[MUSIC]
Everyone, whether it's a chef or an operator,
anyone connected to the industry like has a similar sort of story.
Within a matter of two weeks we went from getting ready for
a very busy spring.
To no business.
You know there was definitely people that stopped coming out to eat and
you just felt the whole machine start to slow down.
The first and second week of March is when we really saw a drop.
And it was really, really bad and we were really concerned the staff was concerned
and then all of a sudden they announced that they're shutting down all
in-service restaurants on that Sunday.
I always remember Sunday the 15th
you couldn't let anyone in a restaurant. You can't, you have to close.
Nothing will be the same after this in the restaurant industry.
For restaurants like going into phase four,
I think it's a really scary place to be if you're a restaurant owner.
People are very germaphobic and rightly so.
For instance, Comedor was an open kitchen restaurant, you could literally sit
and watch people cook. And forever that was a selling point, people enjoyed it.
I don't think an open kitchen might be as desirable as it used to
be a few years ago.
We were a small plates place.
Do people really want to sit around a table and be sharing out of the same plate?
Sanitizers are going to become like a centerpiece at tables.
It's going to be a different world.
It's just not going to be the same anymore.
Bon Me is a food truck restaurant.
We were worried about social distancing for people like working in the trucks.
What we've done is we really tried to think about, well, the placements of things and
if someone's walking back and forth and behind someone that needs to stop.
So what are the things we need to rearrange
so that doesn't happen?
So we've done that across the board at all locations.
With food trucks, we need to have people walking around
outside, and that isn't happening.
So our business shrunk to basically zero.
It was unbelievable like just something that I think no one could imagine.
But I have to be hopeful in that in other parts of the world where they have gone
through situations like this before people do come back.
SRV during normal times, seven day a week operation. We do up between 350 and
400 people on the weekends on Fridays and Saturday nights, and probably no less than
really 150 during the week. We stopped SRV completely, we shut the whole thing down.
And we laid off the whole staff, which was hard.
The government's saying, hey,
we need people to stay away from each other for us to get through this.
But when you are looking at a restaurant space from an economic point of view,
you don't look at the rent per square foot and do all your math and say, well, if I
only had 50% of this, I would still sign this lease. Like that would never happen.
The whole thing is based on you having 100% of it. So it's definitely going to
affect the economics of the business which was already very lean for a lot of people.
For Shy Bird, six months old, February was our best month. We opened end of August.
Middle of what was then a very dense Kendall Square filled with hundreds of startups.
We were ready for the busy season, MIT commencement, outdoor dining, but
had certainly had no money in the bank to spare besides payroll and
were gonna be paying off debt for a while as you would with any restaurant opening.
We're literally taking it day by day, week to week. Regardless of how
big a patio you have I'm definitely scared. No one knows who's coming back to offices in
Kendall Square. Like, it's not going to be a lot. Other things economically will
probably have to start to give to be able to have restaurants we love pull through.
[MUSIC]
Working in restaurants is really all about the human connection.
And the community.
Yeah, the thing I've missed the most is definitely the people. I've always cooked
because I like cooking but also I like the youthfulness of the restaurant industry
and like me myself as a chef getting to engage with a guest.
Yes, I love to make food, but it's not just the food that you make,
it actually has an impact.
People have memories, it becomes like their place in the community.
I think it's going to be a really, really sad thing that's going to happen in Boston.
We're going to go from having so many restaurants so
many cool folks who just only a few.
It is scary to think, like well what's gonna happen to those restaurants?
From the you know, the corner deli
to the high end restaurant, to you know my favorite Thai takeout spot in
David square, like we need it all.