"We had no intention of opening a restaurant."
The restaurant opened quietly in October.
There was no grand opening, no “everyone’s invited” launch party, no big media splash.
When Suzanne and Roger Perry opened Donovan’s Modern American Meatery, a new steakhouse inside Riverview’s Winthrop Town Centre, they knew the game had changed. Just a few months earlier, the couple opened a third location of their popular restaurant Datz a stone’s throw away, in the same multi-use development on Bloomingdale Avenue.
There was a line out the door. People got impatient. Some complained — some even yelled. And this was in May, when restaurants had only just been allowed to reopen and were still limited to 25 percent of their indoor seating capacity.
“We had to close within two and a half hours,” Suzanne Perry said. “We were so flooded with people.”
As it turns out, opening a new restaurant in the middle of a pandemic — no matter how seasoned the owners — comes with its very own set of new rules.
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