By Callum Ludwig
Branded Burgers and Bar’s comeback story is nearing completion, with an official reopening in the coming months.
The popular Seville restaurant will return in November this year, having been shut since 11 February due to the fire in the tobacconist next door.
Owner Lyshea Pushie and her partner Chris had only recently taken over the restaurant in February when the incident occurred and Mrs Pushie said it was like a part of her died when she found out what happened over the phone that night.
“I was just thrown into shock and you can’t really believe what’s happened, almost every day of this has been sort of non-stop hardship, in the first initial stages it was anger and devastation surrounding what had happened and the massive void that it had left,” she said.
“It felt like it was all over for us as new business owners before we had even begun.”
Emergency services were paged to a blaze in the tobacconist at about 2am that morning and after incurring no one was trapped in the vehicle that was lodged in the shop, went to work attempting to reduce the damage to the neighbouring buildings, the dentist and Branded Burgers and Bar.
Mrs Pushie said they didn’t really know what it was going to take to come back from it.
“We were just learning everything about the business as it was, so it’s been a harder process than if you built it all from the ground up, it would have been a little bit easier, but we’ve had to find all of that out really quickly,” she said.
“Then there was the hardship for our staff who we obviously care deeply for and were trying to support them as best as we could, a lot of these people were casual staff’ mothers, uni students or kids at school who now had no income at all, it really broke us that not only had it happened to us but by extension to them and their families.”
First Lieutenant at Seville CFA Rob Groiss told the Star Mail at the time that the neighbouring building ‘sustained substantial smoke and heat damage’ as well as water damage from a burst main that also impacted the medical centre.
Mrs Pushie said she then had major fights with insurance companies, who really try to ‘duck and weave’ out of paying for major claims like theirs.
“We couldn’t understand how something that wasn’t our fault could still mean that we could lose everything, they wouldn’t help with anything, they didn’t answer questions and when we pointed out parts in our policy that should help, they discounted it for any number of reasons,” she said.
“The whole ordeal was getting horrible and I was so at my wits end with them physically and emotionally, we sought legal advice and were able to get the most from our policy to try and get this thing back off the ground,”
“Then came more hardship going through what was actually left of the shop which was absolutely nothing, it all went in the bin, all of our contents including our flooring, walls, ceiling, air conditioning system, even the external cladding around the shop, it was all completely demolished.”
Branded Burgers and Bar will be holding an official reopening event in November, including a raffle with vouchers for other local businesses as well as face painting and live music.
Mrs Pushie said they thought three or four times during the process that they wouldn’t be able to reopen the restaurant.
“Lots of times we wanted to throw in the towel and thought that it might be easier to walk away from it and just go get a 9 -5 and do something else but we didn’t want to do that because we had only just really started with what we wanted to do with it and it was suiting our lifestyle with a young family really well,” she said.
“We’ve lost a couple of them [staff] due to the length of time we’ve had to close for, you can ask people to come back to me in three months or six months when it starts to push out to like nine or almost a year, it’s asking a lot and we understand they’ve got to look after themselves as well,”
“Most of them have committed to coming back, which is just amazing, it says a lot to our character as business owners, but also their character as people and staff and their loyalty to Branded.”
