Restaurants look toward post-pandemic normalcy.
After a year, restaurants look eagerly toward post-pandemic normalcy
When the COVID pandemic forced restaurants to close their dining rooms last year, sales at High Tide Harry’s flatlined.
“We were down 90%,” says co-owner Brennan Heretick, whose father, Michael “Harry” Heretick, founded the restaurant 25 years ago.
“My dad was digging into everything he’d saved to pay the bills and get the staff paid. We didn’t want to let anyone go … ”
The 6,000-square-foot venue has 70 employees and had missed out on the first round of the Paycheck Protection Program
due to a bank error. His dad was stressed, Heretick says. They all were. And with good reason.
More than 110,000 restaurants,
or 17%, were closed permanently or long-term in December during the course of pandemic, according to the National Restaurant
Association.
In May, PPP breathed $368,000 of new life into High Tide Harry’s. Immediately, the Hereticks gave their hourly-wage employees a salary bump.
“Anyone who was normally making a server or bartender wage … we doubled their pay. We were able to continue paying managers’ salaries.”
Employees who wanted more hours got them — bagging to-go
orders, cleaning, whatever had to be done, says Heretick.
“Without [the PPP] we’d have been in big trouble,” he says.
Like High Tide Harry’s, Orlando’s Pig Floyd’s Urban Barbakoa survived on the earliest days on takeout and even delivering family meals — at times across the state in places like Miami.
Owner Thomas Ward still had to decide not to reopen his Lake Nona location, where 20 people worked, while keeping his Mills Avenue Pig Floyd’s near downtown alive.
“I couldn’t reopen and start bleeding,” Ward says. “I couldn’t have two open faucets.”
The decision, along with decreased volume and a meat shortage, made for a tough June.
“That was probably the hardest time of the whole pandemic,” Ward says.
But now, more than a year into the pandemic, Ward is seeing positives.
“We’re seeing more trending towards normalcy,” he says.
Ward’s business received two rounds of PPP funds. He added that people need to realize “it’s not over” and continue to support small businesses.
Community support and creative thinking, says Michael Collantes, is what got his fledging food-court business, Taglish, through the pandemic’s darkest days.
The restaurant, which operates inside the Lotte Plaza Market — an Asian supermarket on West Colonial Drive in Orlando — began feeling its effects earlier than most others.
“There was fearmongering,” he says. “All people knew was that the virus came from China. Everyone stopped going to Asian areas.”
Because Taglish — which had opened in November 2019 — was inside the supermarket, it never shuttered, “but there were days I would work open to close by myself and just send everyone home.”
A small infusion of PPP — roughly $2,000 — helped, but these were among Collantes’ darkest times. “We just said, ‘We’re not going to roll over and let this happen.’ Every week was a battle, figuring out new operations, new specials, how to get to our guests safely,” he says.
At the outset, the answer was third-party delivery companies, like Uber Eats and DoorDash. Sales that had dropped 60% in March rebounded in April. Then Collantes saw the P&L (profits and loss) report.
“You see how much you’re paying out and you realize all those gains went into their pockets,” he explains.
Sales were up 30%, but none reached the bottom line.
“We’d been working so hard to rebound,” Collantes says. “It was scary, devastating, to look at the numbers and realize we were in the same place we had been.”
It was the only way to reach customers before they began doing curbside delivery, he says, “and everyone wanted to support local, which was great. They just didn’t know where that money was going.”
Collantes realized that visibility was critical, so he spent money to make it, hiring someone to run his social media. With TikTok, came the customers.
“It got a lot of traction,” he says. “Some weekends it drove 20% of our sales.”
So, too, did collaborations and new items to appeal to different local food communities. Vegan ube doughnut ice cream sandwiches with The Greenery Creamery and Valkyrie Doughnuts. Smoked pig heads with Git-N-Messy BBQ.
“We didn’t shrink the menu, we grew it,”Collantes says. “Combined, it all worked. I couldn’t pinpoint any one strategy. It was all of them, together.”
Summer strategies forged connections. Collantes and his fellow chef/owners connected, commiserated and created. His partnership with chef/entrepreneur Denni Cha — then forging his own COVID-19-crafted outfit, Itamae Densho — incubated.
By August, Taglish was doing so well Collantes was hiring — and formulating its expansion into its own restaurant group: the Taglish Collective.
Soon it will have five businesses operating beneath its umbrella, serving everything from sushi — Soseki, his business with Cha, soft-opened this month in Winter Park — to Perla’s Pizza in Orlando’s Ivanhoe Village neighborhood and EightySix Media, a full-service restaurant consulting and media service firm. A second Taglish location is slated to open in May near University of Central Florida.
Despite a second infusion of PPP — upwards of $450,000 — and the welcome addition of extra outdoor seating, High Tide Harry’s was still floundering.
“I was hoping we’d see another bump when we moved to 50% capacity and added more outside tables, but sales were still 50% down,” says Heretick, whose business continued on at half capacity even when Gov. Ron DeSantis gave the green light to seat more.
“Why would we go and negate the progress we’d made and how comfortable people were feeling coming here?”
That’s when he, turned to social media.
“I wanted to tell the personal side of things,” says Heretick, who got real, sharing too, not only his father’s story but raw numbers. “Even after 25 years spent building a loyal following, most money still goes toward operating costs … Profit margins are something like 3-7% after payroll, equipment, inventory.”
The Facebook plea went viral. News outlets, local, then national, poured in to cover it. Local support followed.
Now at roughly 90% of its pre-pandemic numbers — despite shorter hours and still seating at just 50% — the Hereticks, who didn’t lose a single employee and are now looking to hire, are grateful.
“The combination of everything — the PPP, more takeout than we’ve ever had, the precautions we’re taking that a lot of other restaurants aren’t and the exposure — is bringing out more locals who want to support us,” Heretick says.
Locals are only one part of the puzzle city-wide.
“Until they open the conventions back full-time and the theme parks fulltime, I don’t think we’ll be back to 100%,” says Gene Richter, owner of longtime Orlando restaurant Lee & Rick’s Oyster Bar.
The restaurant, which opened in 1950, had help surviving during the pandemic from regulars and the family owning its property.
“When you’re in business for 71 years in the same location, that kind of helps,” says Richter.
Still, when the shutdown took place last year, worries formed over how long it would last. While some places offered takeout during the time dining rooms were closed, Lee & Rick’s did not.
“You’re not going to eat a dozen oysters in your car,” Richter says.
Lee & Rick’s did not initially apply for PPP funds but received funds from another round.
Business during a recent week in March was still down about 25% compared to 2019, according to Richter.
“For what’s going on, we’re pretty happy with it,” he says.
Richter hopes one of either his two sons or nephew will eventually take over the family business and get to celebrate its 100th anniversary.
“There’s businesses that have been around for 100-plus years and we would like to be one of them,” he says.