Clinton's Village Inn unexpectedly closes
Apr. 19—CLINTON — Village Inn at 1710 Lincoln Way closed suddenly Monday for undisclosed reasons.
The restaurant closed without warning once before, in January 2020, when over two dozen franchise locations across the country discontinued operations after the parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It reopened in November 2022.
"I'm sorry to the community that this happened again," the location's general manager, Tisha Mankowski, said Tuesday, "and to the employees who are now without a job."
Mankowski, of Clinton, says she and the other employees weren't given a reason for the closure. Village Inn owner Jamal "Jim" Kharbush declined to comment to the Herald when contacted about the closure.
Mankowski told the Herald that she had been in her position for only two months, when in the middle of the business day on Monday, Kharbush came into the restaurant accompanied by two people she'd never seen before.
"They just walked into the restaurant and started taking stuff," Mankowski said, "and started talking about how nice our restaurant was, and how clean it was, and how excited they were."
Kharbush then asked her to go to a back room with him to talk. She says he told her there to get ahold of all employees and to have them come to the restaurant to get their last paycheck.
While she spoke to Kharbush, Mankowski says, one of the servers out in the front of house had asked the two strangers if they were there at the restaurant to eat.
"They literally looked at her," Mankowski says, "and laughed at her and said, 'What, Jim didn't tell you we were closing you down today?'"
Everyone cooking, cleaning, washing dishes, and wrapping silverware into napkins was told to stop working and Kharbush loaded food, Mankowski says, into a non-refrigerated Penske moving truck to take it to the Ames Village Inn location that he also operates.
The assistant manager, Mankowski's fiance, and her were planning to take a week-long vacation in May, during which time Mankowski says Kharbush had told her just last week that he'd run the restaurant in their absence.
Mankowski was responsible for a staff of about 10 employees total at the time.
Aside from the restaurant being short-staffed, Mankowski describes their work environment as having been "chaotic."
"This is the most traumatizing job I ever worked in my life," Mankowski says. "There's a part of me that is grateful that maybe it closed and then there's a part of me that is hoping that maybe they won't bring Village Inn back into town.
