She said the government needs to drop everything against her and reimburse her for losses. She said she has no regrets.
“It would have been a whole lot easier to close, let me tell you,” she said, but “this is wrong, and I’m going to stand up against this.”
Mac’s Public House | Staten Island, New York
For most New York City bar and restaurant owners and staff, May 19 was a milestone. For the first time in more than a year, they were allowed to fully reopen.
But for Mac’s Public House on Staten Island, there is no reopening date.
Last winter, amid yet another government-mandated closure, Mac’s refused to shut its doors. Owner Keith McAlarney and general manager Danny Presti declared Mac’s an “autonomous zone” and remained open, turning the small neighborhood bar into a national symbol of defiance. Presti was arrested twice and made several Fox News appearances.
Since then, a judge has temporarily declared Mac’s a public nuisance, and authorities have padlocked the doors. It’s been stripped of its liquor license, and the business is facing 20 summonses for violating pandemic-related orders. A grand jury dismissed felony charges against Presti in connection with a confrontation with a sheriff’s deputy, but he still faces administrative-code charges of selling liquor without a license and operating an unlicensed bottle club.
Mark Fonte, a lawyer representing Mac’s, said his clients are paying the price for taking on the government.
“They were selectively prosecuted, selectively targeted by law enforcement, by the city and by the governor to make an example out of them as a message to other restaurants and bars and taverns that if you do this as well, this could happen to you,” Fonte said.
When McAlarney and Presti defied government orders, Mac’s was “on the verge of bankruptcy,” Fonte said. He noted that when New York governor Andrew Cuomo was lecturing small business owners about being selfish for not following lockdown orders, he was inking a $4 million book deal.
Fonte argues that no government actor – the governor, a mayor, the legislature – has the power to shutter businesses without first passing a law that could be challenged in court.
Nobody, he said, was forced to go to Mac’s. And he noted that while many small businesses were effectively shuttered, corporate giants – Walmart, Costco, Target – remained open and turned handsome profits.
“But if you’re a mom-and-pop store or a small restaurant,” he said, “then you basically have to bankrupt yourself and struggle to feed your family.”
Grimm Brothers Brewhouse | Loveland, Colorado
For the small-business owners of Loveland, a small municipality north of Denver, Thanksgiving 2020 promised to be a miserable affair. Just three days before the holiday, Larimer County was deemed a level red zone by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
Indoor and outdoor dining would be prohibited and a host of other restrictions would be either tightened or reinstated. It was déjà vu all over again for Morgen Harrington, owner of Grimm Brothers Brewhouse. Overnight, her business had lost 75 percent of its revenue back in March during the first wave of lockdowns. The thought of returning to that state of affairs was “terrifying.”
“It’s not just the business that’s on the line. It’s your mortgage, it’s food for your kids,” and, she added, for those of her employees. Even after the first shutdown order was lifted, Harrington was unable to bring back her entire staff.
So Harrington and a coalition of other business owners resolved to act. Moving quickly, they founded a new organization, Small Businesses for a Healthy Loveland, and announced their intention not to comply with the shutdown order.
“While COVID is not a death sentence for the majority of people who get it, this order will be for many Loveland Businesses” asserted the group in a press release.
Thanks to the group’s efforts, though, Grimm Brothers Brewhouse and most of the other small businesses in Loveland have weathered the storm. Those that refused to close their doors for a time benefited from safety in numbers.
For her part, Harrington stayed open until the state authorities threatened to pull her liquor license. Even still, the extra time open helped her and her employees provide for themselves at a time when having no income stream at all would have been untenable.
A microbiologist who was demanding the same kind of safety measures in her brewery as she did in her laboratory, Harrington is no COVID truther, and she isn’t a partisan — she just wanted her business and community to be able to survive the pandemic and have the opportunity to thrive once it was over. “We understood the need for restrictions, restrictions that made logical sense,” she explained.
Nevertheless, Harrington recalls her husband confiscating her phone so as to prevent her from stewing over the “horrible” things being said about her on Facebook. She was accused of not only being a “grandmother-killer,” but wanting “everyone dead.”
Defying mandates is far from all that Harrington and her band of rebels accomplished though. Small Businesses for a Healthy Loveland also worked with the local government to secure $750,000 in relief for ailing entrepreneurs in the area. “It’s exactly how we all pictured government is supposed to work,” Harrington told National Review. “It blew my mind.”
Recalling the founding of the organization and its works to date, Harrington reflected that “all of us [small business owners] were scared of the exact same thing . . . if we didn’t do something, we might not make it out the other side.”
Al’s Cafe | Bethel Park, Pennsylvania
Rod Ambrogi has been running Al’s Cafe in Bethel Park, Pa., for a long time. “We’re like a family that’s been together for 30 years, a lot of them,” he explained.
It’s that sense of belonging and feeling of responsibility for one another that caused Ambrogi to flout a number of state-imposed coronavirus restrictions that he believed to be unfair and unscientific. “We defied some of the non-common sense mandates that the governor [Democrat Tom Wolf] issued here,” he told National Review. “We believed we were doing the right thing.”
Al’s Cafe wasn’t the only establishment to reject Wolf’s restrictions. Many other restaurants in the area, uniting under a new advocacy group with Ambrogi at its head — the Southwestern Pennsylvania Restaurant and Tavern Association — dispensed with those restrictions they deemed arbitrary while adhering to those they understood to be reasonable.
“We all did the masks and the six feet of distance and the rest of it,” said Ambrogi, noting that health inspectors certified that he was indeed complying with the guidelines laid out by the Centers for Disease Control.
But capacity limits, requirements that customers purchase food with any alcoholic beverage they might want, and a ban on seating anyone at the bar were different stories.
“I just couldn’t see common sense in it,” Ambrogi argued in his defense. Neither could most anyone else, some restaurateurs took to pressing tables against the bar so as to technically comply with that last requirement, while others, including Ambrogi, just ignored it altogether.
Inspectors reminded Ambrogi that diners were not supposed to be eating at the bar. “You come back tomorrow, the bar’s gonna be open,” he replied, a violation for which he was cited often and fined once.
Over the winter, the state tried to shut down dining completely. As you might expect, Ambrogi took exception. “I had a meeting with all the employees . . . they all decided they wanted to stay open so we stayed open.” The state briefly stripped Ambrogi of his health permit, but Ambrogi doesn’t sound like he has any regrets.
“All of our employees had a decent holiday, they were able to buy their kids toys and pay their rent and bills.”
Besides, the support for what he was doing was “overwhelming,” so business boomed during those few weeks he remained open in defiance of the state. Ambrogi was also able to quickly reobtain his health license.
Asked about what he was able to accomplish, he was blunt: “We survived, we managed to survive.”
Pineapple Hill Saloon & Grill | Los Angeles, California
Angela Marsden never defied lockdown orders at her Los Angeles–area pub. The only reason she still has a business today, she said, is because of tearful video she shot in early December, showing her shuttered outdoor patio just feet away from a massive, tented dining area set up in her parking lot so a catering service could feed a television production crew.
“We cannot survive. My staff cannot survive,” Marsden said in the video, calling the government-approved TV dining area a “slap in my face.”
Bar owner in Los Angeles CA is livid to see that mayor Garcetti has approved an outdoor dining area for a movie company directly across from her outdoor dining area (which was shut down) pic.twitter.com/jkUP2CWg35
— Jake Coco 💙🇺🇸🎶🐻 (@jakecoco) December 4, 2020
At the time of the video, Marsden was preparing to shutter her Pineapple Hill Saloon & Grill for good. She’d laid off her staff, and was giving them the food she’d bought for Thanksgiving. But after the video she received about $200,000 in donations, allowing her to stay afloat, she said.
“I had no help before that video went viral. The money was out, and there was nowhere to go,” she said. “If not for that viral video, I would not have a business today, period.”
Marsden has since sued California governor Gavin Newsom, arguing that his shutdown orders were unconstitutional and not based on science.
Restaurants like Marsden’s Sherman Oaks pub – neighborhood establishments not set up to survive on to-go orders – were particularly vulnerable, she said.
She was okay with the initial lockdown restrictions, thinking they’d only be in place for a couple of weeks. She spent $5,000 to install a to-go window, she said. She got approval from her landlord to build an outdoor patio in the parking lot. She served food to a hospital, but over the summer she was losing as much as $40,000 each month.
Marsden, who drives a 2005 Hyundai, took out a $180,000 disaster loan. Newsom’s November order again shuttering restaurants appeared to be the final nail.
“I then talked to my bookkeeper and said, ‘Can we do to-go again?’ He said, ‘Angela, we’re done.’ He’s like, there’s nothing left. We can’t do it.”
Marsden considered moving home to Indiana, but decided to stay to fight. She’s never been political. Now, she said, she doesn’t care who she offends. She’s wants the world to know how California’s leaders treated small businesses.
“Still, to this day, I feel like Alice in Wonderland,” Marsden said. “I feel like I’ve been thrown down a rabbit hole that I’ll never, ever come out of again, because I see things now for what they really are.”