A public outcry about the closing of the Clover healthy fast food chain has led to its rescue, according to a company email Wednesday.
The chain’s 11 locations will stay closed for the rest of this week, but on Tuesday “we will reopen our Boston and Cambridge locations for lunch and onward,” the email said. “Breakfast will come back the next day.”
“We’re still figuring it out – but it’s true! We will not continue as a shell of ourselves, or someone else’s concept grafted onto our leases. We will continue as the experience that we have all built together – the concept that moved so many to raise their voices last week. We will continue to change with the seasons, support local farmers, create local jobs and foster community. We will continue to be Clover,” the email said.
The company said that the reopening will bring “big changes” without going into details.
Inflationary pressures on the industry remain an issue, the company said in response to an email, and it is “working hard on implementing operational changes” to ensure its financial sustainability. It said the reopening next week will focus on its “core Cambridge and Boston locations.”
The current 11 locations include five in Cambridge: Central Square, Harvard Square and another inside the Harvard Science Center, Kendall Square and East Cambridge, in the Eastern Edge food hall. Locations in Burlington and Newton weren’t mentioned in the email; a location at Assembly Square in Somerville closed in the first bankruptcy. The company also caters and sells kits for at-home meal prep.
“No lucky break here – this is the result of months of planning and hard work by our executive team and restaurant teams, plus 17 years of building a beautiful food concept,” the company said. “Sometimes business deals take until the deadline.”
Those months of outreach and negotiation, fueled by the outpouring of support, led to meaty that “several potential paths forward opened for the company” and it was able to finalize a deal with an investor.
This is a big turnaround from Thursday, when Clover had failed to find a buyer and had to lay off around 180 employees. The chain was founded locally by MIT and Harvard grad Ayr Muir in 2008 as a food truck. It grew to 15 locations, then declared bankruptcy twice in two years. The shutdown came as new leader Julia Wrin Piper struggled for a business plan to keep serving vegetarian foods to nonvegetarians.
“We knew people would miss us, but we didn’t understand how much they would miss us,” the company said. “People flooded our restaurants. A customer wrote a tribute song!”
A child baked a cake with a Clover leaf and the words “RIP, we love you.” Article after article came out, one hitting every few minutes. We made a “share a memory” survey, thinking we’d get a dozen notes. It now has 494. (Click here to read a selection). The notes were visceral and heartbreaking and funny, but mostly they were disbelieving. “This can’t be happening,” people kept saying. Some version of “Clover changed my life” appeared over and over. There were more than a couple “Clover saved my life.” Fellow businesses and farmers posted on IG. Former staff who moved away traveled hours for a final popover. Toddlers in strollers clutched their last containers of hummus. Someone biked all around Cambridge to visit as many locations as she could. People took to Reddit to share a romesco recipe from Veggie Monster. On the last day at Harvard Square (which also happened to be commencement) our long-tenured team was laughing and reminiscing and blasting music amid all the “sorries” from customers standing shoulder-to-shoulder, holding their last Mushroom Popper or Soy BLT. Customers were crying, and that made us cry.
The company urged customers to keep eating at Clover and asked: “Could you commit to introducing one new person to us? Every one of you reading this is an ambassador for our mission. Tell a coworker, trick a skeptical carnivore, bring your crush. (There have been LOTS of first dates at Clovers – and some children that resulted!)”
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