Behind the Concerted Effort Not to Save America’s Restaurants

Restaurant are dying at a record rate—but insurance companies won’t bail them out

Photo illustration source: Nicholas Kamm/Getty Images

In the early days of the pandemic, Rosa Thurnher did what every restaurant owner did and leaned into the impossibility of the circumstance: She learned basic code and pivoted to takeout, applied for grants and a Paycheck Protection Program loan for her Mexican restaurant, El Ponce in Atlanta. She signed up to turn out $10 meals for charity to give hours to her cooks, held fundraisers, and sourced personal protective equipment and takeout boxes. “It was a full-time job just attending all the webinars I did,” she remembers, almost fondly. “First-world problems, right?”

Most restaurant people have similar stories: Boston taqueria owner John Schall and Oregon restaurant manager Katy Connors launched campaigns to limit delivery app commissions while sourcing gloves and masks and to-go boxes and reading books to their toddlers. D.C. bar owner Josh Saltzman applied for a PPP loan and founded an alternative delivery service from his part-time home base in Tanzania. The three-Michelin-star restaurant group Alinea had the staff of its upstart reservation app Tock work 18-hour days to add online ordering capabilities to its platform so the restaurants on its site could “pivot to takeout” without paying the 30% commissions charged by delivery apps. And, perhaps most famously, celebrity chef José Andrés launched a program that would eventually contract thousands of independent restaurants across the country to produce to-go meals for sick and unemployed people in their respective communities. Restaurant people live for urgency, and suffused with it, they overhauled their menus, designed meal kits, branded face masks, experimented with grocery programs, and sold gift cards and sent the proceeds to undocumented workers who couldn’t qualify for unemployment.

Eight months later, the odds are better that an 85-year-old nursing home resident survives this pandemic than an independent restaurant, and just about everyone in the small restaurant business feels just about that vigorous and empowered. A hundred thousand restaurants so far have closed permanently, and of those that remain in New York City, 88% couldn’t pay their October rent. Plus, dozens of…