mushrooms, undoubtedly.
The end of the restaurant scene as we know it felt like something worth writing about, and sparkling isolation has left me with some time on my hands, so – hullo! It’s been a hot minute.
This pandemic is going to rip the heart out of the restaurant scene in America. It’s not the current shutdown that will do it, but the extended period of rolling shutdowns or semi-lockdown that’s going to follow. Vaughn over at the Uncertainty Mindset has a piece coming out this week about how restaurants will need to change in order to stay afloat (Spoiler: they probably won’t look very much like the restaurants we know at all, a link will follow). Even the ones that continue to primarily be restaurants as we know them – businesses that make money by putting people in a room and plying them with food and drink – will have to rethink the guest experience, and will almost certainly need to raise their prices to make the numbers crunch (by way of bona fides/full disclosure: I am part owner of a bar, these are conversations we’re having).
Living in this landscape for a year or two (which is what most realistic scenarios seem to project) is going to change habits and mindsets and careers. These cloistered days aren’t a bad time to mourn, if you’re so inclined, the landscape that we’ve lost. Today, instead, I want to talk about what might bloom in the wreckage.
What will that wreckage look like?
To start with the immutables: people will still want to eat. People will still drink. People will still want to gather, and spend time in places that aren’t their homes. We will still find ways to offer hospitality, and to experience it. These needs are basic and soul-deep. If we rarely notice them today, it’s because for most of us they’ve always been so easy to fulfill.
We will probably be in a deep, deep recession for a few years. Once the long lockdown is over, many restaurant spaces will sit empty. There will probably be far more hospitality professionals looking for work than there are job openings. Diners will be much more used to eating at home, and it’s unclear how quickly people will resume eating out even once they’re allowed to.
Perhaps the months of semi-lockdown will lead to a golden age of the deli. Kitchen talent in America has always gravitated towards the independent restaurant as the pinnacle of the craft, but with that path blocked, and people not eating out, perhaps we’ll finally start giving delis the attention the traiteurs of Paris or Montreal get. Businesses built around having people take food home, competing on the same basis as restaurants – excellence of product, delightfulness of service – rather than convenience and price alone.
Perhaps we’ll see informal caterers become a part of daily life. Home cooks, or professionals without restaurants, preparing food at home to sell to their neighborhood. I have an obscure sense that this kind of business is much more accepted outside America, both by authorities and consumers, except among immigrant communities in the US.* The means to operate on this scale are available to most people, and we suddenly have a lot of cooks who need to make ends meet, and a lot of eaters who now have fewer ways to get prepared meals. Grassrootsnetworks are alreadyspringing up where a social safety net should have been, and this kind of informal business would be a natural outgrowth.
Startup capital will be hard to come by, but since many turnkey spaces will be empty, it might be possible to start without a large investment if, and this is a titanic “if”, landlords are hungry enough, or flexible enough, to not demand huge sums of key money. These seem like prime conditions for there to be a tidal wave of pop ups. Empty spaces ready for foodservice, talent at loose ends, demand conditions that make it hard for restaurants (that necessarily plan to be mostly full) to survive. Pop-ups that don’t need to incur startup costs and the attendant financial obligations, and that are sustainable without every seat full, might have a fighting chance.
Take this to its logical conclusion, and you might see an environment in which more and more restaurant real estate is organized not according to tenant-landlord arrangements, but by management agreement. A management agreement is the arrangement that many institutional canteens, hotel restaurants, and the on-campus cafeterias at tech companies use. The landlord owns the property, but pays a second party to make the foodservice happen. The operator is usually paid a fixed fee, and the operator and owner agree on operating parameters and how profits are divided. Imagine landlords filling up some of the empty restaurants they now own by installing their own operators. This would be an enormous change for the industry, but perhaps desperation will force flexibility.
We’ve already seen people flee large cities. I imagine some of them will stay away, and yet more people will leave cities in the months ahead – there will certainly be plenty of reason to do so. With any luck this spreading out of demand will result in a spreading out of supply. Hospitality professionals will leave cities just like anyone else. Chefs and bartenders will move home, by choice or by necessity. Once there, perhaps they’ll find reason to stay. Most small towns are basically residential neighborhoods with low rents. Establishments that still want to have a dining room might actually be able to survive. It might be that the future of independent restaurants in America lies in small towns rather than major cities.
There’s been a lot of discussion about how major metros are increasingly inhospitable to independent restaurants, and how staff and owners alike are trapped by market conditions that mean that nearly no one in the industry can make a decent living while working at a small urban restaurant. If this pandemic finally breaks that cycle – by finally making it untenable to operate an independent restaurant in a city, by forcing ambitious hospitality professionals to look outside major metros, by making us realize that the restaurant is not the be all and end all of the food world – that would be a silver lining.
I’ve been consciously optimistic in writing this, in that I’ve tried to both be a realist and to focus on the construction and reconstruction that will follow the current upheaval, rather than the destruction we’re about to see. In a few days, I’ll follow up with another issue, talking about restaurant groups, the cost of a restaurant meal, and the possibility that we’ll no longer have mid-market restaurants. I don’t guarantee that one will be quite this optimistic.
If you write to me, I will publish correspondence.
*It is currently legal to operate certain kinds of food business out of your home in many states. Most such statutes permit baking, confectionery, and jam making, but what I have in mind here is more akin to getting take out from a restaurant, or the kind of thing a private chef offering a week of prepared meals might put together.
Thank you for reading let them eat cake, which was once a weekly newsletter about food systems and food, and may yet become weekly again. As always, a super-special thank you to my pre-release readers, special guest reader Vaughn Tan and regular old reader Diana Kudayarova.
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best,
tw
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