SPECIAL REPORT
HOW THE BUSINESS HAS, AND HAS NOT, CHANGED SINCE THE PANDEMIC Five years after the COVID pandemic, the restaurant business is as big as it’s ever been. But it has also changed in ways both significant and subtle.
COVID-19 CREATED A METAPHORICAL EARTHQUAKE AND MAN RESTAURANT INDUSTRY. | ILLUSTRATION BY NICO HEINS/MID
R emember January 2020? Remember hearing about the first rumblings of a type of pneumonia spreading in China, where a seafood market in Wuhan closed on the first day of the year? Over time it would be known as SARS-CoV-2, and then COVID-19. By February, six weeks after the first cases were reported, it had killed more than 1,000 people worldwide and had started to make its way into the U.S. By March, it was ravaging Seattle. The actor Tom Hanks came down with it, and the NBA canceled its games, and sud- denly everyone was talking about COVID. By St. Patrick’s Day, we were all told to stay at home unless we had no choice, stamping out a huge day for many restaurant and bar opera- tors. Americans stocked up on eggs and milk and toilet paper and quarantined themselves in their homes, gathering only outside. The term “social distancing” became commonplace. People couldn’t go to movies or concerts or sporting events. Offices shut down. Downtowns became ghost towns. Loved ones only met virtually on Zoom, which few people had heard of in February but by March had become the way people in- teracted. Local and state governments told the restaurant industry to close its dining rooms. About 90,000 restaurants closed. Those that remained open relied on their takeout services, sometimes erecting makeshift curbside services with folding tables in parking lots. “It was like the music died and our com- munities were soulless,” said Lisa Miller, a consumer strate- gist and author of The Business of Joy. Everybody wondered whether there would even be a restaurant business when it was all over. But the restaurant industry persisted. These days, it’s as big as it’s ever been, buoyed by some government help as well as a consumer who insisted on dining at restaurants as soon as they got a chance. In some respects, in fact, it’s difficult to tell if anything is different at all. Except it is. The industry has evolved in ways both large and subtle, driven by a combination of changes to the consum - er, how they prefer to use restaurants, where they live and how they consume media, along with a series of external pres- sures that tested operators’ mettle, sending a bunch of them
JONATHAN MAZE
JONATHAN.MAZE@INFORMA.COM
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RESTAURANT BUSINESS APRIL 2025
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