Nashville restaurant owners sound off about order requiring earlier closing time

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    NASHVILLE, TN (WSMV) — Restaurants in Nashville serving alcohol will soon have to close earlier.

A new public health order will require them to shut down at 10 p.m. It goes into effect on Friday.

“Every day we get up wondering what they’ve done to us now,” Barrett Hobbs, owner of Scoreboard Bar & Grill said.

Employees started texting and calling Hobbs this morning asking if they still had a job. That’s how he found out about the latest public health order.

“When you take a decent volume restaurant and tell them on Tuesday at 10 o’clock that they have to close on Friday at 10 p.m., the city thinks that’s adequate timing, it’s not,” Hobbs said.

Mayor John Cooper said similar measures are in place in states like Florida, California, and Kansas.

“A city that can’t reopen schools smoothly is a city that can’t be back to normal. The parents of more than 100,000 children and the children themselves need Nashville to break the spread of the disease and we must use the tools we have to get that done. If we have to tell 100,000 children to stay home, we can tell public facilities to close early,” Cooper said.

The announcement comes after a video captured on Lower Broadway from over the weekend showing crowds of people not wearing masks or social distancing.

“I just don’t see the connection between restaurants, crowds on Broadway, and the spread of infection. The dots don’t add up to me,” Hobbs said.

Hobbs said the order could mean his business losing anywhere from $30,000 to $40,000 per week. Some employees may soon be out of work too.

“I have hired and let go the same group of people three times since March,” Hobbs said.

He’s calling for better communication between the city and restaurant owners so they’re given more of a heads up when their businesses will be impacted.

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