After 13 years in the Cultural District, Nine on Nine will close next Saturday, Feb. 16, at the end of service, the owner confirmed.
The landlord is apparently doubling the rent, owner Courtney Lynch-Crawford said. She found out about the rent increase over the summer and has been trying to negotiate with the landlord since, she said.
When the restaurant opened in April 2006, “there was only Sonoma Grille and Six Penn Kitchen,” Ms. Lynch-Crawford said about competing restaurants in that part of Downtown, so the rents were lower. If the rent were to double, “it doesn’t work.”
Six Penn Kitchen closed a year ago this month, and Sonoma Grille and its various iterations from Yves Carreau’s Big Y Group shuttered about the same time.
900 Penn Ave. LP bought the building in the late 1990s for $300,000, Allegheny County property records show. Trek Development Group manages the property.
William Gatti, CEO of Trek Development, on Friday disputed Ms. Lynch-Crawford’s description of the rent situation but would not elaborate.
A dining review by the Post-Gazette during the restaurant’s 10th year came after the owners made a lot of changes to be more competitive with the growing Downtown restaurant scene. At that time it had dropped its white tablecloths for a sleeker look and also had dropped its prices, providing a menu of smaller share plates.
Ms. Lynch-Crawford said she is upset about having to close for many reasons, especially because the restaurant has been paying the salaries for about 25 people.
“It’s an extended family,” she said. Among them, manager Joe Kinlock joined the staff the first year and has been at the restaurant since. Chef Lee Corbett has been running the kitchen for about seven years. He had been at Hyeholde in Moon before that and attended culinary school in Baltimore.
In the early days of the restaurant, chef Richard DeShantz — now proprietor of Richard DeShantz Restaurant Group, which most recently opened Fish nor Fowl in Garfield and Poulet Bleu in Lawrenceville — was a partner in the restaurant. The Post-Gazette reported in 2010 that he dedicated his resources to the restaurant particularly after he sold Cafe Richard — now Cafe Raymond — in the Strip, and before 2011, when he opened what’s now his restaurant group’s flagship, Meat & Potatoes, Downtown.
The DeShantz-Lynch-Crawford business relationship split “right around the time he opened Meat & Potatoes,” Ms. Lynch-Crawford said.
This is her only restaurant; for a stretch she had a hand in Taste of Dahntahn, at 535 Liberty Ave., that closed in 2013. Ms. Lynch-Crawford, 44, grew up in Carnegie and has been working in restaurants all her life, she said, citing her longtime gig working at Papa J’s, now closed after a fire, near her childhood home.
Melissa McCart: mmccart@post-gazette.com.
First Published: February 8, 2019, 6:43 p.m.
Updated: February 8, 2019, 6:59 p.m.
