BUSINESS

Successful downtown businesses help one another succeed

Maria DeVito
Newark Advocate

NEWARK - Before Barrel and Boar opened in 2016, four other restaurants occupied the space at 5 N. Third Street in downtown Newark over about a 10 year period.

The barbecue restaurant has made it two years and is going strong.

Co-owner Alex Athan said part of the reason the restaurant has been successful is because of all the other strong businesses around it.

"We knew that the brand worked and we were confident with the growth and timing it and coinciding with a lot of the growth that was happening downtown we were able to piggyback off of that quite a bit," he said.

Having strong businesses can help new places thrive, said Fred Ernest, the director of the Newark Development Partners.

Places such as The Midland and Thirty One West, Ernest said, are driving people to Newark.

"The other thing it does is it introduces new people to the downtown," he said. "New visitors to the downtown, there’s nothing but good things that can come out of that."

Athan said having other successful businesses around Barrel and Boar has helped the restaurant in it's first two years.

Shannon Walker, president of the Downtown Newark Association said new businesses can also have a positive effect on existing businesses.

"It re-establishes the person that’s been there for a long time to see some new company come in," she said. "Those companies usually have lots of energy, they’ve got marketing, they’re picking it up, they’re cleaning it up, they’re excited, they want to do it. Excitement is contagious."

Athan said Barrel and Boar has benefited from Elliot's Wood Fired Kitchen and Tap, which opened in July.

"We’ve had quite a few instances where folks will either go have dinner there and finish their night with a drink here or vice versa," he said. "The more retail the better as far as I’m concerned."

Athan said he wants to see more business open downtown. He added that he views it like car dealerships.

"You never see just one car dealership typically. You see five or six of them all bunched together in the same location," he said. "The more that brings people downtown the better. They don’t have to be necessarily coming down to see us, they just have to be down here. Once they’re down here, there’s just so many more options now that it’s inevitable that sooner rather than later we hope that they check us out as well."

But not every business can survive, Walker said.

"It could be the product, it could be the service, it could be lots of things. It could be that the demand for that kind of business is not what we need. It just is a normal ebb and flow of business."

Walker said people need to do research before opening their business.

"You got to research if downtown is something that your business can thrive in and not every business can work in a downtown environment, but most can," she said.

Athan said before opening Barrel and Boar, he and his business partners realized there was nothing else similar to their restaurant in downtown Newark.

"We felt that we were a pretty good fit for the community from a price standpoint," he said. "You can certainly bring a family in and not break the bank so to speak."

Walker said having some turnover between businesses is normal and OK to have occasionally.

"Some people are good at business and some people aren’t," she said. "You can’t blame everything on the economy or where it is."

mdevito@gannett.com

740-328-8513

Twitter: @MariaDeVito13