For Restaurants in the Pandemic, Immense Challenges...and a Glimmer of Hope
Editor’s Note: This week, we are publishing several articles on the essential role healthy food economies play in building stronger and more financially resilient communities. Follow along with all the articles from Strong Towns Food Week here!
My husband has worked nearly every job in the restaurant industry. He’s washed dishes, cooked pizzas, served tables, driven a delivery truck, and bartended everywhere from tiny corner pubs to boutique hotels. Even in recent years, when he moved out of service industry work, he always viewed his skills in restaurants as something to fall back on. At times, he’s picked up shifts behind a familiar bar to make some extra money when we needed it. It was always his back-up plan if he ever suddenly lost a job, because you can pretty much always find a restaurant that needs some help.
I never imagined a day when that would fail to be true. But when COVID hit the US in full swing this March, that day had arrived. Suddenly, millions of waiters, dishwashers, cooks, bartenders and managers were out of work. According to the National Restaurant Association, at least than 8 million restaurant employees have been laid off or furloughed since the start of the pandemic. The industry has lost tens of billions of dollars. And each of those statistics represents hard work, families provided for, entrepreneurial dreams—all of it shattered, or close to breaking.
It’s hard to fathom the scale of this loss, but if you take a walk through your downtown, you might start to get a sense of it. Look at all the restaurants with their blinds down and “Closed” signs up. Notice all of the places that are now advertising “take-out only,” limiting their hours, just serving a few outside tables. These places—once the backbone of our neighborhoods and downtowns—are hanging by a thread.
The picture is grim and heartbreaking, and hits close to home for so many of us. I have several friends who work in or manage restaurants, as I’m sure you do, too. And then there are the secondary impacts of restaurant closures: saying goodbye to that favorite steakhouse where you’ve celebrated every birthday and anniversary, watching your go-to lunch spot close its doors, witnessing the shuttering of the heartbeat of your neighborhood…
I wanted to more fully understand how the coronavirus has impacted the restaurant industry, so I spoke with a bartender, an owner and a server who work in three different sorts of restaurants in three different cities. It’s a tiny sampling of a vast and varied experience, but I learned a lot from their stories—both about the immense challenges and also the glimmers of hope.
The Bartender, Finally Scraping a Few Shifts Together
Sidewalk dining at the Calderone Club in Milwaukee. Image via Facebook.
Donovan Romo has worked in the service industry in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for several years and this February, he started a bartending job at the Calderone Club, an institution in downtown Milwaukee serving upscale Italian food. With restaurants forced to close in March, Romo’s timing for this new gig was tough.
He reports the restaurant was completely shut down for the first month, and then eventually began doing carry-out later in the spring. Unfortunately for Romo and many fellow staff, that still meant they were out of work because only a small cadre of employees was required for carry-out business. Savings and unemployment allowed Romo and his young family (he has a toddler and a partner) to keep paying their bills. “I know a lot of people have struggled,” he says, “so I count myself lucky.”
Romo was eventually able to come back to work in mid-June when restaurants in Milwaukee were permitted to open up at a reduced capacity. But he’s only getting a few short shifts a week—whereas he used to work four or five shifts, some as long as ten hours. Bartending at an upscale restaurant in downtown Milwaukee, Romo is used to seeing wealthy patrons and lots of traffic, especially in connection with Milwaukee Bucks basketball games as the stadium is located just a few blocks from the Calderone Club. The scene right now is very different, as are the tips.
When asked if he felt safe returning to work, Romo says he felt pretty good about the new procedures the restaurant has put in place. Milwaukee recently implemented a mask mandate and restaurant employees help enforce that. “The easiest way is to stop people at the door before they come in,” Romo explains. “We haven’t had really any issues yet [with people complying], but I’ve heard other places have.”
With careful money management and some solid savings, Romo is not too worried about his family’s financial situation right now. He’s thinking about trying to pick up some shifts at other restaurants to supplement his work at the Calderone Club. As for the future of the restaurant, Romo says, “They’ve been around for so long they’re an institution. I think they’ll pull through and do what it takes.” He’s more concerned about the fate of newer restaurants in the Milwaukee area. “You have a lot of places downtown that don’t even have five years in. Those are the places that really need support.”
The Owner, Telling it Like It is
Erin Miller is the owner and executive chef of Urban Hearth. Image source.
Erin Miller opened Urban Hearth, an intimate farm-to-table restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2016 and has since cultivated a customer base of dedicated regulars as well as visitors from all over the region who enjoy not just eating Miller’s food but also learning about where it comes from and experiencing a relaxing, homey environment during special meals. This spring, Miller had just been gearing up for a revamp of the space with new investments in china and silverware, and a firm hired to help out with marketing efforts. “We were on the cusp of moving forward exponentially,” she says.
When COVID hit and restaurants across the country were forced to shut down, Miller had to rethink everything. “The fact that we’re small and nimble and able to pivot easily has been to our advantage,” she explains. “But the fact that we’re a niche market in an out-of-the-way location has made it more challenging.”
Shortly after restaurants closed for in-house dining, Urban Hearth began a take-out menu focused on comfort foods, which, Miller says, survived through solid relationships with regular customers who wanted to support the restaurant. It’s been “enough to keep the lights on” says Miller, but she had to let some staff go. The restaurant is currently operating with just her, a couple chefs and a delivery driver. They have no dishwashers and no servers at present, so this small team is doing everything—plus keeping their website and social media feeds active so that customers can stay up to date.
In recent weeks, Urban Hearth was able to open up a small outdoor dining space, but they had to run up their credit card bill in order to buy the necessary outdoor seating and then stretch their already overworked staff to get it set up. Summer was always a slower period for Urban Hearth, which gets a fair amount of customers through nearby universities, and the loss of spring business combined with an inevitably slow fall (with many universities closed for in-person classes) is incredibly challenging for a small business.
Like Romo and the server you’ll hear from below, Miller also has children at home and a spouse who works, so they have been juggling childcare and schooling needs on top of the extra hours at Urban Hearth.
The fact that there’s no end-date in sight makes planning for the future of the restaurant particularly hard. “I think I’ve proven to myself that I have enough moxie to keep going, but I’m beginning to really question if it’s worth it,” she says. “So much of our mission and philosophy was the experience of being with people. It wasn’t just about the food but the community—this interaction and conversation.” Without that, the restaurant experience feels “hollow.”
“I want to be hopeful and I want to look forward,” says Miller. “But it’s really hard not to look backward and grieve what was lost.”
The Server, Glad to Be Back at Work—While It Lasts
The patio at Main Street Ale House. Image via Facebook.
Missy Trees of Pequot Lakes, Minnesota is my part-time colleague at Strong Towns. She has also been working service industry jobs for the last couple decades. Most recently, she’s been a waitress at a grill pub called Main Street Ale House in Nisswa, Minnesota.
When the country shut down in mid-March, her restaurant shifted to doing take-out only and the owners, who also run another café about ten miles from the Ale House, temporarily shuttered their other business to focus efforts on this one. Trees was able to return to work at the beginning of June, when the restaurant was cleared for reopening with outside seating, plus indoor at 50% capacity. The restaurant was fortunate to have a patio space, although that could only fit eight tables with the required six feet of spacing.
Trees felt a little wary about returning to work at first. “It was strange going back because you feel comfortable in your home, in your bubble,” she says, “and then to go back out into it with all these people...”
With a variety of safety precautions in place like servers wearing masks, contact tracing for guests and extensive sanitizing processes, Main Street Ale House has luckily been quite busy, says Trees. “Everyone [on staff has] been able to get the hours that they want and then some.” Nisswa attracts a fair amount of tourists in the summer and Trees remarked that the small, rural town doesn’t look much different this year compared with any other. She thinks people are just happy for the chance to get out of the house, and glad to visit a restaurant if it means not having to cook and feeling a small sense of normalcy.
When asked how the restaurant was doing financially, Trees said she couldn’t speak for the owners, but overall felt the Ale House was doing okay. If they can get in a good amount of business during their busy summer season, she thinks that bodes well for the rest of the year.
Trees’ main concern right now is whether other restaurants will follow the safety precautions like hers is. “I know we’re compliant, but I’ve heard that other restaurants are not. If some people don’t follow the rules, it will wreck it for everyone else,” she remarked.
Hours after my interview with her, one of Trees’ coworkers tested positive for COVID. The restaurant immediately shut down and all the staff drove two hours south to the Twin Cities to visit a rapid testing site. Luckily, Trees found out a few days later she tested negative.
Common Challenges, and a Glimmer of Hope
What do we learn from these different stories? Besides the obvious impacts of the shutdown, I recognize some common threads: First, each of these businesses is highly dependent on outside forces for their customer base. Whether it’s the flux of tourist season, university students or basketball game attendees, the ripple effects of the pandemic are hitting restaurants in all sorts of ways. Even if they are technically allowed to be open right now, they are not getting anywhere near their typical amount of customers through the door.
Another commonality between these three restaurant experiences is the decrease in staffing. As each establishment has gone through periods of operating only through carry-out or limited seating, many restaurant employees continue to be out of work or receiving decreased hours. When you see that your favorite taco joint is back open and serving at outside tables, recognize that many of their regular employees like bartenders, dishwashers and servers may still be out of work because there is less business and decreased demand for things like handmade cocktails (or even hand-washed dishes—if the business is primarily using disposable take-out containers).
A third factor for each of these restaurants and their workers is safety precautions. Each business had to go through a process of developing new safety procedures and spend money investing in special cleaning supplies, masks for employees, barriers between tables, and so on. Again, as you walk past those new outdoor patios getting a fresh spray-down of sanitizer, consider that this represents an expenditure of likely thousands of dollars for these businesses, at a time when revenue is already severely decreased.
The industry was tough already, with razor-thin margins. Even the fanciest restaurants depend on consistently full dining rooms to get by. The restaurants that are still functioning are doing so through creative thinking, fast adaptation and lots of hard work. And even with all that, paying their bills is tough.
So, what’s the Strong Towns response to this challenging moment for the restaurant industry? I wish I could offer a brilliant, bottom-up solution. But with no clear end in sight for the limitations and risks this pandemic creates, it’s hard to imagine a future where the restaurants we know and love survive intact, and hard to stomach the fate of all the people working in and owning those restaurants. Many have already lost their jobs and I’m sure that far more job losses and closures are still to come, especially as restaurants in colder climates are forced to shut down their outdoor seating areas in the winter.
Yet, I know that some businesses will survive, particularly those that have figured out ways to adapt by doing take-out, shifting the food they focus on, selling grocery products and so on. Small places may be at an advantage since their overhead costs are lower than large establishments. And those with devoted customers who will keep patronizing the business no matter what are also positioned to hang on.
A fourth commonality between the three folks I interviewed is their optimism. They believe in restaurants and none of them is ready to close up shop yet.
My greatest hope right now is in the future. Even if many of our favorite restaurants are forced to close for good and their employees and owners must find new jobs, one day we will emerge from this pandemic, and a whole crop of new restaurants will start in its wake. People are always going to need to eat, and they’re always going to value the chance to have a meal prepared by a talented cook and enjoyed in a friendly environment.
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