Restaurants will bear the brunt of this crisis

As bad as this Coronavirus crisis is going to get (and it's going to get really, really bad), it is going to be especially devastating for bars and restaurants:

Across America, restaurant dining rooms are empty. Some have locked the door; others have skeleton crews working to fulfill delivery and carry-out orders as customers hunker down in their homes, waiting to see what happens next. 

The coronavirus pandemic — fast-moving, and endangering people who spend time in public spaces — is uniquely poised to take down the restaurant industry as we know it. As if tailor-made to render restaurants unusable, the pandemic is a time bomb. And restaurants will not be able to delivery or takeout their way out of it. 

Many of the restaurants that close during the pandemic will not reopen their doors. Diners should also brace for a restaurant landscape that will be entirely different by the time — however near or far off it may be — they can be safely encouraged to enjoy a crowded night out again. 

“We are about to see a lot of places go broke forever.”

I've already begun seeing local restaurants put out pleas for gift card purchases, "virtual tip jars" for their staffs, and other requests for support on social media. It's heartbreaking. Corinne and I are trying to do our part by ordering takeout from our favorite local restaurants, but it's not particularly good  for our pocketbooks or our waistlines and it's not something we can do indefinitely.

A crisis of this scale and scope, so uniquely damaging to restaurants, is indeed unprecedented. And for now, restaurants are doing their best to stay afloat, ramping up delivery, offering curbside to-go service, promoting merch, offering gift certificates, begging diners to reschedule rather than cancel pre-paid reservations. But the truth is, compared to full dining rooms night after night, these are Band-Aids, temporary stopgaps to stop hemorrhaging money. Gift cards, which are effectively microloans to the restaurant owner, also do little to help workers in the short-term — or restaurants that don’t have the infrastructure to sell them. 

Independent operators need a major infusion of cash — cash that’s more readily available from the government than from their stressed-out customers — to make it. They need rent alleviation, eviction protection, and tax deferrals, at a minimum, to live through this body blow. Who knows what they’ll end up getting.

Restaurants operate on thin margins as it is; even a bad week or two can doom them. There's no telling what a shutdown of this magnitude will do to the industry. 

Both the large groups that have enough cash at hand to “mothball” and the restaurants that can run a successful delivery operation are on borrowed time. This outbreak has no clear end date. There will be businesses that simply cannot afford to stay furloughed or continue doing delivery. 

And when those restaurants that survive do reopen, they’ll do so with their pocketbooks depleted, without an emergency fund to spare should some other unexpected issue hit (and in the restaurant business, there’s always an expense around the corner). They will also reopen their doors to a new world of challenges, not least of which is facing a dining public likely either coming out of or in the midst of a global recession. Those diners who lost income after supply-chain disruption and nationwide business closures due to social distancing will simply have less money to spend on dining.

Chronicle food critic Alison Cook fears for the future of Houston's unique and vibrant restaurant culture:

I could go on at length about the ways in which our Houston restaurants and bars are a powerful economic engine we can’t afford to lose. About the fact that they’re the city’s fourth largest industry, and the dire social consequences of all those jobs evaporating. About the whopping sales taxes restaurants and bars feed into the Texas treasury, gone like the wind. 

All that pales, however, next to the particular cultural importance restaurants have to Houston. Here in a city that has been on the leading edge of demographic change in America since the 1970s, restaurants have functioned as a kind of crossroads and social glue. 

Dining rooms, food truck and barbecue lines alike are public squares where different kinds of Houstonians come together to check out each others’ cuisines — and each other. If we think of ourselves as a tribe these days, and I maintain that we do, much of that awareness has sprung from our collective enthusiasm for our freewheeling culinary mix. Thanks to Viet-Cajun crawfish, Tex-Mex barbecue and a hundred other manifestations of our diversity, it always tastes as if there is more that unites us as a city than divides us.

I’ve watched it all happen over my long career as a student of Houston foodways. And that is where my grief gets so personal. I grew up along with the city’s growing worldliness and embrace of a riot of cultures. It has been my privilege to chronicle that change, to dissect and try to explain the restaurants big and small that helped make it all happen. 

Our vivid regional cuisine, once ignored by the world at large, is now celebrated as the city’s foremost attraction. We built this, fellow citizens, with our skills and curiosity, our adventurous spirit and our financial support. To see it all threatened now seems unbearable to me. 

I have a lot of friends and acquaintances that work in the service in food and beverage service industry. They are going through very tough time right now. I hope everything works out in the end, but I'm also bracing myself for a future in which some of my favorite dining spots and watering holes are no more.

Kuff is just as concerned as I am.