New Canaan Businesses Face Aftermath of Power Outage

While most residents in New Canaan while trying to keep cool Wednesday evening, restaurants downtown scrambled to salvage their stock.

manager Eligio filled empty shelves Thursday morning after tossing out their inventory and starting from scratch.

was bustling with activity around 10 a.m. Thursday after ushering out a near full restaurant Wednesday night in a mad rush to move cars that would be towed in minutes.

The manager recalled hte evacuation stating, “We tried to get people out as soon as possible so their cars didn’t get towed, so a few tables didn’t get to settle their bill.”

Le Pain Quotidien managed to salvage most of their food, however, according to an email to the Chamber of Commerce, only one person managed to return and settle their bill.

ended up without any losses, but a fried register Thursday morning.

“They cleared out that street in around 10 minutes,” said , Chamber of Commerce Director and member of the Community Emergency Response Team. “Mike Handler (CERT), you’ve got to hand it to him, he tried very hard to get all the businesses open as soon as possible so they didn’t lose anything.

“It was very organized, under control and totally calm,” said Murphy.

 employees said the restaurant lost some salads and plenty of business Wednesday during the outage.

“This place was about 80 percent full,” said a server, “and closing up in the 95-degree heat was awful.”

Caroline Kaplan of was one of the last businesses to lose power and got a heads up from Chef Luis next door.

“I was able to prepare,” said Kaplan, “We had a generator and saved most of everything. The store was full when we lost power, but we have a very good relationship with our customers, some left their credit cards and came back for them.

“The crew was so amazing though. They worked so hard, so fast and they really deserve a hand,” said Kaplan.

stuck around with the crew into the night, providing them with pizza and water until they left.

“We cancelled all reservations, around 60 or 70 people,” said manager Carlos. “We had to throw away a lot, though, because the walk-in freezer did not have the capacity for all of it. We had to start from scratch today.”

By noon, Chef Luis was back up and running, though, with reservations already lined up.

confirmed again Thursday morning that the sub-station explosions on Lakeview Ave. on Wednesday put stress on the wires underground downtown, which resulted in the wires burning up. CL&P was on the scene to shut off power to over 4,000 New Canaan residences as a safety precaution while they isolated the issue.