Many foodservice establishments have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic.
Before the pandemic, you couldn’t walk into Padoca, a Brazilian bakery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, without waiting in line. The bakery had a steady flow of customers on any given day, the tables were often filled with laptops and couples chatting over coffee. Its location, on First Avenue and East 68th Street, was central for nearby institutions like New York-Presbyterian/Weill-Cornell Medical Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Rockefeller University, and a few New York City public schools. The pan de queso cheese breads, dubbed PDQs, maintained quite the cult status among the children at the playground across the street and the administrative staff from the world-class healthcare institution next door.
That all changed with the outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020. By July, owner Marina Halpern, who hails from Brazil, shut down Padoca’s brick-and-mortar location and gave up her lease. She was not alone. More than 1,000 restaurants in New York City have permanently closed since the state-mandated lockdown in March of 2020, and the National Restaurant Association declared that 17 percent of U.S. restaurants shut their doors in 2020. The average age of those restaurants? Sixteen years in business.
Additional Hurdles
The restaurant industry is notoriously hard work, but it’s been even more challenging for immigrant restaurant owners who often face additional hurdles. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that the number of small businesses owned by Blacks, Latinx, and Asians declined more sharply than the number of businesses owned by whites, suggesting that immigrant- or BIPOC-owned businesses had a greater chance of shuttering. For immigrants especially, a lack of resources due to citizenship status, increased spouts of racism, and fewer opportunities to tell their stories in the press have made surviving the pandemic that much tougher, foreign-born foodservice operators told SFA News Daily.
“We all came to America for a better opportunity, and I would hate to give up on that,” says Halpern. “But every day we do not know if we are still going to be able to survive, even if we created a smaller version of our business.”
Before Halpern closed her doors, she felt she had tried everything. It was heartbreaking, she says, to let her staff of 30 people go and to see her five years of hard work seemingly disappear. She applied to two banks to get a Paycheck Protection Program loan and attempted to negotiate her rent with her landlord. Though she had a corner location on the Upper East Side, she could only put out a handful of tables on one side, not two, per her outdoor dining permit. Her 20 weekly catering contracts were canceled as staff at nearby companies began working from home. She could do takeout, but the revenue she was bringing was only 20 percent of pre-pandemic levels. It wasn’t enough to cover the rent. If she took the state’s moratorium on rent, she’d owe more than $100,000 by the end of 2020, a debt she didn’t want to take on.
“The PPP first round did not help the business; it helped the people who were employed by the business,” Halpern says of paying her employees and landlord with the first round of PPP capital she got with the help of Square. “It was like privatized unemployment. I could pay my landlord—great—but it did not really move us forward in any way.”
What Halpern realized she could do was run her business solely out of her industrial kitchen in Long Island City, New York. She spun up an e-commerce site shipping baked goods. It’s tricky, she says, being that the items are perishable, and costs quickly racked up: it was initially $80 to ship overnight. Thanks to a flexible landlord and negotiating with shipping carriers, she is making just enough to cover her expenses. She can keep three employees on payroll and her brand going.
Not only does she want to see her goal through, but she also doesn’t want to leave. Halpern holds a green card, but if she left the United States for Brazil, she wouldn’t be able to come back. As a business owner, she couldn’t get unemployment despite paying into it for her employees. She survived for six months on savings and the help of her boyfriend, plus the emotional support of a Whatsapp group of 200 restaurant owners all trying to navigate a global pandemic together.
NYC’s Chinatown
In downtown Manhattan, Grace Young, a James Beard Award-winning cookbook author, has been chronicling the effects of the pandemic on NYC’s Chinatown, the largest in the United States, spanning some 40 blocks and 150,000 people, for the past year. The area was one of the first hit during the pandemic, as the virus outbreak was linked to China. Customers immediately began avoiding the area, and some owners and businesses became victims of racist remarks, actions, and vandalism. In January 2020, two months before the lockdown began in Manhattan, Chinatown restaurants reported a steep drop in revenue, with some losing up to 80 percent of their business.
Young says she was alarmed to hear that 59 percent of independently-owned Chinese restaurants nationwide had ceased credit card and debit transactions in March 2020, implying that they had closed. Meanwhile the P.F. Chang’s chain, with 208 restaurants nationwide, received a PPP for millions of dollars and reported that its business doubled during that same month. Then, in November 2020, the Small Business Administration announced a $35 million loan program for minority businesses in the hardest hit areas of New York City. But despite Chinatown being touted in the marketing, its primary Manhattan zip code, 10013, was omitted from the program.
“It makes no sense that the neighborhood that was the first to be impacted by COVID was shut out of the program,” Young says. “My fear is that if we don’t protect Chinese mom and pop restaurants, in the future, we’ll only have big chains.”
To this day, the existing Chinatown restaurants still face increasing racism. Social media is flooded with posts to “Stop Asian Hate” and #SaveChinatown, a movement started by Young.
Erik Cheah, of Wok Wok Southeast Asia Kitchen, is scraping by on his delivery business, which he built up before the coronavirus outbreak—otherwise, he doesn’t know if he’d still be open. He is tired as he does the job of three people to keep his Malaysian restaurant’s lights on, so when he gets a “prank call with racist tones” he just hangs up. “There’s no time to deal with that,” Cheah says.
Other immigrant-owned businesses just feel lost. Guarav Anand, an Indian chef and restaurateur with three Manhattan restaurants and an international catering company, says that his challenges are similar to those of any other chef—except that you don’t often hear about the plight of South Asian restaurants. His fine-dining establishments—Moti Mahal Delux, Bhatti Indian Grill (pictured above), and Awadh—have switched to a delivery-only model.
“Indian restaurants don’t have a huge demand like Mexican or Italian, and we are still trying to break into the mainstream,” Anand says. “I spent time creating these fine dining experiences, and now I’m just another takeout location in NYC. That was the hardest part to accept.”
Anand says he has watched opportunities for meal prep kits go to celebrity chefs and private grants focus on major culinary organizations, but nothing is specifically geared toward chefs of smaller fine dining restaurants, many of which are owned by solo restaurateurs like himself. It’s always been tough, he says, to get an immigrant-owned restaurant’s story out there, unless they happen to be French or Italian. It’s been no different during the pandemic.
Anand went from 19 chefs to three, and he has been running only two of his three restaurants out of one kitchen. One restaurant, Awadh, is being transformed into a new concept, one he hopes will garner the attention of the press. He’s thankful his landlord for this Upper West Side spot is supportive of his idea and drive to save his businesses. While he has watched some fellow restaurateurs close their dining rooms, he has seen others creatively exploring options too.
“I want to give it a final shot,” Anand says. “We need more attention, and we can do that by coming up with something new. If it doesn’t go well, at least we tried.”
Stephanie Cain is a freelance writer specializing in food.
Image: Mark Ferri