After months of anticipation, the post-pandemic economic revival finally appears within reach. The desperate tango of trying to get into our favorite restaurants is back, but we’re all so excited to dine out again that even being denied a reservation feels oddly affirming. It’s easy to assume that restaurants are on the road to recovery when they’re too busy to accommodate us, but restaurant profits and losses are never so linear. Restaurant people understand these delicate economics all too well, which is why we don’t need outsiders diagnosing our health.
A massive year-long drought can’t be undone by turning on a few sprinklers. Even as demand swells, sales metrics can’t accurately measure the current state of the restaurant industry. The truth is that, during the pandemic, much of the damage to the restaurant economy has occurred beneath the surface.
As restaurant professionals we learn to conceal our infirmities so that guests don’t feel uncomfortable, often martyring ourselves at the cost of our own sanity. But this time we can’t afford to put guests’ welfare ahead of our own. Recovery should be something we approach holistically and on our own terms. We can’t just “play through it.” If we do, we almost certainly risk more permanent injury.
There are still plenty of reasons to be optimistic that the worst may be over. If the stock market is any gauge of confidence, Wall Street expects unprecedented pent-up demand for dining out throughout the rest of 2021. The parent companies of multinational chains like Olive Garden and Applebee’s are trading at or near all-time highs, riding the tailwinds of a potential V-shaped recovery. Investors assume—with the spigot of government stimulus continuing to flow—that the American economy is poised to relive another “Roaring Twenties.”
Unfortunately, the economic challenges of running a restaurant haven’t changed. Rents have dropped marginally in urban areas hit hardest by the pandemic, but real estate costs still remain prohibitive. Independent restaurants can’t adjust to fluctuating market conditions as nimbly as corporations can. Inflation is inching upward as the labor market tightens, and commodity prices are soaring in the face of increasing demand. Input costs are rising faster than restaurant owners can afford to raise prices.
Medical professionals already predict, with new variants circulating and lingering skepticism toward vaccines, that we should expect strains of the virus to flare up again in the Fall and Winter. If this happens, it’s hard to imagine the public going along with another round of government-imposed lockdowns.
It’s wrong-minded, but uniquely American, to think we can spend our way out of every mess. The pandemic has exposed the restaurant industry as a house of cards. By May of last year, almost six million restaurant workers had already lost their jobs, two-thirds of the entire workforce. Over 100,000 businesses closed their doors, many permanently.
A year later, the media continues to expose bad actors and cultural problems endemic to the restaurant workplace, reporting on the seemingly endless stream of notable chefs that double as chronic abusers. Rampant labor shortages are a byproduct of workers’ apprehensiveness about returning to an environment with so many inherent health risks but also an industry that has so many lingering systemic problems.
We should ask ourselves why restaurants have become such highly-pressured environments in the first place. The answer is simple: Money. When people spend more in a restaurant, they expect more than just good food. While feeding oneself is a matter of life and death, having someone provide you sustenance should be joyful and calming. Instead, high-end dining feeds people’s hunger for status. As menu prices rise, the guests’ status goes up and the servers’ status goes down. Exorbitant spending created this backward dynamic, it’s wrong to think that it can help reverse it.
The restaurant industry as a whole is not monolithic, which makes it difficult to set parameters about how to define recovery. One way we can rebuild the structure of our business is by building a stronger foundation for permanent employment. Historically, restaurant work has been transient nature, but momentum was building toward it becoming a more viable career path before the pandemic hit. The hasty decisions so many employers made to cut bait with their staff during lockdown sidetracked that progress and caused a massive, and perhaps irreplaceable, drain on the talent pool. While the rest of the world has adapted to working remotely, restaurant workers have no such digital life raft. You can’t cook and serve food over Zoom.
In the near term, restaurants need to make it clear—assertively when necessary—that we don’t exist purely to facilitate post-pandemic euphoria. It’s not something we’re programmed to do, but we have to be firmer about enforcing boundaries. As guests have continually raised their expectations of us, we need to start raising our expectations of them.
Asking guests to return their table in a timely manner, for example, once taboo, shouldn’t be considered an affront anymore. It should be acceptable to refuse parties another round of drinks after dessert because the table is rebooked. Drunkenness or boorish behavior should be dealt with authoritatively. No more visits from sweet-talking managers.
Changing our approach to the way we manage guests’ behavior requires reimagining how we administer hospitality. Our spaces are sanctuaries and should be treated with the same deference. When we assert ourselves with disruptive or disrespectful guests going forward, we shouldn’t feel the need to genuflect, we should demand courtesy.
Here’s how we should NOT define recovery:
1) Convincing ourselves that rich people splurging in restaurants again equates to recovery. 2) Prioritizing food tourism instead of continuing to nurture the neighborhood patronage that sustained us through the most difficult months. 3) Celebrating big-name chefs expanding the footprints of their businesses and colonizing cities outside of their home turf. 4) Assuming that government stimulus will rescue the hordes of struggling restaurant businesses.
To truly gauge the integrity of the recovery, we should be paying as much attention to dormant restaurant spaces as we do restaurants that survived the pandemic. The magnitude of the economic loss, though it pales in comparison with the human toll, is staggering. Much in the same way society has avoided processing the grief of the millions of Covid-19 deaths, it’s still in denial about the long-term devastation the pandemic has wrought on so many sectors of our economy like the food and beverage industry.
Now that life is returning to some semblance of normal, it’s not uncommon to hear people pass a crowded restaurant and proclaim their city “back.” “Nature is healing,” they’ll say. But the truth is that nature has always been a restaurant’s greatest adversary. The physical spaces that restaurants inhabit erode from constant exposure to the elements. Inclement weather can turn a prosperous night into a calamity. Acts of God like hurricanes or floods destroy businesses that took years to build, sometimes in the blink of an eye. Even just the Earth’s relentless gravitational pull causes every restaurant worker’s feet to hurt. Nature doesn’t sustain us; we survive in spite of nature. True to form, nature will also provide a constant, nagging headwind while restaurants pick up the pieces. Healing takes time, and nature can be stingy about providing that too.
