Firebox, the innovative farm-to-table restaurant in Hartford’s Frog Hollow neighborhood, will close after 13 years, citing the COVID-19 pandemic and “the uncertainty it has brought.”
Restaurant representatives issued a statement Tuesday. “It has become clear that we are simply unable to sustain the restaurant in its current form going forward,” the statement read. “Small businesses, and particularly restaurants, operate on very slim margins, and the pandemic economy has effectively eliminated those margins, with no real end in sight.”
The Melville Charitable Trust launched Firebox on Broad Street in 2007, with a vision “to serve extraordinary food and to bring jobs, investment, and opportunity to the community.” The restaurant became a destination for locally grown fare, crafting its daily menus with produce, meats and dairy from Connecticut farms.
Cary Wheaton, Firebox’s owner representative and the executive director of its nonprofit partner Forge City Works, said the restaurant staff had attempted to survive the COVID-19 shutdown crisis, offering curbside pickup with family meals and other takeout options. Even the introduction of outdoor dining wouldn’t have been enough, she said, as the restaurant’s patio would have only offered 12 seats with proper spacing.
“We have been a destination restaurant, and also one that feeds folks from the institutions around here,” she said, noting Trinity College, Aetna and The Hartford, where many employees are working from home. With no sporting events or theater performances on the calendar, either, guests haven’t been coming into the city to dine like they normally would.
Forge City Works’ operations will resume this summer. The Kitchen at Billings Forge on Broad Street is reopening on June 8 for takeout, along with the catering business, and the weekly farmers’ market at Billings Forge begins June 4. The Kitchen at the Hartford Public Library is planning to open with outside seating in late June. Culinary job training, a large part of the nonprofit’s efforts, will continue.
Wheaton said the team is exploring different ways to use the Firebox space for the future, as its mission has always been to create economic opportunity for the people of Hartford.
“It will rise again, in a different iteration, for sure,” she said. “We’re looking at what would be the most sustainable, what will provide the most opportunities and what we can make work in whatever the new normal is. We’re going to spend the time it takes to figure out what that is.”
Leeanne Griffin can be reached at lgriffin@courant.com.
