REBECCA MASSON, OWNER-FOUNDER, FLUFF BAKE BAR, HOUSTON Rebecca Masson opened the new location of her bright, airy bakery, Fluff Bake Bar, just two days after Houston officials shut down all indoor dining in 2020. When we spoke the following year , on the first anniversary of the pandemic, Masson said she was “bone tired.” She went from six employees to one, all the while learning how to pivot to online ordering, shipping and delivery. Fluff Bake Bar survived the crisis and turns 14 this month. “COVID was rough, I’m not gonna lie,” Masson said recently. “It was more from a staffing standpoint, in my experience. I worked seven days a week for two years.” She has kept all the ordering channels she rolled out during the crisis and still ships cookies, though not as many as she did. Labor remains a challenge, especially with rising wages coming out of the pandemic. But she learned one very important thing coming out of COVID: “That I can do anything,” Masson said. STEPHAN HARMAN, CO-FOUNDER, FUSIAN; COLUMBUS, OHIO In March 2020, Stephan Harman was busy mobilizing his staff to turn his 10-unit sushi concept, Fusian, into Fusian Groceries. The team brought in wholesale produce and broke it down for individual grocery orders as Harman hunted for “incremental sales growth to crawl our way out of this hole,” he said at the time. “Persistence certainly was a lesson that arose from COVID.” —Stephan Harman, co-founder, Fusian Fusian now operates seven restaurants in Ohio. But it has closed five locations since 2022, Harman said, after experimenting with some available real estate. “The pandemic gave us an opportunity to take advantage of open real estate, with second- and third-generation restaurant spaces,” he said. “The pandemic allowed us to kind of dip our toe in the water in markets that we were interested in without committing to full-blown build outs and full- blown lease structures.” The first two weeks of the pandemic were “very scary,” he said. But then he
TIM AND KELLY BAKER, OWNERS OF WASHINGTON’S SWAN HOUSE FARM, MADE A SIGNIFICANT PIVOT DURING THE PANDEMIC. PHOTO COURTESY: TIM BAKER.
Now, he spends his days sheering sheep, processing pigs and growing produce, all of which makes its way to the restaurant. Swan House also hosts dinners, operates a farm stand and runs a “family glamp ground” where guests can sleep under a “hippie dome” during the warmer months. “It’s beautiful,” Baker said. “And it’s been a really effective component of reawakening out of COVID and giving the restaurant a new level of focus.” WORKING FROM HOME All restaurants felt the pain of COVID, with clamp-downs on indoor dining seemingly overnight, fearful workers, fights over mask requirements, supply chain headaches and more. But the crisis was, perhaps, most acute for independent restaurant operators, who didn’t have the financial cushion or the infrastructure of bigger chains. The industry lost $280 billion in sales
during the first 13 months of the pandemic and more than 8 million restaurant workers were laid off or furloughed during that time, according to the National Restaurant Association. In 2021, the Association revealed data that showed that 90,000 eating and drinking places had been shuttered either permanently or temporarily during COVID. In 2022, the Independent Restaurant Coalition (IRC) found that more than half of independent restaurants and bars that hadn’t received Restaurant Revitalization Fund (RRF) grants expected to close within six months. Restaurant Business spoke with some of the independent restaurant operators we featured in the pandemic’s early days, to see how things are going as we approach the five-year anniversary of COVID-19. All their businesses survived the pandemic, though, as with Baker, life looks different for all of them now.
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