CLEARWATER, Fla. — At the peak of the pandemic, Danny Lehan and his staff at The Village Inn weathered the storm.
As their dining room shut down, they didn’t fold but instead found a way to expand. Lehan has worked for Village Inn since he was 15, so this place is in his blood.
“Bought my first car, bought my first house when I was 18, as a server for Village Inn, so yeah,” said Lehan.
Lehan bought his first Village Inn franchise in 2011. Fifteen years later, he is getting ready to open his brand-new Clearwater location.
“This will be our ninth,” explained Lehan.
“Team” is a keyword for Danny. He said that’s what got him through the Pandemic when sales plummeted 90%.
“The landlords, US Foods is our distributor, every single team member, we made them part of the solution, put our heads together to figure out how to move forward,” said Danny.
From then on that included making sure his employees had food on the table, even if it meant taking it from his own walk-in refrigerators. He even sold thousands of pies out of their kitchen for the holidays.
“We actually called each individual guest that ordered a pie from us to check on them to make sure they were ok. Let them know we had delivery, for anything you needed to get from Village Inn. You just couldn’t come into the dining room at that time,” explained Lehan.
But when so many other restaurants failed, Lehan and his team did not.
“One of the key successes that we had through COVID, we put team and people first,” said Lehan.
He calls this the most fulfilling thing he’s done in his life.
Now he’s focused on Village Inn once again being considered “The breakfast experts.”
“That was our tag back in the day: made-from-scratch pancakes. Who does that?” said Lehan.
Lehan and his husband designed the new Clearwater location off Roosevelt Boulevard. It’s smaller but sits nearly the same amount of people with a full bar and outdoor seating.
