How Flooding His Own Restaurant Saved It

A story, quote, and lesson about cutting your losses before they drown you

The smartest move may look like sabotage from the outside.

That’s what it looked like at Captain’s Quarters Riverside Grille, a riverfront restaurant in Prospect, Kentucky, when co-owner Andrew Masterson opened the taps and started flooding his own building with clean water as the Ohio River rose. 

While muddy, debris-filled river water crept up outside, Masterson and his team ran sinks, faucets and a well pump from an underground aquifer until the inside of the restaurant held around six feet of clear water.  From the video he shared, it looked less like a dining room and more like a strangely cozy indoor pool.

The logic was simple: if the building was already full of clean water, the dirty floodwater outside would have a harder time forcing its way in. Less mud. Less trash. Less bacteria. Much easier cleanup when the river finally dropped.

This wasn’t a random gamble, either. Captain’s Quarters floods often, they sit right where Harrods Creek meets the Ohio River, and high water is a regular visitor. Over time, they’ve learned to design around that reality: cinderblock walls, tile floors, minimal vulnerable materials, and key equipment and electrical panels moved or disconnected before the water comes in. 

Flooding the building is a guaranteed shutdown. No guests, no meals, no revenue. But compared to weeks of scraping mud off drywall and replacing ruined wood, it’s the smaller, smarter loss.

“It’s a huge interruption of business, but it saves us from extensive clean-up.”

- Andrew Masterson, co-owner of Captain’s Quarters Riverside Grille

There’s a quiet wisdom in what he did: he chose his loss on purpose.

Most of us try to avoid loss altogether. We keep the doors metaphorically shut, hoping the river won’t reach us this time, a project we know is failing, a habit that’s obviously unsustainable, a situation that clearly isn’t working. We wait, tell ourselves it might “blow over,” and then feel blindsided when the water finally pushes through.

Captain’s Quarters shows another way. They don’t pretend the flood isn’t coming. They accept it, build for it: no drywall, limited wood, lots of tile, and then meet it on their own terms. The building is still hit, but it’s hit in a way they can recover from.

In life, that might look like: Ending a project now rather than letting it quietly drain time and money for another year. Having a hard conversation today instead of letting resentment slowly rot the relationship. Downsizing your lifestyle before debt forces the change for you.

All of those are versions of “flooding the restaurant”, accepting a controlled, intentional loss to avoid a catastrophic one later. And like the way Captain’s Quarters is built, we can also “design for floods” in advance: emergency savings, realistic expectations, healthier systems that can get wet without falling apart.

So now I ask you:

Where in your life do you need to deliberately take a smaller loss now, your version of flooding the restaurant, so a much bigger one doesn’t sweep everything away later?

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