A Current Affair

Last May, the kitchen equipment in Norma’s Corner Shoppe in Ridgewood began to break at a suspiciously fast rate. “We’re down an oven. It’s been a bit of an expensive nightmare,” Crystal River Williams, the co-owner of Norma’s (which has a second location in Wappingers Falls) texted her landlord in June. 

“I might have my electrician come back with me like I did last time. It will save tons of money,” he wrote back. Williams and her co-owner, Denise Plowman, figured some things just needed to be fixed or replaced, probably to do with the electrical wiring. They hired an electrician who upgraded the panel box and installed new lines. But that didn’t resolve the issue. So the electrician tracked their lines into the street and, Williams says, found out the restaurant wasn’t getting the minimum voltage required—the all-electric kitchen’s workhorses are two 220-volt ovens, and they were getting voltage readings of just 187 to 194. 

“You’re getting these power surges that fry things out, and you can’t really control when that happens,” Williams says. Undervoltage can cause electrical equipment to underperform, overheat, and potentially fail because they draw higher current to compensate for the low voltage. Williams, her landlord, and the electrician each filed emergency tickets with Con Edison. “I naively thought this meant they would come out to fix it,” she says. But it didn’t.

For months, they kept filing tickets, and eventually lodged a complaint with the Department of Public Services (DPS). Now, almost nine months after initially reporting the issue to Con Ed to no avail, Norma’s will shut its doors after 14 years as a result. Con Edison says that’s not exactly the case.