Worcester Business Journal

wbjournal.com | October 31, 2022 | Worcester Business Journal 5 R E S T A U R A N T S & H O S P I T A L I T Y F A C T B O O K I don't go out for lunch as much F L AS H P O L L How often do you go out to eat for lunch during your working day? The business lunch, once a staple of professional life, has been disrupted by the economic impacts of the COVID pandemic over the past two years. The Massachusetts Restaurant Association says lunch business at eateries has not returned to close to pre-pandemic levels. When polled online, the plurality of WBJ readers said they are going out to eat for lunch at a restaurant less often than they did before the coronavirus pandemic. Less often than I did before the pandemic 43% I never went out for lunch, pre- and post-pandemic. 21% COMMENTS Massachusetts Restaurant Association. 70,000 closures A restaurant serving a sitdown lunch has become less prevalent since COVID. It's lost its lure and its audience to last night's leovers. e pandemic forced everyone to reexamine how they worked. No one has escaped the impact of COVID-19, but one of the industries most hit by the vi- rus has been restaurants. When the lock- down began, we were told two weeks. It went longer. Restaurants stayed closed. ey pivoted to new business models just to serve food. ey became delivery services. ey changed into markets. In September of 2020, WBZ News reported the Massachusetts Restaurant Associa- tion said around 3,600 restaurants closed for good. Since the beginning of the pan- demic, the Washington Post estimates more than 70,000 restaurants nationally closed due to the pandemic and the ones that remain open, specifically indepen- dent restaurants, are deep in debt, barely hanging on, thanks to various govern- ment influxes of cash like the Restaurant Revitalization Fund and the Paycheck Protection Program e Sens got money from both PPP loans and RRF. e loan paid for the few employees they had while the restaurant money kept them open for months and helped pay the back rent they owed from being closed for seven months the prior year. But it wasn't enough. ey were burned out, and the clientele never returned. "We basically stayed open until the [grant] money [ran out]; and we burned through this, and we had x amount of dollars we were willing to lose," Ryan Sens said. Before the pandemic, catering kept Z Cafe afloat. Foot traffic in downtown Worcester hasn't been strong for decades. When the restaurant deadhorse hill opened in April 2016, the hope was the large parking lots filled with commuters around the restaurant would allow it to do all-day business. Chef Jared Forman and his business partner Sean Woods set up a cafe counter for coffee. ey opened early with breakfast and expected to stay open through dinner. But no one came. People preferred to make coffee at home or pick something up on the way to work, long before they parked their car and walked by the restaurant. Aer cutting coffee, Forman wanted to keep lunch. Even as a self-professed lover of sandwiches, he soon noticed the draw- backs of trying to keep something alive that lacked stability. e decision was made to limit staff and work it the best they could, but every once in a while the restaurant would get slammed and the food suffered because one cook couldn't handle it all. In the end, hiring a qualified and energetic staff to move with the ebbs and flows of the unpredictable schedule became too difficult and expensive. "We were losing money when we cut it," Forman said. Forman and deadhorse called it quits on lunch before the pandemic, before the lunch crowd got even thinner. Even with limited service now, Forman is still looking to find a balance in the schedule that makes the most sense for his staff, his vision for what the restaurant can be, and what makes it financially viable. Finding the right balance Across the city, Michael Covino still has hope, though. As one of the owners of the Niche Hospitality Group in Worcester, he has seen a shi in the busi- ness of lunch. Niche's concept e Fix Burger Bar lends itself to being a lunch restaurant because it focuses on burgers, a sandwich sitting neatly between pub fare and dinner. Plus, the Worcester location was once on Shrewsbury Street and then moved to the Northworks Building on Grove Street. It had a built- in audience in the area thanks to all the Worcester Polytechnic Institute buildings in Gateway Park and the proximity to other businesses on that side of the city. But now, Covino has noticed guests are less likely to come in for the impromptu lunch meals aer a meeting, probably because we're having less meetings in person these days. "People have adjusted to doing busi- ness online," Covino said. e Fix's other locations in Leominster and off of Simarano Drive in Marlbor- ough made sense to be open for lunch. ey're centrally located near global office buildings. But, with more workers working remote or in hybrid positions, that audience has dwindled, Covino said. And it's thrown a wrench into how restaurants operate and plan. Covino used to be able to look at the books for his restaurants and know pretty well how they'd perform throughout the year. COVID disrupted all of that. People got accustomed to take out, the convenience The same as before the pandemic 31% More often than I did before the pandemic 5% "We are in the office much less, so our full team gathers for a monthly luncheon. Prior to the pandemic, we would visit an eatery nearly weekly as a team." - Kelly Johnson "Social interactions are a necessary personal touch in business that in my opinion lead to more successful engagements with more positive outcomes." - Echo Louissaint of delivery apps, and eating lunch at the office for efficiency. "e pandemic changed people's habits," Covino said. "ings are habitual." While the likes of e Fix and deadhorse have adapted to takeout and what consumers want, they've also scaled back. ey've begun to staff differently to make sure they don't over-staff but not leave customers wondering what happened to one of their favorite places to eat because of poor service or food because of a shortage of workers to make the experience pop. With that, though, the feeling-out period of the new normal continues. ere's "no crystal ball to see trends," Covino said. For now, the trends appear to be focused on outdoor dining, good takeout, and fewer restaurants open for business all day, so that they can stay open for years to come. "How do you survive?" Clark said. "You have to be more efficient and sacrifice quantity, not quality." In the same block as deadhorse hill, Not Ya Mama's Vegan Cafe (top) closes on Tuesday because business is slow while Rice Violet maintains consistent lunch hours. W

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