AIRE Taunton Chef: I Was Told to Leave Airport ‘Quickly and Quietly’

TAUNTON (WBSM) — Things are still up in the air with AIRE, but Chef Charles Hermann is not going to vacate the restaurant’s space at Taunton Municipal Airport without a fight.

Hermann posted to the AIRE Facebook page on Monday that the restaurant was being asked to vacate the space it had been operating in for the past year. He wrote that it was being done “without due process,” but the City of Taunton Law Department told WBSM it was due to “ongoing concerns related to lease violations, Board of Health violations and operational shortcomings.”

READ MORE: AIRE Taunton Told to Vacate Airport Space

Hermann told WBSM Tuesday that the plan right now is “regular hours until otherwise noted.”

“They said they had a deadline, and they’re not responding after the deadline, so I’m assuming the worst,” Hermann said. “There’s no meeting planned. So at the end of the day, they’re just telling me to leave by the 31st.”

AIRE Fans Attend City Council Meeting

AIRE Taunton posted to Facebook earlier Tuesday calling for those in support of the restaurant remaining in the space leased from the City of Taunton to show up at Tuesday night’s Taunton City Council meeting. A total of 10 people, including Hermann and his wife, spoke during the public input portion of the meeting on behalf of AIRE and Hermann.

His wife, Ruth, also spoke directly to her husband at the end of her public input time.

“Charles, what they did to you was not fair,” she said. “This system may be trying to push you out, but your story is still there to write. You built something beautiful, something real, and you are not alone."

Taunton City Councilor Estele Borges made a motion to send a letter to the Airport Commission asking to reconsider the termination of the lease agreement with a corrective action plan, but other councilors took issue with the council not having all the information on the lease. City Solicitor Matthew J. Costa did not think the council should be discussing the matter without it formally being on the agenda, as this discussion had come about through public input.

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Hermann Believes the Airport Commission Wants Someone Else

Hermann signed a five-year lease for the space, which is overseen by the Airport Commission. It was that commission, which by state law manages the city-owned airport, that voted on May 7 “to formally terminate the lease based on the persistent and unaddressed violations.”

However, Hermann told WBSM earlier Tuesday that the only conclusion he can come to is that the Airport Commission must have another operator it wants to move into the space.

“You want us to end on an end date, because you want someone else to start on the 1st,” Hermann said. “They want you out as soon as possible so the next guy can come in.”

He had written in a Facebook post that the City of Taunton had offered to purchase the equipment in the restaurant if Hermann vacated the premises by May 31.

“But the offer came with conditions: that we leave quickly and quietly,” he wrote. “That didn’t feel fair. That felt like pressure.”

He used stronger language in his conversation Tuesday with WBSM.

“I don’t want to call it blackmail, but it is in a sense,” he said. “They said we’re purchasing your equipment if you leave by the 31st, if you don’t, we’re not going to purchase it and we’ll take you to court.”

“It’s almost impossible to leave a commercial space with all this equipment in two weeks,” he said.

Chef Hermann on the Health Inspection Violations

“They’re saying the last straw was the Board of Health inspection, but at the end of the day, if it was corrected, how is that the problem? The problem is they don’t want any dings on a City building, I guess,” he said. “Am I breaking my lease because of that?”

WBSM obtained a copy of AIRE’s most recent health inspection from the Taunton Health Department, conducted on April 4, 2025. Unlike other restaurant inspection reports, it was not available on the Health Department website. (Editor's note: the Health Department uploaded the inspection report to its website after publication of this article)

In the report, 26 violations were found – none of them repeat violations from any previous inspections – ranging from issues like having expired test strips for sanitation processes to refrigeration temperature issues to moldy food.

READ MORE: AIRE Taunton's Full April 2025 Health Inspection Report

The violations did not warrant having the restaurant close to address them; instead, AIRE was given a certain period of time to correct the issues, which Hermann said it did.

“None of them were critical, or we would have been shut down,” he said.

Hermann said the problem was he was not present when it was conducted, having gone into the hospital for surgery in late March for ongoing problems related to a blood clot in his lung that caused him to collapse during a catering event last October.

“Half of the problems could have been rectified if I was here,” he said. “Some of the things they couldn’t find, like shellfish tags, were in my office locked up in my drawer. They couldn’t find certain things, the staff didn’t have the knowledge needed, because they’re not going to have that owner information.”

“I don’t want to use my health as an excuse, but unfortunately, it was bad timing,” he said. “If they came in today, it wouldn’t be what it was then.”

Hermann also said that AIRE has an “open kitchen” concept, so everyone dining would see if there were any issues.

“If we have sanitation problems, we are about as transparent as you can be,” he said. “You can watch me prepare the food.”

Hermann Said He’s Tried to Work with the Airport

Hermann said he had “like 35 meetings” with the Airport Commission and airport management, but that “it’s hard to explain” how he’s been handling the challenges of running AIRE.

“There’s a lot of different people involved,” he said. “It’s different if there’s one landlord, but you’ve got the Airport Commission, the City of Taunton and the airport manager. There’s like 12 people involved in all of this. Just the sheer amount of people involved in this, you’ve got this guy saying this, this guy saying that.”

“Half of these guys have never been in the restaurant. They don’t even know,” Hermann said.

Hermann: Relationship with Airport Broke Down on Day 1

“I really feel the breakdown of everything started from Day 1,” he said of his dealings with the airport management. “There was never that beginning relationship development, so when there was a problem, it became, ‘Why are you micromanaging us? We never built a relationship and you want to micromanage?’ It’s hard to come back from that.”

Can the Relationship Between AIRE and the Airport Commission Be Rectified?

Hermann said even though he has corrected the issues brought up, it doesn’t seem like the Airport Commission wants to give him another chance.

“It seems like they’re not OK with things even if they were corrected, so how do you go from there?” he said.

Hermann said the important thing moving forward is he knows he has the support of the community and his customers in this fight.

“At the end of the day, people like the food, they know it’s quality food, they see the chef making it,” he said. “That’s what we've been all about.”