A year into the pandemic, few industries have been hit as hard as restaurants. But some, like the small Springfield bistro Eat, are hanging on.
Last March, just before a new state ban on indoor dining went into effect, Robert Lindsey, who owns the restaurant with his wife, thought the ban might last a month.
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“We would be able to survive something like that,” he said at the time. “Anything more prolonged, probably not. We’d probably just have to just close the doors.”
A year later, they are still in business. But it was a hard year.
The Massachusetts Restaurant Association reports that 3,400 restaurants in the state did not reopen after last year's initial shutdown of indoor dining that began on March 17. Nearly 100,000 furloughed restaurant workers still have not gotten their jobs back, according to the association.
Thinking back on the year, Lindsey said it did not take long for things to get bad. The turning point, he said, came after a news story that broke on March 11.
“It was when Tom Hanks got COVID — it made it real for people, I guess, because it got real slow after that,” Lindsey said.
Once Hanks announced he was sick, Lindsey said that is when it started to feel eerie outside the restaurant.
“Have you ever seen 'The Walking Dead'?” he asked. “I mean, it sometimes felt like that kind of level.”
People just weren’t coming in to dine.
“One day, I just looked at my wife and said, ‘We can't keep coming in here doing this.'"
They decided to cut back from operating six days a week to four, with shorter hours.
“The savings mostly came from us not having to throw out food and our sanity, honestly,” he said.
Things got better over the summer, but sales started dropping in the fall, as COVID-19 cases started increasing again. Lindsey has seen an inverse relationship between the number of COVID-19 cases and the number of customers.
Restaurants were allowed to begin seating customers for indoor dining again beginning in June, but as the fall surge grew worse, Gov. Charlie Baker imposed a curfew on restaurants.
"The curfew dramatically impacted restaurants, especially in the greater Boston area, but across the state," said Bob Luz, president and chief executive officer of the Massachusetts Restaurant Association. "It took out the whole second seating, if you would. Basically you could not get a table after eight o'clock in a restaurant."
Luz said he expected the curfew to hurt restaurants in Boston, which often seat customers later. He said he was surprised by how hard it was for for restaurants in the suburbs, too.
"I think what it did was it put a big question mark over over the confidence of all the dining public," he said. "And it started to scare them."
In the tiny dining room at Eat, the chairs remain stacked on the restaurant’s seven tables, since they're still only offering takeout service. The state started allowing full indoor capacity at the beginning of the month as long as tables are spaced six feet apart. But Eat is so small that they would only be able to seat two tables.
Eat's only employees are the restaurant's two owners, Lindsey and his wife Suzanne Lamoureaux.
“I'm pretty optimistic,” Lamoureaux said. “I still come in here [and think], ‘Oh, it's going to be busy.’ It's just the way I am. I'm very positive and I'm just patient.”
And yet, it is rarely busy.
“Me personally, I would get depressed. I would shut down, which was not fair to her,” Lindsey said, referring to Lamoureaux. “But you know, she would always say to me, ‘Try not to stress about stuff that we can't control.'”
“I was concerned about him, but he pulled through,” she said.
The couple did whatever it could to stay in operation. The city offered a grant, but to qualify, Eat would have to hire someone, and they did not have enough business to do that. They applied for a federal PPP loan, but they did not get it. They applied for a state grant, and were told just 7 percent of applicants would receive them. That, Lindsey said, was his lowest point of the year.
Towards the end of 2020, the state added more money to the grant program. And Lindsey and Lamoureaux got some great news on New Year’s Eve.
“We both cried,” she said. “They sent me an email. We were at work and we were just like, we got it. It was such a relief.”
“It carried us through,” Lindsey added.
Lindsey and Lamoureaux will not offer any indoor seating again until they are both vaccinated, they said. Whenever that happens, they expect it will be another turning point for their little bistro.
Last March, they were not sure they would last more than a month doing just takeout. A year later, they are still here, but the customers are not fully back yet.
“The future is still uncertain, and we don't know if they're coming back,” Lamoureaux said.
“We're getting by right now,” added Lindsey. “We're managing, you know, the ups and downs of it all.”
It is still too soon, they said, to call the restaurant’s survival a victory.
