City Restaurants Weather Power Outage

John Golumb and his staff at Poco's Bow Street Cantina were working up quite a sweat around lunch time on Friday, and it wasn't because they were swamped with hungry patrons.

To the contrary, they were scrambling to reopen the waterfront restaurant Friday by 2 p.m. after Poco's and dozens of other city restaurants, businesses and residents were left without power for hours.

According to Public Service of New Hampshire, more than 1,000 Portsmouth customers were affected when a on Marcy and State streets on Friday around 9:40 a.m.

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As the mercury threatened to break 90 degrees for the third day in a row, downtown restaurant owners were worried they would lose a lot of the food they typically purchase for the busy summer weekends.

"It's a setback," said Golumb. "But luckily we can still get open to serve a late lunch and dinner."

Golumb said he and his staff made sure all of their freezers were closed and packed with ice. He also postponed some Friday shipments of food until later in the day.

"As soon as we lost power, we kept everything shut and we iced everything down," he said.

Golumb said the restaurant staff also took the necessary ServSafe precautions to safeguard their inventory.

"If anything is questionable, we'll toss it," he said.

The main thing he wanted to stress was that Poco's and all of the other restaurants on Bow Street, such as Old Ferry Landing, the River House and Harpoon Willy's were back open Friday afternoon.

At Izzy's Frozen Yogurt next to Poco's, Sarah Maskwa said their coolers managed to keep all of the ice cream and frozen yogurt cold enough until power was restored around 12:45 p.m.

At the very beginning of the power outage, nearly the entire northern half of the downtown area was without electricity, which inconvenienced businesses like Optima Savings Bank and the federal government agencies inside the Thomas J. McIntyre Building on Daniel Street.

Golumb thanked PSNH crew members for restoring power within the two-hour timeframe they promised following the federal OSHA inspection that took place at the scene of the power line accident.

And yet there were some businesses that were spared altogether from the outage.

Bruce Pingree, general manager of The Press Room, said the restaurant, along with Ceres Bakery, Paradiza gifts and other businesses on the upper end of Penhallow Street never lost power because they are connected to the grid that supplies the former Portsmouth Police station where companies like RAKA Creative and Oppenheimer are located now.

But for restaurants that cater to the breakfast and lunch crowd, the power outage proved to be too much. Jeremy Colby, owner of Colby's Breakfast and Lunch on Daniel Street, decided to close on Friday at 11:20 a.m.

He said the power outage happened right in the middle of a busy breakfast rush. In 20 minutes, the restaurant became a sweat box, he said.

"This totally killed my Friday, and Fridays are one of our best days," Colby said.