Abrupt closing of NJ gastropub chain leaves workers stunned

An old friend of mine back in Michigan who became a successful independent trucker did so because of how he was fired from a trucking company. He and other truckers showed up at the fenced-in truck yard only to find the gates were padlocked and they were all out of work. The company never even bothered calling them.

So I always feel for people who find out they lost jobs in cold ways. Such was the case for a lot of workers at a gastropub chain in New Jersey and across the country.

Abrupt closure stuns workers

Bar Louie closed their Brunswick Square Mall location in East Brunswick so suddenly that many workers were showing up for their shift to find a locked door. They were totally blindsided. To me that is unforgivable.

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Not only did this happen there, all other New Jersey locations have apparently been closed just as swiftly and already removed from their website. This nasty scene was playing out across the country this past weekend as more workers showed up to find more locked facilities.

Bar Louie filed for bankruptcy in 2020 and closed over 30 locations around the nation. This time it’s happening across the country, too. They just closed two Michigan locations, in Ann Arbor and Livonia. Bar Louie gastropubs started disappearing in Chicago as well. Just as sudden. And in a manner just as heartless.

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Canva / TSM Illustration

Their website has already wiped clean all locations in New Jersey as if there never were any. I know there was one in Paramus as well as in Hackensack.

Workers deserve better

What a damn shame workers are treated this way.

You'll never convince me a local manager didn't have phone numbers for staff. Even something as cold as a group text letting everyone know wouldn't have been as ugly as letting them blindly drive all the way to a job they no longer had.