SWAMPSCOTT — The Mission on the Bay restaurant will reopen June 9, owner Marty Bloom announced Tuesday afternoon.
Five weeks after a portion of the seawall below the Humphrey Street restaurant collapsed, leaving a hole in the wall and causing the business to close indefinitely, Bloom said the establishment will be open for business — and a small reopening party — in a little more than a week.
The wall is currently being supported by a thick layer of concrete, which the company Extreme Shotcrete sprayed the afternoon of its collapse for immediate support. In the days following the collapse, Bloom hired the engineering firm Intralux Construction to build a temporary boulder wall supporting the restaurant.
Bloom said the boulders and other materials for the short-term repair will be onsite Wednesday morning.
“We have all our permits from the state — everybody couldn’t couldn’t do enough to help us, which is great because everybody knows the situation for what it is,” Bloom said. “We’ll have our temporary fix in place that will buy us time and then right behind it, we’re already working on the full-time fix.”
Bloom was able to temporarily move roughly half of his 100-employee workforce to his other restaurants in Revere and Beverly while the restaurant has been closed. However, with approximately 50 of his employees out of work, Bloom said the need to safely and quickly reopen was pressing.
“I’ve got 100 people who need that restaurant for their livelihoods,” Bloom said. “I can’t go fast enough to get these people back to work. They all need paychecks, they all need their source of income… I can’t hesitate one second.”
While Mission on the Bay races to re-employ its staff and get back to business, Town Administrator Sean Fitzgerald said the restaurant has not yet received an occupancy permit from the town allowing it to reopen.
Fitzgerald said the process of obtaining a public-occupancy permit requires thorough inspection, peer review, and a public safety report. He said that the permit will only be issued when the town considers the structure safe for patrons.
“Public safety is our top priority. We don’t have a clear idea of when that date will be,” he said Tuesday. “We certainly hope that we can get there sooner than later, but public safety will dictate that timeline.”
Even though there were no injuries in the collapse that sent lunchtime patrons rushing out of the restaurant on May 4, utilities in the area were cut. Engineers determined the seawall collapse did not affect the restaurant’s structural foundation.
Since Mission on the Bay’s seawall neighbors the town-owned wall beneath Anthony’s Pier 4 Cafe, town officials met with engineers from the firm Simpson Gumpertz & Heger to start an investigation into the town-owned wall’s structural integrity. Fitzgerald said Tuesday that the town is still waiting for a report from the firm.
Despite the five-week closure’s inconvenience to restaurant workers, patrons, and those who reserved the space for special events, Bloom said the hiatus gave him an opportunity to make all the repairs and upgrades he had originally scheduled for later in the year.
The restaurant will reopen late in the afternoon next Friday — occupancy-permit pending — with a new grill, some repainted walls, and newly-repaired flooring.
As the town is allowing Bloom to use public-beach space to temporarily fix the private wall, Fitzgerald said that Bloom has a “very strong responsibility” to plan a permanent wall repair.
“I want to make it clear that we are going to do our best to try to help ensure Mission on the The Bay can reopen safely, but this creates quite an imposition on the town and we certainly don’t want to wait years to see that seawall permanently replaced,” Fitzgerald said.
