Imagine going grocery shopping for the week and then having to throw everything away. Now, imagine relying on selling that food for your next paycheck.
“Multiply that times 100 and that's the situation you're at with a restaurant,” says Adam Bauer, chef of Heart of Gold.
Typically a killer month in the hospitality industry, December hit restaurants hard. This week, the Independent Restaurant Coalition released a report finding that 58 percent of businesses experienced a sales decrease of more than half last month during the Omicron surge. Forty-six percent of businesses reported that their operating hours were impacted for more than 10 days in December 2021. It’s amidst this landscape that restaurants such as Heart of Gold, Cloak & Dagger, Zhug and more were forced to shut down for days or even weeks.
“December is an important month for all restaurants,” says Doug Katz, chef and owner of Zhug, Chimi and Amba. “You have holidays, celebrations and vacations. Everything sort of stops at that time, and it's all about celebration. A good New Year’s Eve or Valentine’s Day can be your profit for two or three months.”
With 700 reservations booked, Cloak & Dagger, the literary-inspired vegan cocktail lounge in Tremont, was hoping for that kind of December. Instead, on Dec. 13, it was forced to close its doors until New Year’s Eve after 11 of 13 staffers tested positive for COVID-19.
“I was very nervous about coming back to no reservations,” says co-owner Casey Hughes. “I figured people would be like, ‘We can never get in there, and our reservation got canceled,’ but it was the exact opposite. Everyone was so positive.”
Still, canceling 700 reservations comes at a cost. Hughes and chef Todd Kronika were forced to throw away mounds of ingredients and remake syrups and other housemade cocktail staples fresh for reopening. For many service industry professionals, that also would’ve meant no paycheck for two weeks, but Hughes paid employees for that time off.
“You have to throw everything in the fridge away,” she says. “We had to remake everything, and the kitchen basically had a total overhaul.”
For Heart of Gold, the holiday timing was actually kinda perfect when Bauer and another staffer came down with COVID-19. The elevated smashburger joint in Ohio City, which shut down on Dec. 23, already had plans to close for the Christmas weekend, so ordering had been kept light. Freezing produce salvaged some of what would’ve been lost.
“I didn't lose a ton of stuff, but I definitely lost stuff,” says Bauer. “I couldn't imagine if we hadn't had that plan in place and I had just been ordering. Assuming we still had three days left in the week and the week after, I could’ve been in a situation where I was out a few thousand dollars.”
Fresh meat and produce, he explains, has a four to five day shelf life. So if Bauer had been ordering for the weekend, he might have lost about $1,500 on burger meat and chicken alone. Thinking back to his days running Red the Steakhouse Downtown, however, he understands that restaurants with higher overhead could be out as much as $15,000 in a weekend.
“There’s nothing you can do as far as insurance on lost products either, so there’s really no failsafe,” says Bauer. “Profit margins are so tight as it is. Restaurants are just trying to survive right now.”
Katz is no stranger to the woes of the pandemic either. While his restaurant Zhug has earned near-unanimous praise, the chef was forced to close his catering business, his spot in Van Aken Market Hall and Fire Food and Drink, a 20-year staple in Shaker Square.
“When I look at the revenue I could’ve had with those three places, it’s in the millions,” he says.
Meanwhile, Zhug, which went takeout-only starting on Dec. 19, has maybe experienced more prolonged shutdowns than any other restaurant still surviving. While many restaurants scrambled to find ways to stay open, both last year and last month, Katz’s approach has been more measured, accepting prolonged closures as they come and pivoting to takeout.
While his losses don’t quite reach that 60% figure shared by the Independent Restaurant Coalition, he says revenue is down at least 30 to 40% over what was expected for the past month. Takeout is a good way to keep employees working and some money coming in, but it’s not a replacement. Katz expects the restaurant to reopen around Feb. 1.
“We were actually doing great before this shutdown, but we were worried about the surge,” says Katz. “But I look at it as a longevity decision because I think in the long term people will respect us more knowing we were caring during this time.”
Two years in, the pandemic remains a grim reality for the restaurant industry. The National Restaurant Association estimates that more than 90,000 restaurants have closed since the beginning of the pandemic, and the Independent Restaurant Coalition estimates another 200,000 are in danger.
But with experts expecting the pandemic to end in 2022, Katz, whose Amba is set to open in March in Hingetown, and others are cautiously optimistic that there is light at the end of the tunnel.
“There's so much revenue that we lost because of these decisions,” says Katz. “But I hope that the future's bright, and we're able to sort of reposition ourselves to grow.”
