The owners of Andiamo, an Italian restaurant chain in Michigan, penned a letter asking other restaurants to join them in defying Gov. Gretchen "Big Gretch" Whitmer's latest orders that ban indoor dining.

The Andiamo chain is part of a larger group of restaurants owned by The Joe Vicari Group. And in the letter, it says they anticipate having to lay off some 700 employees.

And they've had it up to HERE with Whitmer's lockdowns.

The letter came from owner Joe Vicari and was dated November 24th. It read in part,

"Our industry cannot survive another extended closure. Thousands of restaurants and tens of thousands of our employees can not survive it either. We need to band together and FIGHT BACK but we need to do this as a United Group of Michigan Restaurant Owners."

Vicari noted that it's not just their staff that will suffer, "All of our vendors will be suffering too," Vicari wrote.

The economic impact is going to be massive for these poor restaurants, and it's nice to see someone trying to stand up. Vicari says he fully expects that Whitmer will extend her temporary "pause" beyond when it's set to expire on December 8th.

Despite her protestations to the contrary, Whitmer has been unsympathetic to the plights of small businesses, and specifically restaurants. She has repeatedly played a game of "shut it all down" even though the state supreme court and legislature have attempted to stop her.

You can feel Vicari's frustration in the letter. He points out the destructiveness of the benign word Whitmer has chosen to use to describe her latest shutdowns: "Pause."

"Such a simple, little word with such devastating implications," Vicari wrote.

Unfortunately, Vicari missed a golden opportunity to end the letter with "now that's a spicy meatball!"