Why Restaurants Will Not Just Survive But Thrive After The Pandemic – Forbes

Restaurant News

         Food critics are not prone to being Pollyannas, but in the face of so much gloom and doom about the future of the world’s restaurant industry during the current pandemic, as a culinary historian I remain very optimistic. 

         The California Restaurant Association contends that as many as 30,000 of the state’s 90,000 restaurants might close for good. “I expect 70% of restaurants will close as a result of this,” said Tom Colicchio, host of Bravo’s Top Chef. He may well be right, but there will be another 70% to replace them. For more than most industries providing a social need restaurants have a long history of adapting to boom and bust times, not least because of the kind of people who go into a business that is very difficult even good times. To open and run a restaurant takes not just a commitment of time and effort — as it would be for, say, a dry cleaners, an auto body shop or hair salon, whose owners are likely drawn to the business for the chance to make a living for their families.  

        Opening a restaurant demands a fervent love of the business, from the owners to the chefs and often the waiters and busboys who fantasize about someday owning their own place. Even restaurateurs who beg their sons and daughters not to follow them in the rough-tough business find their children often leave other, more secure professions to come back to work in the family’s restaurants.  And because of that love restaurants have historically proven far more resilient than many other small businesses, not least after wars and pandemics have utterly destroyed them. 


 One can not go back to Ancient Rome, the Middle Ages or even the 18th century to demonstrate restaurants’ survival abilities, simply because, before the 19th century, the only eating places open to the public were just roadside taverns and cafés. Restaurants as we know them—where you can sit at a table, choose from a menu, order wine and get good service—are really a phenomenon of the era following the bloodiest days of French Revolution, when the former cooks for the aristocracy opened bistros and full-fledged restaurants to appeal to the burgeoning bourgeoisie. (Some believe the word “bistro” comes from the days when, after the Napoleonic Wars, Russian troops streamed into Paris shouting “bistra, bistra!”—“quick, quick!”—to get a meal.)

         Even during the Prussian siege of Paris in 1871 during the Franco-Prussian War, with many people starving and butchers selling cats and dog meat, the bistros and fine dining restaurants stayed open. Running low on basic ingredients, cooks began serving elephant steak and stewed beaver from zoos.  In fact, one journalist wrote, “We will end up going through the whole of Noah’s Ark.” 

          After the war,  the Golden Age of Paris restaurants began with the establishment of grand brasseries on Montparnasse, which became the epicenter of artistic social life, and the opening of the vast Les Halles market, where every conceivable food from all over Europe was brought in by rail and sold.  

         Through World War I Paris’s restaurants stayed open and  they thrived through the Jazz Age. Not even the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918-1919, which killed upwards of 250,000 French people, nor the global Depression of the 1930s, much affected them, as chronicled by habitués like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who made names like La Rotonde, La Coupole and Cloiserie des Lilas famous. Even during the German occupation of the city early in World War II, restaurants stayed open, working off rationing, while the grandest dining rooms, especially in the hotels, became the exclusive haunts of German officers. (The scene in the movie “Inglorious Basterds,” wherein a Nazi officer dines sumptuously with a woman he is interrogating is both chilling and sickening.)

         In other European countries whose cities were bombed into rubble, as in Italy, Belgium, England and, especially, Germany, the first small businesses to open after the war were eating places. By the mid-1950s Italy was enjoying “Il Boom,” with restaurants central to a new vitality in cities like Rome, Milan, Venice and Naples. One has only to read of the gourmet meals James “007” Bond enjoyed throughout Europe in Ian Fleming’s novels of the 1950s to sense how quickly the continent went from starvation to abundance. 


 America had had a lively restaurant industry since the 1840s, largely unaffected by wars and recessions, and it was increased enormously by the arrival of millions of immigrants in the late 19th century who opened trattorias, chop suey shops, chili parlors, diners, rathskellers and delicatessens. The industry did live under rationing during World War II, but the restaurants of major cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, with huge influxes of servicemen coming and going, did very well. After the war, with the permanent return of those servicemen and women, America boomed, the Interstate Highway system was built and the industry responded with the creation of fast food eateries, chain restaurants, theme restaurants and high-end ethnic restaurants everywhere. 

         After Sept. 11, 2001, the same dire predictions about New York’s restaurant industry never recovering proved to be extremely short-sighted. At the time New York had about 20,000 restaurants; today the city is home to 26,000. 


  When Hurricane Katrina in 2005 destroyed New Orleans’s restaurant sector, sending employees flowing out of town, it was predicted they would never return to a city so damaged and without any tourism. Yet the lights were back on within weeks in the city. Indeed, in the aftermath of Katrina New Orleans gained restaurants. Where there had been 984 restaurants in the city before the hurricane, there are now more than 1,300, an increase of about 30%.

         Because of this history of resilience I am convinced that America’s restaurant industry will not just survive but thrive, and, once the All Clear signal is sounded, it will happen rapidly. To be sure, no one knows what seismic changes may occur, how fine dining versus storefront eateries will be affected, how much more take-out and delivery will be available. But, unlike the devastation of wars and hurricanes, in America food service spaces are still intact.  Certainly many operators will never re-open their restaurants, but others will take their place—real estate, like Nature, abhors a vacuum—modify their expectations and be more responsive to the public’s wants and needs.  More than with most leisure time endeavors, people want desperately to eat out again, and restaurants will respond to that enormous appetite. 


  I am reminded of a scene in The Diary of Anne Frank, in which the family members, isolated for months in an attic, but still believing they would soon be out, fantasize about the first thing they’ll do when they return to the world outside. Anne says she yearns to go to a dance. Her teenage brother wants to go to a movie, a western movie! And the adults all start remembering and dreaming of a wonderful pastry shop, a good stew, a romantic restaurant with thick linen and fine wines.  

         So, when we all finally emerge from our homes, we’ll all want to go to a restaurant for a good stew and fine wine, for it is the surest sign that all is well again. And the people who run our restaurants will respond as they always have, because they would love nothing more than to feed us all.

Source: Thanks https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmariani/2020/05/01/why-restaurants-will-not-just-survive-but-thrive-after-the-pandemic/