Imagine you own a restaurant. One of your most reliable servers calls her manager before her shift: Someone she hung out with last weekend came down with Covid. The manager alerts you immediately, but that server worked the last two days, potentially exposing dozens of guests and co-workers to the virus. What do you do?

The general consensus, as wave after wave of Covid broke over Charlotte in 2020 and early 2021, was to close the restaurant. The closures protect staff and guests, and reassure the public that owners are taking the right precautions. But if enough team members are exposed, as in the example above, closing also becomes a logistical inevitability. “It was just losing two or three key employees at the same time that made it really hard to stay open,” says Jeff Tonidandel, co-owner of Supperland, which closed twice this year after possible Covid exposures.

We spoke to Tonidandel and other local restaurateurs about how they handled this quintessential pandemic dilemma and discovered that closing unexpectedly provokes cascading consequences — from the obvious to the surprising.

Revenue nosedives. Costs don’t.

Restaurants have notoriously low profit margins. A thriving business may earn 10 percent in profit, but most fall in the range of 3 to 5 percent. Revenue is offset by a host of costs, from rent to labor and food. Revenue is immediately choked off when the restaurant closes, but those costs are harder to control. “If you lose $100,000 of revenue over a period of time,” Tonidandel explains, “and your costs are still really high — say you spend $60,000-$70,000 while you’re losing that — it would take weeks or months to make up that revenue.”

Staff feel the pinch, too. Remy Thurston is director of marketing for FS Food Group, which had to temporarily close Mama Ricotta’s, a Yafo location, and a Midwood Smokehouse location during the pandemic. “Servers need customers to make money,” he says. “Like it or not, as much as people were tipping more on to-go and things like that, it’s just not the same as when you can add a bottle of wine to the tab or dessert.”

A fast-casual concept like Yafo will see lower-dollar transactions than a destination dining experience like Supperland, but Thurston and Tonidandel both say each day closed represents thousands of dollars in lost revenue. The effect amplifies on the weekend. Womply’s 2020 State of Local Restaurants report found that average daily sales for local restaurants in North Carolina were $1,666. Those restaurants see an average of 66 transactions a day, at an average of $25.42 per ticket. These numbers include a range of concepts, from budget to blowout, so lost revenue can be substantially higher. In August, San Francisco restaurant Nightbird lost $8,000 on a single canceled banquet. 

Food spoils.

Midwood Smokehouse, Yafo, and Mama Ricotta’s are open almost every day of the year, excluding a few holidays. Closing for an extended period isn’t routine and throws up several hurdles. One of the biggest? What to do with all the food. Every Midwood Smokehouse has a smoker that can hold up to 1,000 pounds of meat. That’s a lot of product to deal with if a location closes without warning. Luckily, Midwood Smokehouse, like Yafo, has multiple storefronts, so in theory, owners can simply transfer the food to another location. But in practice, moving that much food can quickly become a logistical nightmare. And the clock is ticking. “Once a product is cooked, there’s a timeline,” Thurston says. “It’s still safe after a day, but we don’t want to serve it.” 

Sanitizing is key for health — and PR.

What The Fries has closed temporarily twice for possible Covid exposures. At first, owners Greg Williams and Jamie Barnes had trouble finding definitive health and safety guidance. The first time, they closed for a week. The Health Department later let them know that that wasn’t necessary, so the next time, they only closed for a few days. They decided to hire an outside company, Ecolab, to sanitize the restaurant, which set them back about $200. The expense added to their lost revenue, which was substantial since the restaurant was closed over a weekend, the most lucrative time of the week.

Tonidandel closely monitored CDC guidelines and instituted masks before they were mandated. FS Food Group went a step further. The company hired a consultant in March 2020 to help navigate the quickly evolving guidance. The consultant, a food safety expert who worked with FS for about a year, offered advice as needed and was instrumental in setting up employee check-in forms, where staff would register their temperature checks and other health information. When a restaurant closed due to a possible Covid exposure, he gave step-by-step guidance to get the restaurant back open as soon as possible. 

Sanitizing the space was an essential step. As the pandemic wore on, it became clear that the virus couldn’t survive long on hard surfaces and that the chances of surface transmission were next to nothing if the restaurant had been closed for days. But the need for rigorous sanitizing procedures remained. “Even if the science says it doesn’t really live on hard surfaces very long, you still want to have the place smell like bleach when people come back,” Thurston says. “There’s a mental thing there.” Restaurant management was right to worry about PR fallout. Thurston says reservations dropped by about 10 percent for a couple of weeks after a closure, then rebounded. 

The restaurant takes a digital hit.

A Yafo location can net as much as 25 percent of daily revenue through online orders. (The fast-casual concept lends itself to takeout more so than, say, Paco’s Tacos and Tequila, an FS Food Group restaurant with a heavier emphasis on the dining experience.) “Turning off DoorDash can get really dicey because when you turn it back on, whatever algorithm they have going doesn’t always pick up where you are,” Thurston explains. “So sometimes you’re not on the app like you used to be.” The same thing happens on other platforms. If the online ordering interface goes dark for a few days, it can be hard to climb back up the algorithm’s rankings. “When so much of your business is relying on people finding you organically online,” Thurston says, “anytime you’re off of those platforms, it’s going to have an effect.”

Employees step up.

Restaurant leaders like to boast that their team is like a family. It’s often true, which can be both a blessing and a curse these days. No one I spoke to experienced a mass outbreak at the workplace, largely thanks to masks, but hanging out maskless during off hours increases the likelihood of infection. At work, staff banded together to respond to fast-evolving situations, and they took on the challenge despite the risk to themselves and their families. “The big thing was how willing our teams were to adapt at the last second to do whatever it took,” Thurston says. 

He says the FS Food Group staff was just as stressed as everyone else, working long days and worrying about infection, but as experienced hospitality workers, they knew “the show must go on.” At Mama Ricotta’s, for example, the team improvised a patio drive-thru to keep orders coming in when the restaurant was closed. They saw the need and seamlessly instituted a solution. “You don’t know how good your team is,” Thurston says, “until they have to rise to the occasion.” 

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