Photo essay: New rules push restaurants to the brink, with no end in sight

If there’s one thing this year has taught me, it’s not to plan three hours ahead of yourself. It’s a fool’s errand to predict what’s next.

It’s really hard to look around, to take in the emptiness of the space. We are a big restaurant, just a large space, and it’s hard to even remember what it was like full. It’s like a false memory, picturing it filled with voices and music and clinking glasses…did that really happen?

Time is the biggest thing now. Thank god, we have the vaccine, but it’s going to take time to filter through society. Bigger than that, we might need a shot to people’s heads! ~laughs~ Really though, it’s going to take serious time to readjust to normalcy, for people to feel normal riding the elevator with other people, to not jump in the air like they have a knife when someone gets too close to you.

Our catering business was huge. We always used to say ‘We’re here at the beginning for your bris and here at the end for your funeral’ but no one can gather now. We get calls for six people, maybe.

We’re only doing takeout and delivery. People call, they ask to dine in and we say no. They tell us ‘we’re going to a different restaurant.’

It is sad, we’ve had to cut employees’ hours. Now we only have two working in the morning, two in the afternoon. At least we haven’t had to cut anyone off, though. This is lucky.

Now we just do take-out. We have to move the tables away, and we cut down employee’s hours. It is very hard.

We have lost many customers, they come in and want to sit down, they don’t want to take home. They look around and go away. We’re going to try to build tables outside, I don’t know.

For 17 years we set record high sales, every year. This year sales are like 17 years ago.

We were doing great before March, 170 seats and really busy, but after the first shutdown we went ‘boom,’ down about 70 percent. Once we started outdoor dining we caught up to 50 percent of what we used to do, and we were happy with that because outdoor and take-out were going up. This time? It’s just really dead. Even take-out is less. We had 65 employees before the pandemic, and now we have about 15. It’s so bad.

But I look at the staff, at holiday season, how are they going to survive? It’s really scary. I have no idea how long we can hang on doing lunch and dinner take-out, but we can’t shut down. We have to stay open because these people have to survive, somehow.

They’re saying we can open by January 4th but looking around now, at the sickness and everything, I really don’t think this is possible.

We’re hoping to be here for good, but it’s so hard to tell. I’m just trying to keep the doors open.

We’re a real social place, a lot of regular customers coming in from the neighborhood. We know their names, they know ours, it’s like family. We’ve lost a lot of those people, because they lost their jobs or they moved back to where they came from before New York.

We own the building so we’re not panicked about rent like so many others, but we still have bills to pay!

We had to close our falafel restaurant, and it’s bittersweet. Well, no, it’s really just bitter. But we have to continue at the restaurant, and our rotisserie chicken place, and not spend too much time mourning. We don’t have the luxury to stop moving.

I worry most about keeping our staff safe. Our workers can’t be remote, the job requires them to be here, and obviously that creates danger.

We opened in February, three weeks before the mandated Covid shutdown. The neighborhood was very supportive. We were off to a good start. Now we’re on a rollercoaster of emotions.  Optimism and excitement for the future, but concern going into these uncertain winter months.

It’s difficult to make any plans without knowing what’s going to happen as far as city mandates.  We’re just taking it day by day. No choice really. With a possible indoor dining shutdown looming, dwindling outdoor dining business, and no federal or state help in sight, we’re concerned. It’s going to be important to pivot and adjust extremely quickly in order to make it through. 

As a longstanding neighborhood restaurant our business is fairly consistent—but on March 16 we had to lay off 78 people. It was chaotic for everyone and our business dropped quite a bit. We quickly converted to a marketplace on top of prepared foods, and then into a need-based grocery space working with six local farms. By the end of April we rehired 26 people.

By mid-June we were doing quite well, at about 70 percent of our revenue the year prior, half take-out and half outdoor dining, but the new shutdown has been devastatingly hard. We had about 90 employees pre-pandemic and the roster now is 39 employees. This has been the most difficult year I’ve ever experienced, in terms of emotional stress, and it’s a high-stress industry anyway. We are all tired and a little numb. We don’t know if people have the energy, capacity and money to continue to support us, but I’m hopeful we will return to full capacity next year.

I’d say this year has been brutal, but at least we still exist. Brutal is a word for all the restaurants that aren’t around anymore.

We sell hot soup, so winter is our busiest time of year. When I saw all the restrictions coming down in the last month, my optimism kind of drained out. That said, I think we’ve been very fortunate. On some Fridays and Saturdays, the takeout lines are so long it almost seems like business as usual.