Grilled Cheese Bar closed after mud, silt filter in from water main break
Natalia Mulica graduated from St. Ambrose in 2020. In November 2021 she opened her business, and by 2022 she was celebrating its first anniversary. But on New Year’s Day 2023, her good fortune ran out.
Mulica awoke at 5 a.m. to a phone call from the Davenport Fire Department. A water main had burst on Mound Street in the East Village, right beside her business. Grilled Cheese Bar is in the lower corner of the Village Market Place, the green building that faces River Drive.
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Because of the bar’s proximity to the water main, the damage was worse than she originally thought. Based on the phone call Sunday, Mulica thought she would be coming into a flooded bar. But the water would be removed and she would reopen the next day. It wasn’t that easy.
“We come in the next day, I look behind the bar and the cement is all broken up. There was mud; you could walk up a hill of mud,” she said. “It was immediately complete heartbreak, because everything was destroyed.”
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She discovered on Monday that the water had pushed through the building’s foundation and broke through the baseboards. Mud, silt and dirt poured in, destroying furniture, the walls and leaving a quicksand-like mess for Mulica and her team to clean up.
“Tuesday we came back in, but it had rained. Everything we did the day before was washed away,” she said. “So we had to start over again.”
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