The last two restaurants of the German Nordsee chain, focused on fish dishes, will end up in the Czech Republic by the end of the month. Their operator, Master Mariner, was terminated from the lease in the Palladium and Nový Smíchov shopping centers in Prague. The reason is the inability of the company to pay its obligations.
In mid-May, the company filed a motion to initiate insolvency proceedings at the Municipal Court in Prague, it wants the court to declare bankruptcy on its assets. He has not yet made a decision, according to documents published in the insolvency register.
The Master Mariner company became unprofitable in 2019, when the Nordsee branch in the Prague center of Arkády Pankrác ceased to function. According to the company, the next two years of business were affected by the forced closure of establishments due to the spread of the coronavirus disease.
Even this year, attendance did not return to the pre-coronavirus level, and the company is thus unable to pay new and previously unpaid invoices, he stated in the insolvency proposal. The company registers a debt of approximately 40.3 million crowns. The largest part is in crowns, other liabilities are in euros and Swiss francs.
Because of the notices from the leases, the company will have to dismiss the remaining employees, of whom it has about twenty, some of them on a main employment contract, some on an agreement to perform work.
The first Nordsee restaurant in the Czech Republic welcomed guests in 2004, ten years later Master Mariner operated four establishments under this brand.
Gastronomic establishments were the most dynamically growing sector in shopping centers before the pandemic, according to CBRE. However, as a result of anti-epidemic measures, they experienced a significant drop. In the first year of the pandemic, their sales in regional shopping centers fell by 35 percent year-on-year. Although they improved last year, earnings were still 17 percent behind 2019, according to the current analysis of the CBRE Shopping Center Index.
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