North Bay restaurants starve for business in 2020
Since March, COVID-19 served up a colossal catastrophe for the restaurant industry in 2020.
Month after month, restaurateurs were bombarded with new sanitary protocols and government rules that yanked them between open and closed. When they were allowed to open, they could only do so at limited capacity depending on what “tier” their county fell into based on the case volume, adjustable rates and equity metrics. “Purple” was the worst category, defined as “widespread” risk in the California’s Blueprint for a Safer Economy. The ranking only permitted restaurants to serve a quarter of their capacity.
Who would have ever thought restaurant managers and owners would celebrate going into the “red?”
But these food and beverage warriors saw revenue drop 20- to 50%. Many owners used the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program funds to keep staff on board. Some closed for a while to ride out the hardest periods. Others, like Tisza Bistro in Windsor’s Holiday Inn, served their last suppers this summer.
“From where we’re sitting, we feel restaurants are the most impacted by this pandemic,” California Restaurant Association spokeswoman Sharokina Shams told the Business Journal.
The state restaurant advocacy group asked in one survey if restaurants had consumed their PPP funds. Over 60% answered yes.
The state’s national counterpart reported that 17% of restaurants — 110,000 locations — shut down permanently. In a lobbying effort conducted this month, the National Restaurant Association sent a letter to the U.S. Congress asking for another safety net.
With that came the stark news that 87% of full-service eateries experienced an average 36% drop in sales revenue. For an industry with a traditionally slim profit margin anyway, the economic free fall “is simply unsustainable,” the association pointed out in a statement.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, Yelp provided a precursor of the devastation in August that about 3,000 of its members had shut down in a mere four months. From March 1 to July 10, Yelp found that 239 were located in the Napa and Santa Rosa metropolitan areas of the North Bay.
Business survivors were discovered from the eastern end of Napa County to the Pacific shores of Marin.
Those who have endured the crisis have introduced their customers to al fresco dining in numbers so great, downtowns resembled the streets of Paris. Restaurants like Sonoma’s Girl in the Fig have expanded onto their own patios, city sidewalks and into villages squares. “Parklets” flanking the roads entered our vernacular. And as summer gave way to fall then winter’s nip in the air, patio heaters became all the rage.
And through the holidays, eating out was not an option at all. Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered a state shutdown that closed restaurants in December for three weeks when COVID-19 cases went through the roof.
Customers who preferred to eat at home mastered the art of patronizing their favorite restaurants via curbside, with some even taking cocktails to go. Restaurants joined bookstores by investing in staff time and vehicles for deliveries.
Small success stories of businesses getting creative and collaborating gave reason to celebrate. For example, one Marin County coffee brewer shifted its focus from large-format offerings like coffee kegs and bags to small cans and single-serve packets. Addictive Coffee teamed up with a resort and pharmaceutical company to induce sales and keep up with marketing its products. Girl in the Fig joined forces with Wicked Slush to provide a special concoction to the beverage menu.
Come 2021, the hope from restaurants, economists and advocacy groups is restaurants can muscle through the winter as case numbers drop and the vaccine is dispensed. The combination may give them that much-needed shot in the arm to stay open and thrive.
The need to diversify markets and pivot to other business models are all tactics Marin Economic Forum CEO Mike Blakeley says will help businesses survive in the North Bay.
“This has been the case since Day 1 (of the pandemic),” Blakeley said.
