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
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”…
