CLEVELAND — April marks the fifth anniversary of Mabel’s BBQ operating on East 4th Street, a strip filled with restaurants, shops and usually people.
What You Need To Know
- Downtown business owners are excited about the opportunity for a financial boost, because of the NFL Draft
- East 4th Street is usually one of the busiest strips in downtown Cleveland, but the pandemic hurt business
- Many restaurants have had to close temporarily or permanently on East 4th Street, including celebrity chef Michael Simons’ restaurant, Lola
“I think of it like a neighborhood, and that neighborhood extends onto Euclid, so people can kind of bounce around from place to place and enjoy themselves,” manager Michael Boland said.
Boland said the past year has been a challenge for the restaurant, just like for many others in downtown Cleveland, hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic.
“We’re such an event-driven restaurant,” he said.
Boland said businesses on East 4th Street finally have something to look forward to with the influx of people expected to crowd city streets looking for good food and drinks during the NFL Draft.
“The draft days will kind of help bridge the gap, albeit only being really three or four days of draft stuff, the incoming media and the people setting it up, have already been here, and they’ll likely be here, three or four days after the fact,” Boland said.
Boland said Mabel’s BBQ was closed for three months when the pandemic hit in 2020, but since reopening the restaurant, has been able to make ends meet while operating on limited capacity.
However, other restaurants on the strip haven’t had such luck.
“When we lose restaurants, we lose our friends, we lose, you know, the people that we’re used to seeing every day on the street, and, I mean that’s tough,” Boland said.
Boland’s hoping the NFL Draft weekend will be the springboard to a major comeback for East 4th Street and all Cleveland businesses, and while restaurant owners will be rooting for their favorite teams during the event, they’re also rooting for each other.
“Everyone feeds off each other,” Boland said. “It’s never been some, you know, animosity of one place is busy and another place isn’t because we all we all support each other in that way and it’s really great.”
