GROUND ROUND Valley outlets won't close

Company-owned restaurants were abruptly closed last week.
THE VINDICATOR
STAFF/WIRE REPORTS
Ground Round Grill & amp; Bar restaurants in Boardman and Warren will remain open, local store managers say, despite the Massachusetts chain's decision to close about 60 of its corporate-owned stores.
Stores around the country were shut down abruptly last week without explanation by American Hospitality Concepts, which is based in Braintree, Mass.
Gabriel Novotny, an assistant manager of the Warren Ground Round on Elm Road, and Dave Turner, who manages the Boardman store on South Avenue, said both are locally owned franchise operations and are not affected by the corporate restaurant closings.
"Everything's good. Nothing has affected us at all," Novotny said.
The Warren restaurant opened in 1995, and Novotny said business has been good. The eatery employs 40 full- and part-time workers.
Turner said the Boardman restaurant managers made arrangements with its vendors and will continue operating as usual. "The business is financially sound," he said.
The Boardman Ground Round has been in business 12 years and has 60 full- and part-time employees.
Several AHC executives did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Displaced workers
The closings, including stores in the Cleveland area, left thousands of workers jobless and angry.
"I've been with the company 11 years and I felt like I got kicked in the teeth," said Bob Laudo, general manager of the Ground Round in Macedonia, Ohio. "The way they left it left everybody pretty salty."
Laudo's was one of the company-owned Ground Round restaurants nationwide that were preparing for a busy night last Friday when they got word on a conference call to kick out the customers, close the doors and stash the food in the freezer.
"I let them finish their meals. I couldn't do that to them," said Laudo, who after notifying the bewildered customers informed his 60 employees they were out of a job.
American Hospitality Concepts owned about 60 of the 130 Ground Round restaurants in 25 states and Canada, employees said. The rest of the chain is a franchise operation that is independently owned and operated and those restaurants remain open. But all those that were still owned and operated by the company appear to have been shuttered.
Ground Round employees said the conference call Friday referenced problems with creditors but offered few details, and the executives hung up before taking questions. Laudo said that was particularly frustrating, since managers weren't told how to handle matters like customers questioning what would happen to their gift certificates.
"We knew there were lenders out there," Laudo said, but the call "came completely out of the blue."
Revenue at the company grew an estimated 13 percent last year to $170 million, according to Hoover's Online.
Corporate history
Ground Round debuted in 1969 as a division of Howard Johnson and was one of the early promoters of the "casual dining" movement in the restaurant industry. In the 1980s, it targeted families and was a popular spot for kids' birthday parties. Guests were given peanuts and encouraged to simply toss the shells on the floor.
AHC bought the chain in 1997 and had been pushing a franchise model, where local operators ran the restaurants under the Ground Round name but got marketing and other help from the company.
AHC also operates the much-smaller chains Tin Alley Grill, Berkshire Grill and John Harvard's Brew House. At least some of those restaurants are franchised and were open Tuesday, though the fate of all of them was unclear.