California Wine County restaurants battered by pandemic impacts, but tenacity wins

THE NORTH BAY BUSINESS JOURNAL

March 21, 2022

2 years later: COVID’s impact on the North Bay economy

Sonoma and Solano counties: Different COVID approaches but similar outcomes

Sonoma has been among the California counties with the most proactive public health measures in the past two years, while Solano County has resisted measures.

How has each industry been faring?

Beyond the human toll, the pandemic, public policy responses to it and consumer reactions have had impacts on employers that vary by industry. We talked to players in several sectors, and here’s what they told us.

Voices of local business

Here are the personal stories of how North Bay leaders have steered their organizations through the past two years. What has changed? What were their worst fears, and how did they face them?

Tom Finch, owner of Filippi’s Pizza Grotto in Napa, closed out 2020 with just 35% of the sales of a normal year. He considered himself lucky.

“(Takeout) was part of my culture already, so when the virus closed us down, we still had that revenue stream of takeout food,” Finch said.

Takeout proved a lifeline for many restaurants when COVID-19 shut down the industry in 2020, with some businesses creating that service and others, like Finch’s, with it already in place.

Recovery for the North Bay restaurant industry has come in waves. For a while, it was one step forward, two steps back. Restaurants could reopen, but only outdoors. When the governor gave the green light to allow for indoor dining, albeit with limited seating capacity, it brought relief.

But relief was temporary — and convoluted. Decisions were made according to individual county metrics.

As COVID-19 cases ebbed and waned, so did the level of restaurateurs’ frustrations. Restaurants in Marin County were among the first in the North Bay to reopen indoor dining, only to quickly be shut down again.

Along the way, however, these small business owners showed their agility, especially when it came to outdoor dining. Many eateries, notably in San Rafael, Santa Rosa and Windsor, erected parklets to extend their outdoor space.

Now, with the industry fully back online, recovery has brought with it decisions around vaccination requirements. And there remains a smorgasbord of staffing challenges.

Restaurants are contending with the loss of former workers who chose another career path or moved away. And the fresh labor pool has been shallow, at best. Some employers are offering higher wages and still can’t get bites, while interested job candidates aren’t necessarily qualified. To cope, some restaurants are open fewer days a week than before the pandemic.

But optimism is now coming back, as evidenced by a number of restaurateurs who are not looking in the rear-view mirror.

Some are preparing to launch their own ventures, including a former chef from the French Laundry, while others across the North Bay have opened a second location. Their stories will be featured in an upcoming issue of the Business Journal.