To be read in conjunction with “No more seats at The Table“

On May 28th, The Table closed its doors for the final time.

And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Of course, it sucks that local restaurants, especially ones with almost a decade of history under their belt, are being priced out of business by rising operating costs and diminished profit margins.

But, of all the restaurants that could’ve gone under, and all the institutions that have gone under, I’m not so sad that it was The Table’s turn on the chopping block.

Despite The Table once being a renowned restaurant, beloved by many DeLanders, a growing number of locals have long been disappointed. They blame the sale of The Table from the original owner, Melisa Reed, to Alaskan transplants Jessee and Heidi Quinn. It is precisely this fall from grace that I wish to document for you today, dear readers.

Part 1: The Beginning

Established in 2017, The Table was inspired by memories of eating around Melisa’s grandmother’s dining-room table. Scratch cooking was central to the vision from the start.

“We focused on something I felt deeply passionate about — quality food made from scratch. It wasn’t something widely offered at the time, and I believed if it was executed correctly, it could become something truly special,” Melisa Reed said.

One employee started at The Table in the summer of 2022 — a few months prior to the ownership transition — and stayed for two years, working under both Melisa Reed and the Quinns. She agreed to speak with me anonymously.

On Melisa Reed, she was unequivocal: “Melisa was an amazing employer. Very understanding and caring. She gave many opportunities to people that probably didn’t deserve them. She was very friendly and kind.”

When I asked what it was like working under Heidi and Jessee Quinn, she said that “they were both horrible bosses [and] human beings. Worst I’ve ever worked for.”

The Reed era of The Table marks the peak of the restaurant. It lasted five-and-a-half years.

Part 2: The Fall

In 2022, Melisa Reed decided to sell The Table to Jessee and Heidi Quinn.

In the Beacon article announcing the sale, one can see the first causes for concern. “[T]hey had never eaten a meal at The Table Restaurant in Downtown DeLand,” the article reads. It is also implied in the article that the Quinns had never even been to DeLand.

This sale marks the beginning of the end.

One Facebook commenter described the transition in ownership: “From the moment Jessee and Heidi Quinn purchased The Table from Melisa Reed the vibe shifted. Many of us locals were die hard Table fans. We watched in horror as amazing staff members were driven away and the vibe continued to shift. Then the food [distributor] trucks started showing up which is odd when the restaurant was built around the scratch kitchen concept. After the last of the beloved bartenders left we had enough and have not been back since.”

In order to better understand The Table under the Quinns’ ownership, I spoke with former employee Tony Traver (who now owns and operates South of the South Smokehouse at Northwest Square with his wife Kelly).

Tony worked in The Table’s kitchen from November 2023 to April 2024 — hired as a cook, put in charge of brunch, and was promised (though never received) the title of executive chef. The first thing he was told when he started: The Table was a scratch kitchen.

“When they hired me, they told me it was a scratch kitchen,” Tony said. “They got a lot of stuff that was just like… their osso buco was pork in a bag that you boil.”

Tony confirmed The Table’s primary food distributor was Gordon Food Service. Meats came through Cheney Brothers and Halperns.

The items that were still made from scratch were seriously botched: meatloaf, mashed potatoes, grits, spinach artichoke dip, coconut shrimp. The sauces were thickened with cornstarch instead of roux, and the risotto was made in bulk and left sitting in a steam well for hours until it became, in Tony’s words, “a gooey glob.” Mashed potatoes were made fresh at the beginning of the week, and then the entire batch would be reheated day after day after day for the rest of the week. The food wasn’t fresh daily, even when it was scratch.

The Quinns, Tony said, acted like they were always there. But, in practice, they stopped by for a few minutes every other day. Toward the end of Tony’s tenure, he’d sometimes go more than a week without seeing them at all.

Tony would flag problems when he could — no soap at the hand sinks, no hot water, no mops, no brooms. Sometimes things got addressed. Often they didn’t. The Quinns, when they were in the building, were focused on marketing: events to bring more customers in, ways to drive foot traffic. The question of what those customers would find when they arrived seemed not to factor in.

The problem with absentee owners isn’t just that they’re absent. The problem is the vacuum that their absence creates.

Tony described a kitchen where no one was truly in charge. There was a kitchen manager, Preston Nemoto. Preston, Tony said, had no command of anything. When Tony was put in charge of brunch and told Preston what he needed ordered, it simply wouldn’t get ordered. Eventually, Tony asked him directly: “Is this malfeasance, are you trying to fuck with me, or is this incompetence?” Preston’s answer: “It’s incompetence.”

Tony had been promised the title of executive chef. It never materialized. “I don’t think any decisions were being made there,” he said. “It was one of the strangest things.”

The power vacuum gave rise to consequences. Teenage food runners chasing each other through the kitchen with water pistols. A line cook named Adam figured out that he could set his Xbox up on the digital order screens. Tony would find him playing Fortnite, standing in a puddle of grease.

“If I wasn’t the one mopping the floor at the end of service,” Tony said, “it wasn’t getting mopped.”

The kitchen reflected this. The ceiling dripped grease. A metal fan bolted to the wall was packed solid with grease and gunk. Over the course of his time there, Tony threw out thousands of pounds of rotting food. His summary: “The absolute filthiest work environment I have ever seen in my life. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Food safety issues followed. Vacuum-sealed fish were being defrosted at room temperature, on a speed rack in the kitchen, in Florida heat, for hours. Vacuum-sealed packaging creates an environment where the bacteria responsible for botulism can thrive and produce toxins without any obvious signs of spoilage.

Once, the walk-in cooler stopped working and ran at roughly 60 degrees for weeks. The freezer ran at around 40. Jessee’s response was to come in and vacuum the vents on top of it. “As if he was fixing it,” said Tony. “Why aren’t you calling someone to come in and fix it?”

This is what Melisa Reed’s scratch kitchen had become.

Poor conditions and high staff turnover don’t exist independently of one another. They feed each other, in a downward spiral. Employees leave because the conditions are untenable; conditions worsen because there are fewer people to maintain them; the restaurant makes less money and hires less staff; the remaining staff are overwhelmed; and so it goes.

Tony described the trajectory plainly: “Very short staffed, but also sales dwindling ’cause food sucks and service sucks. So numbers kept decreasing. Downward spiral.”

He had walked in on day one already feeling it. “When I walked in the door it was downhill,” he said. “And I felt like Sisyphus.”

The day before he hit six months, Tony told the Quinns he wouldn’t be returning.

Part 3: The End

Tony left in April 2024. Fast forward to January of 2026: when a new server and bartender (who asked to remain anonymous) started her first shift, the situation had only worsened. We’ll call her Jane Doe.

The Quinns were there even less than during Tony’s time. In Jane Doe’s entire tenure at The Table, she had only met Jessee Quinn twice prior to the meeting where he announced the restaurant’s closure. She never met Heidi Quinn at all.

There was no real manager. There was Elise, who Jane described as someone who “did everything but wasn’t a manager.” She’d simply been there long enough that the role had developed around her by default. Staff kept leaving: a host, two expos, and more. Those positions were never posted, never filled.

The kitchen had not improved either. Food fell off trays on the stairs and sat there for days. “Disgusting,” said Jane.

The paychecks were a problem too.

Jane noticed it a couple weeks before her final paycheck: roughly fourteen and a half hours missing. She messaged Jessee on the work app. For a week, nothing. She messaged Heidi, who gave her Jessee’s personal number. Jane texted him. Still nothing. Eventually Elise said she’d spoken with him — the missing pay would appear on the next check.

It did not.

Then, on Tuesday, May 26th, Jessee Quinn called an all-staff meeting.

Staff had heard a rumor that the restaurant was going out of business about a week and a half earlier. They were told it was just that — a rumor. Then, the weekly schedule never went up on Sunday. On Tuesday, they received messages asking them to come in at 2pm.

Jessee Quinn told them The Table was closing. The last day of business would be Thursday, May 28th.

His explanation: the cooks had quit and left them unable to operate. The building owner wanted to divide the space and had raised the rent.

The property manager, Swann Real Estate, declined to comment on the veracity of Quinn’s claim.

“We all felt pretty let down,” Jane told me. She is a single mother of two. “[It] just sucks not to have a heads up.”

On one of the final days of the wind-down, Jessee told Jane the pay system was down, and that checks would be ready by 5pm. Five o’clock came and went. He eventually paid some employees in cash, but Jane was still left short. When she sent him a breakdown of what was still owed, with photographic documentation attached, he stopped responding entirely. (At the time of publication, the now-former employee alleges that she has still not received the money she is owed, totaling over $400.)

According to Jane, at least four other employees were also still waiting on wages as The Table shut down.

According to Jane Doe, Jessee had told the staff that he had spoken with local restaurant owners who would be willing to hire them. He said they’d have first pick of anything being sold from the restaurant’s contents. He said the liquor was theirs to take, since it couldn’t legally be sold.

None of that happened.

The jobs never materialized. Items employees tried to purchase were sold to customers at the same price. According to the employee, the liquor was sold as well.

Jessee Quinn did not respond to requests for comment.

Part 4: The Conclusion

If I might wax poetic, for just a moment: a restaurant is a covenant. It’s a place of trust and vulnerability between chefs, staff, and diners. In its ideal form, it is meant to nourish. It is meant to be the place you can go to laugh, cry, commune. We go to restaurants to raise our spirits. We go to restaurants to celebrate. We go to restaurants to be with friends old and new. The best restaurants are those that provide the venue for those moments to freely flow.

I believe that Melisa Reed understood this. She built The Table around scratch cooking not because it was trendy but because it was a statement of intent.

“We built more than a restaurant,” said Reed. “We built relationships and bonds among team members that will last a lifetime.”

This raises one yet-unanswered question:

If The Table under Reed was everything their employees and community say it was, why did Melisa Reed sell? Specifically, why did she sell to the Quinns?

Reed told the Beacon she wanted more time with her son. She was done washing dishes at 4 in the morning when dishwashers didn’t show. That makes sense. And yet, she kept her other job, Director of National Sales for the Winery Exchange of California. She wasn’t stepping back from work. She was stepping back from this specific work.

Melisa Reed wanted out. The Quinns were the exit. How carefully Reed vetted the people she was handing her restaurant to remains unclear.

The Quinns got the keys to a restaurant that had spent five-and-a-half years building a particular kind of promise to a particular community. They had never eaten there. They had never been to DeLand. They sat in the office and brainstormed marketing events to drive foot traffic while the walk-in cooler ran at 60 degrees. When the staff called, they didn’t always answer.

“I’m really glad that they’re shutting down,” Tony Traver told me, “because everyone in this town deserves better than that. The workers and the eaters.”