Va. restaurateur who defied covid rules presses his anti-government fight
“What you’re doing right now is government overreach. What you’re doing right now is supporting a tyrannical government,” Strickland told the officers as he panned his phone around the room. “The Constitution means more to me than my self-preservation. If any of you guys had the b—- to stand up and say that, and fight for that, this would not be going on right now.”
When the agents responded that they’re simply executing a lawful search warrant, Strickland compared them to former Nazi officers who, during the Nuremberg trials, said they were just following orders. “So many people were just doing their job for Hitler back in Germany,” he told the agents and troopers, their faces as still as stone.
The harangue was, seemingly, Strickland’s last line of defense as his restaurant headed into the holidays without its liquor licenses, which ABC had officially suspended on Nov. 15 because the owner had refused to follow coronavirus restrictions during the height of the pandemic. But like the coronavirus mandates, Strickland ignored ABC’s suspension order and continued to pour booze — until the agents paid a visit. The owner was now facing a holiday season, typically a lucrative time for restaurants, that looked anything but bright.
Strickland — the U.S. Army veteran turned restaurateur — had played a game of chicken with the state over the emergency rules that former Gov. Ralph Northam (D) put in place to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Strickland reportedly had spent “six figures” in legal fees to fight the rules, which, among other things, required face coverings for staff and diners (when not eating or drinking) and restricted seating capacities. He said he was even willing to go to jail to stand up against what he called unconstitutional mandates, which, in his view, had all but destroyed small businesses in Virginia.
In this game of chicken, the state blinked once last year when the Virginia Department of Health dropped its case against Strickland and Gourmeltz. But the state’s alcohol authority, with a board and chief executive appointed by Northam, never flinched. It pursued a complaint against Strickland for 20 months, until restaurateur had exhausted his appeals. Then, Virginia’s ABC suspended Gourmeltz’s licenses until Jan. 31, forcing Strickland to cancel weekend bands and talk to clients about holiday parties. He wasn’t sure his business could survive the strain.
“If I’m being honest with you, I don’t know,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post, several days after the raid on his restaurant. He expected to lose more than $200,000 during the suspension period.
But Strickland has no regrets. His feud with the Commonwealth has turned him into cause celebre in conservative circles and has even put him on a new career path. In January, Strickland announced that he’ll run in the Republican primary next year, vying for a seat in the Virginia senate. He says he’s running as a conservative Christian, not as Virginia’s answer to Majorie Taylor Greene. He hopes to move from a businessman battling the state over its laws to a politician creating them.
Strickland, 39, says he wasn’t a particularly political person until the coronavirus turned his world upside down in 2020. Yet, years earlier, as a teenager, Strickland says, he experienced a family trauma that inspired him to take on a leadership role: Growing up in what he describes as a rough neighborhood in Woodbridge, Va., Strickland lost his two older brothers over the span of two years. One was killed in 1996, he says, and another was sent to prison in 1997, both gang-related.
At age 17, Strickland decided to join the U.S. Army.
“I wanted to set a better example for my little brothers, and I also wanted to get out of the environment that I was in,” Strickland told The Post. He has three younger brothers as well as three sisters. (The Post could not immediately verify the family’s history.)
He was a medic in the Army for several years, a fact confirmed by public documents, before taking his skills to Blackwater (now known as Constellis), a private military contractor that was implicated in one of the ugliest chapters of the Iraq war: Four guards were convicted of killing 14 unarmed Iraqis in 2007; in his last weeks in office, former President Trump pardoned the guards.
Strickland served as a medic, he says, for Blackwater’s Counter Assault Team. He then worked as an intelligence analyst before taking another tour of duty in 2014, according to his official biography. But in 2016, Strickland’s career took a left turn. He launched a food truck called Gourmeltz, which specializes in grilled-cheese sandwiches stuffed with a wide variety of ingredients. One truck quickly turned into three, and by 2018, Strickland and his wife, Maria, sold their fleet and opened a bricks-and-mortar Gourmeltz at the corner of Patriot Highway and Meridian Street in Cosner’s Corner.
Self-described as a “’90s music bar and drafthouse,” Gourmeltz is a spacious operation, with high ceilings, exposed ductwork and lots of flatscreen TVs that broadcast live sports or an endless stream of music videos from the 1990s, or thereabouts. A stage is carved into one corner of the restaurant. On a Tuesday afternoon in early December, the stage was empty, save for a background mural featuring caricatures of Michael, Tina, Slash, Snoop, Tupac, Prince and other one-named artists who filled our lives with rhymes in the previous century.
Several diners were seated at the bar, but they’re were sipping soft drinks or glasses of water. Every bottle of beer, wine and booze had been confiscated the week before, and even the self-service beer wall had been detached from its kegs. The only alcohol in the entire place was a pitcher of beer still sitting on the bar, two-thirds empty and covered in plastic wrap. This was battlefield in the days after the war was lost, even if Strickland was not yet ready to concede defeat.
“It’s a fight I’m going to see through till the end,” he told The Post.
Strickland says he didn’t set out to pick a fight with Virginia at the beginning of the pandemic. Like most everyone else, he toed the line in the early days. He closed the dining room at Gourmeltz for three months. In April, he got a loan from the Paycheck Protection Program for $50,600, which was forgiven in January 2021, according to ProPublica’s database. (He got a second draw for the same amount in February 2021, and it was forgiven later the same year.)
But when Northam allowed restaurants to reopen their dining rooms at half capacity in June 2020, Strickland began to chafe at the restrictions. As a former medic, he was particularly put off by the mask mandates. At the time, many were wearing little more than surgical masks or homemade ones juryrigged from used clothing.
“I know a piece of cotton is not going to stop me from getting a virus,” he told The Post.
After the Rappahannock Area Health District received more than 20 complaints that Strickland wasn’t following the mandates, the heath department sent inspectors to Gourmeltz. The inspection, Strickland has said, wasn’t unnecessary. He would have told the state outright that he was defying the rules.
Virginia suspended his business licenses in early 2021, but Strickland continued to operate without them. In March 2021, the state asked Spotsylvania Circuit Court Judge Ricardo Rigual to issue a temporary injunction, which would shut down Gourmeltz until the court could hear the merits of the case. Rigual refused, saying, among other things, that the state had not proven the restaurant posed a threat to the public.
A few months later, the health department decided to drop its case against Strickland and Gourmletz, partly because Northam had eased mask mandates for fully vaccinated Virginians and lifted seating and distancing restrictions. The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star’s editorial board proclaimed that the state’s decision “can be seen as a tacit admission that Northam’s mandates strayed well beyond the constitutional guardrails set up to protect individual citizens’ rights.”
A New York state judge said much the same thing earlier this year, ruling that Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) didn’t have the authority to impose indoor mask mandates. Likewise, the Supreme Court ruled that the Biden administration didn’t have the authority to require the nation’s largest employers to mandate vaccines for their workers or to test them regularly for the coronavirus.
But even as Strickland and his supporters celebrated the victory, the Virginia ABC was continuing to press its case. In March 2021, around the time Rigual was denying the injunction, the alcohol authority revoked Strickland’s license. But the revocation was stayed pending appeal.
Meanwhile, the Virginia health department continued to receive complaints about Gourmeltz. From July 2, 2020 to April 30, 2021, the department received 117 documented complaints, according to spokeswoman Maria Reppas. Given the nature of how the coronavirus spreads — sometimes via asymptomatic people infected by the virus — the health department “cannot definitely say how many cases have been traced back to Gourmeltz,” Reppas said in an email.
(Incidentally, Strickland says that neither he nor his wife have come down with the coronavirus during the pandemic. But he also said they haven’t tested for it. He remains unvaccinated.)
By September 2021, ABC modified its initial decision. Instead of revoking Gourmeltz’s license, the authority would suspend it. But again ABC stayed the order pending Strickland’s appeals. More than a year later, in November, the Spotsylvania Circuit Court ruled in favor of the Virginia ABC, leading to the suspension of Gourmeltz’s license and, eventually, the raid on the restaurant in early December. The tweet announcing the alcohol seizure had been pinned to ABC’s account for days, which led to the predictable trolling from Strickland’s supporters.
“You’re a group of fascist thugs,” one responded to ABC.
Virginia ABC executed a search warrant today against Gourmeltz LLC in Spotsylvania County.
The establishment failed to comply with ABC’s Board Order and continued to serve beer, wine and mixed beverages to customers.
Read more: https://t.co/iEwqdSvk4y
— Virginia ABC (@VirginiaABC) December 2, 2022
Strickland has used the seizure to fundraise for his state senate campaign. But he and his supporters have also been pressing Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares, both Republicans, to resolve the case. Earlier this year, Youngkin signed a bill that would limit executive orders issued during emergencies to 45 days unless reauthorized by the General Assembly. But on Dec. 6, the governor also issued his own executive order, which would revisit all the disciplinary action taken against individuals and companies during the pandemic. The order came four days after the raid on Gourmeltz.
The owner of Gourmeltz was less than impressed with the governor’s order. Strickland didn’t see how any corrective action could take place before Jan. 31, when he would presumably get his liquor license back.
Strickland’s business was already starting to suffer the consequences. On a Saturday earlier this month, Strickland canceled the band scheduled for the evening because, he figured, no one would want their rock and roll without a cold one in hand. He posted photos of a nearly empty restaurant on his social accounts, saying this is “what government overreach really looks like.” Then he wondered aloud: Where were Youngkin and Miyares as his business crumbled?
Even if he wasn’t a politician yet, Strickland was acting like one. Last week, Strickland tagged Phillip Scott, a Republican delegate from Spotsylvania, and asked if he was “behind me in my fight against these unconstitutional mandates?” Scott expressed his support and thought the case should have been dropped.
But Scott also issued a reminder to the wannabe state senator:
“When you started down this path, you knew there would be road bumps,” Scott wrote on Strickland’s Facebook page. “Just because one does not agree with the rule or the reasoning behind it, does not make them immune to the repercussions. That is where you find yourself.”
But this is not where Strickland landed. On Wednesday, seemingly out of the blue, attorneys for Strickland and the Virginia ABC reached an agreement “resolving all issues associated with the serving of alcohol products without the requisite license to do so,” according to a joint statement. The authority would reinstate Gourmeltz’s licenses on Dec. 23. The statement made a point to note the agreement is “neither an admission nor denial of liability or wrongdoing on the part of any of the Parties.”
The Virginia ABC declined to comment beyond the joint statement.
“This was a really frustrating example of legacy problems from bad decisions made from the Northam administration. It was caught up in the courts, and they made sure a fair settlement was reached,” Youngkin told O’Connor & Company on Friday.
Strickland took to social media to revel in his victory. “When Patriots stand together & fight, we win. Every time,” he wrote. He told The Post that supporters from across the country had pressed state government, from the governor’s office on down, to resolve the case. He speculated that they ultimately pressured ABC into seeking an agreement.
“I’ll be getting my license back and getting my liquor back, and I’m not paying them a dime,” Strickland told The Post. “So the will of the people prevailed.”
