It's The Second Winter Of The Pandemic. Restaurants Know What To Do This Time Around.

Massachusetts restaurants are taking last year’s lessons about outdoor dining and takeout to get ready for a second pandemic winter. Even as they continue to be plagued with staffing and supply chain shortages, some restauranteurs feel optimistic, hoping that the state’s high vaccination rate and manageable case counts will keep people comfortable with indoor dining.

Bob Luz, President and CEO of the Massachusetts Restaurant Association, said restaurants were caught off guard last year going into the colder temperatures, especially when it came to outdoor dining.

“They’ve had a year to figure it out and get better at it, but a lot of them figured it out,” he told GBH News Tuesday. “Look, restaurateurs are the most innovative, resilient entrepreneurs that I know.”

Restaurants that are still standing endured a notoriously tough economic climate. Nearly one in five Massachusetts restaurants that shut down during the pandemic never reopened, Luz said.

In Cambridge, chef-owner Will Gilson spent tens of thousands of dollars to build a roofed street patio at Puritan & Company, his Inman Square restaurant that has been operating for nine years. But it was an all-day café in one of his three new Cambridge Crossing locations that sustained his business, he said, with orders coming in online and grab-and-go service.

His Inman Square restaurant’s outdoor structure will come down on January 1 in accordance with Cambridge city regulations, Gilson said, but he thinks there’s a sizable number of people who will be comfortable eating in.

“We still have to hold up our end of the bargain as operators,” he said, “that we are providing a safe environment, that we’re thinking about airflow, we’re thinking about spacing. We’re not just sort of jamming everybody into a room and hoping for the best.”

Even with clearer ways to protect customers’ health, new problems have cropped up in staffing and the supply chain.

Gilson says at the beginning of October, he was able to bring his staff up to almost 80 without a lot of trouble.

Luz said that’s not true for everyone, despite recent improvements that he traces back to the end of additional unemployment benefits and the beginning of the school year, which brought parents back into the workforce.

“The problem still exists,” said Luz. “It always gets amplified in the restaurant industry because we’re a highly labor-intensive industry. ... Although we’ve embraced technology to improve our systems, you can’t use technology to cook food, deliver food, seat the guest.”

Some menus are also “slimmer” than last year, Luz said, because of difficulty in consistently getting raw ingredients and rising prices.

To keep going, Gilson said, restauranteurs need to continue to be flexible.

“If you’re too rigid, you’re too worried about things being exactly the way you want them to be, this is going to be a hard time for you,” he said.

Gilson said there’s also a lot be grateful for, too, as he looks forward to this fall and winter since patronage has gone up since it plummeted in 2020.

“Really, the best things about running restaurants is because it’s a people business,” Gilson said. “Being able to see people's faces, being able to have them back into the spaces. ... More than anything, I’m appreciative of that this year.”