08/14/2024
📢 **Important Announcement from The Highlander Public House Restaurant** 📢
Dear valued customers and community,
We regret to inform you that The Highlander Restaurant has permanently closed its doors in Downtown Wichita Falls, TX. We want to take a moment to explain the circumstances that led to this difficult decision.
Over the past year, our restaurant has faced significant challenges due to ongoing construction in our building. Unfortunately, this construction caused an influx of rats into our space, as they were forced out of the rest of the building. This is an issue we reported to building management over a year ago, yet we received little to no support in addressing it. So we informed the health department of our struggles and paid for weekly pest control to try to handle the situation, but it persisted. It's a large building with a lot of rodents.
Despite our efforts to work with the health department and follow their recommendations, including closing for a deep clean to manage the rodent issue, the situation continued to deteriorate. The construction activities not only disrupted our operations but also posed serious health and safety risks over the past two years—ranging from the construction crew damaging our air conditioning units and making uninformed decisions that flooded the restaurant to excessive dust filling our dining room and debris dropping on to diners plates while drilling through the ceiling. These just to name a few. All this and more with absolutely no recompense from building management.
For eight years, we have been proud to serve the Wichita Falls community, always paying our rent on time, even through challenging times like the COVID-19 pandemic. However, after this recent incident, we were locked out of our restaurant after only five days late on rent with no prior notice or communication, we realized that our long-standing partnership with this building management was no longer sustainable.
We had hoped to rebrand and refresh our concept, in fact, we were in the process of doing that when we were locked out, but the lack of support and respect we received made it clear that it was time to move on. We want to thank each of you for your loyalty and support over the years.
As we navigate this transition, we appreciate your understanding and will keep you updated on our next steps. Thank you for being a part of our journey.
With gratitude,
The Highlander Team 💚
