At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, there were more than 1 million restaurants in the U.S. employing nearly 16 million people. Now 7 million are predicted to lose their jobs, as more than 100,000 restaurants shut down. In New York City, where roughly 10,000 people have already died, accounting for roughly 40% of all COVID-19 deaths in the U.S., the industry has been hit especially hard. Restaurants and bars in the Big Apple recently generated roughly $50 billion in annual revenue. Now these storefronts are in danger, with some already closing and others reporting 80% or more drop in sales.
To help support these businesses, Forbes and several partners including Kyrie Irving and Beyond Meat, launched a NYC-wide campaign on March 30 called Help Our Neighborhood Restaurants, or HONoR, to highlight their stories.
Below: snapshots from the kitchens of New York City restaurants in the fight of their life.
“I did not have a loan when I opened nor do I have any partners or investors,” says Harlem-native Melba Wilson of her 15-year-old comfort food establishment. “Closing our doors is a severe financial hampering.”
Wilson, the niece of the legendary Harlem restaurateur Sylvia Woods, packs take-out orders from her restaurant on 114th Street, a location she chose because it was then one of the most notorious blocks in the neighborhood for drug dealers when it opened, and she wanted to lead a revitalization.
“Restaurants take care of so many. Now we need to be taken care of,” says Wilson. “I have never experienced anything like this before in my life but as my grandmother would say, ‘This too shall pass.’ Amen? Amen!”
“We’ve been here through 9/11, Sandy, now this. It’s about surviving right now,” says co-owner Joe Rao. He had to cut 80% of staff and is currently working 15-hour days, but promises to keep cooking: “Unless the city comes down with a padlock, we’re gonna stay open.”
The family-owned spot has been serving comfort staples like it’s custom Pat LaFrieda blend burger since 1977. “We spent the last six months renovating and redecorating, and then corona came,” Rao says, beginning to cry. “There’s never not been people here.”
Mudville 9, blocks from the Hudson River, usually has 30 beers on tap, but now the bar is empty.
As sales slowed in March, Chef Kyo Pang and co-owner Moonlyn Tsai adapted the menu of their Malaysian coffee house in Chinatown to feature kits for making Kopitiam’s signature kaya toast at home. They also bottled condiments like sambal and dried anchovy. But business is still a sliver of normal levels.
Tsai, who usually runs the front-of-the-house, packs 300 meals daily that are then picked up for a ReThink Food NYC program which gives grants to restaurants to transform into relief hubs to cook food for those in need, including local hospital workers. “I’ve never been busier,” says Tsai. “I don’t have any downtime anymore.”
After having to furlough a staff of nearly 30, most either elderly or local teens who are the main providers for their families, Pang and Tsai made enough in March to pay employees their full wages. And the ReThink program has helped Kopitiam rehire three employees so far.
Gazala Halabi left a village in Israel for New York to marry her American husband. “I was limited in every way,” she says. “With language, money, everything.” In 2005, after spending most of her time at home, she decided to open a catering business out of her apartment. With the help of a friend and some savings, she turned it into a restaurant inspired by her background as Druze, an ethno-religious minority in the Middle East.
First came a spot in Midtown, followed by a location on the Upper West Side. “The dream that I never thought would happen,” says Halabi. Gazala’s success allowed her to stay in the country even after her 2012 divorce.
Sales are at 20% of normal levels and her Midtown location is closed, but Halabi says she is staying open for her employees, some of whom have been with her since she first opened. “I’m trying my best.”
“People will know each other, and if not, they will meet each other,” says owner Dominick Bruccoleri, 60, explaining how his restaurant Papazzio has been a place where neighbors relax for three decades. “Many people have met and gotten married.”
The restaurant’s name (meaning “Father-Uncle” in Italian) is an homage to Bruccoleri’s uncle, Angelo, who owned and operated a beauty salon at the same location for 30 years before retiring in 1989. When Bruccoleri opened Papazzio in 1990, it was the only fine-dining restaurant on Bell Boulevard in Queens. Over the decades, the street has transformed into one of the borough’s dining meccas. But now sales are off 90% since the start of the pandemic.
Bruccoleri says his employees have become part of his family but he’s had to let most go, keeping only a bare-bones kitchen staff to fulfill delivery and pick-up orders: “We’ve been suffering.”
Before Cheryl Smith settled down at her restaurant blocks from the Brooklyn Museum in 2006, she’d had just about every job in the food industry. She sold homemade sandwiches in Soho, worked her way up from dishwasher to executive chef at Manhattan restaurant Marion’s and even hosted Melting Pot on the Food Network.
Now in her cozy restaurant strung with Christmas lights that features work from local artists, she cooks up comfort food from around the world. “The whole thing was to open what I envision as a neighborhood spot. They rely on places to go regularly and feel very much at home,” she says.
Cheryl’s business is struggling but locals are helping her keep the doors open. “I’m there to jump in when it gets busy in the evening. I am out there doing delivery.”
Felipe Mendez-Candelas decided to bring the street food of his hometown, Coyoacán, Mexico to Brooklyn 12 years ago. But these days, he’s mostly making sure his restaurant is properly disinfected—“as soon as I hang up I’m probably going to clean this phone again,” he says.
Mendez-Candelas is fighting to stay open for pick-up orders, despite the fact that business is down 85%. “I’m doing enough to pay the salaries of my kitchen staff—some of them have families back in Mexico and big weights on their back,” says Mendez-Candelas. “But I’m barely breaking even.”
Immigrant Hibist Legesse has been forced to stay out of her restaurant, Bati Ethiopian Kitchen, since, at six months pregnant, she is vulnerable to Covid-19. Her husband (left), who is an emergency room doctor in Brooklyn, has moved to temporary housing while working on the frontlines.
In 2008, during the depths of the Great Recession, Legesse quit her accounting job to start Bati Ethiopian Kitchen. The homey restaurant opened on a record-breaking cold January day that Legesse now thinks about often. “This time reminds me a lot of back then,” she says. “We were constantly thinking, ‘Oh my God, are we going to survive this?’”
Though business is down 80%, Legesse decided to cobble together Bati’s financial reserves to pay staff a few extra paychecks. She still had to let go of everyone but two full-time cooks. “That is the hardest part. Just knowing that I can’t pay my staff.”
Peaches has been through its fair share of ups and downs, like the 2008 recession and Hurricane Sandy, but co-owner Ben Grossman says “this has definitely been different than anything else.”
Sales are down more than 70%, and 80% of staff has been temporarily laid off. “It was the worst day of my career, one that had me in tears as I spoke to my team,” says Grossman. “We have a lot of people that do want to work. They want to help our company survive.”
When Peaches first opened its doors on a brownstone-lined block, families coming from a nearby youth soccer game were among the first customers. More than a decade later, the soccer players, now college students, still come back for Southern classics like catfish and shrimp and grits. “We cater to those that live around us,” says Grossman.
