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December 23, 2020

Hartford’s Red Rock Tavern an early beneficiary of Barstool Fund

CoStar Red Rock Tavern in Hartford.
By Sean Teehan

Red Rock Tavern in Hartford is one of six restaurants that have benefited early on from a small-business relief fund set up by Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy.

Portnoy established The Barstool Fund on Dec. 17 with an initial donation of $500,000. The fund is supporting small businesses struggling with declining revenues amid COVID-19-related regulations with little government support. 

The six businesses that have so far benefited are all restaurants, but the fund is open to all struggling small businesses. As of Wednesday morning the fund had raised more than $2.5 million.

Chelsey Mancini, the daughter of the Red Rock's owner, said in a post on the fund’s website that the family restaurant has been in “survival mode."

"We have struggled through the COVID-19 pandemic. Since COVID hit, we've had to pivot dramatically," Mancini said. 

It's not clear how much Red Rock has received so far from the fund. Red Rock Tavern is located on Capitol Avenue near the state Capitol and has been a popular watering hole for politicos, journalists and lobbyists, 

In an online video announcing the fund, Portnoy said small businesses that are in existential financial crisis but still paying employees are eligible for the fund. Rather than a one-time payment, Portnoy said, the fund will pay businesses it selects whatever they need to make ends meet each month until the pandemic subsides.

"How are restaurants going to survive? They're already on their last legs," Portnoy said in the video posted soon after New York City renewed a ban on indoor dining. "Nobody seems to care from the government."

Connecticut state officials are currently distributing $35 million in emergency grants to restaurants, bars and other small to mid-sized businesses as a bridge to a proposed $900 billion federal COVID-19 pandemic relief package. 

Businesses whose revenues are down by at least 20% will go into a pool, with grants then calculated by a formula based on tax and payroll data. Gov. Ned Lamont this week said the target of the program is the approximately 2,000 businesses in the state too big to qualify for a previous $50 million program that provided $5,000 grants to 10,000 businesses with 20 or fewer employees. The grants will be funded with money from the earlier CARES Act. 


About one-third of the $900 billion in new federal relief will go to another round of forgivable loans through the Paycheck Protection Program, with Connecticut businesses expected to get about 1% of that, or $3 billion.


 

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