BOSTON — Celebrity chef Todd English fired back at claims he left Boston’s Kingfish Hall Restaurant in disarray after allegedly abandoning the space.
English left a bad taste in the mouths of merchants at Faneuil Hall Marketplace when he closed the seafood restaurant several weeks ago.
“We were very happy when Todd moved in. He did a great business there and he’s a very talented chef so we don’t understand why it would look like that,” Carol Troxwell of the Faneuil Hall Merchants Association said.
Troxwell claimed English left a lot of ductwork and other areas of the restaurant in bad shape. She told FOX station WFXT the space looks, “pretty un-leasable.”
According to The Boston Globe, when English was a tenant, he failed to pay the former operator of Faneuil Hall over $1 million in rent and other charges. General Growth Properties began eviction procedures in 2011 after Kingfish fell behind on payments, the report stated.
Troxwell said English owes about $200,000 in back dues to the merchants association.
Meanwhile, English fired back at the Globe via social media. He posted a photo of the space on Twitter along with a tweet reading, “Get your facts right @bostonglobe. A clean construction site! BG u r better than this!”
A spokesperson for English gave WFXT a statement on the matter late Saturday, which read, “Kingfish Hall is a clean space. We had a cleaning crew in for the past week ensuring that the restaurant was back in order.”
It went on, “Earlier this year during lease renegotiations, we were in the process of renovating the space which the landlord was aware of. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to come to an agreement on a lease renewal and some of the work was already underway, hence the past state of the site. This was already being rectified before the Globe article came out.”
To read more, go to MyFoxBoston.com