Jason Joyce
Barriques on Atwood Avenue will close sometime before the end of the year. The location opened in late 2015.
Barriques will not be renewing its lease for its east-side location at 2166 Atwood Ave. Co-owner Matt Weygandt says the exact closing date is “to be determined” but it will be sometime before the lease expires at the end of the year.
“Our other locations have pretty largely recovered from the pandemic or are doing even better than they were before,” Weygandt says. “For some reason we were languishing on Atwood.” Weygandt says the lease renewal would have been for five years and he “wasn’t comfortable [there] for the long-term obligation.” Business was “far away from what we needed.”
Barriques closed another location at 961 S. Park St. in December 2020 but still operates locations on Monroe Street, West Washington Avenue, University Avenue, Old Sauk Road, McKee Road in Fitchburg and Cayuga Street in Middleton.
Weygandt is at a loss as to why business at the Atwood location never really took off. “In some ways the area is very much like Monroe Street, where we’ve been having a great year since things picked up around May or June. I don’t know. I wish we had some idea.”
The Atwood location opened in late November 2015 on the ground floor of the Cornerstone apartments.
In general, Weygandt says business at the other locations has been stronger than it was in 2019, and he is still looking to expand in a new location sometime in 2023, by which point he hopes the labor shortage will have abated.
“We’re still trying to grow but we are much more discerning,” he says. “I’m hopeful there will still be decent opportunities.”
Weygandt says he is glad that Barriques has fared pretty well through the pandemic but says that winter is once again going to create “a tough environment” for a lot of restaurants.
