Vanishing portions
Orlando restaurants struggle again as coronavirus cases grow
As restaurants across the state opened up again and customers began to feel hope and relief, sales at Hawkers Asian Street Fare started to pick up.
“I never thought I’d celebrate being down 20%,” said Kaleb Harrell, CEO of the Orlandobased chain of nine restaurants across Florida, Georgia and
North Carolina.
But the improvements near the end of May to the middle of June have since vanished for Hawkers and other Orlando restaurants as coronavirus cases across Florida skyrocket, making the state one of the U.S. hotspots of the pandemic.
“Everybody started to realize this is going to be around for a little while,” Harrell said.
Hawkers, where sales are back down to half of what they were a year ago, is getting creative to try to return to profitability during the pandemic.
“I’m positive that we’re going to see a deterioration in June,” San Diego-based restaurant analyst John Gordon said of restaurant sales for that month. He added the trend will continue in July.
Hawkers looks to create new revenue
After reopening its Florida and Georgia dining rooms on May 18 and its North Carolina dining rooms on May 25, Hawkers managed to break even the week of June 8, according to spokeswoman Esther McIlvain.
The restaurant chain’s weekly cash loss has since fallen off again to $100,000 a week, Harrell said.
Hawkers, which has already spent about $3 million in a federal Paycheck Protection Program loan to keep its 500 workers employed, is planning for its commissary kitchen that makes
spices and sauces for its restaurants to sell them wholesale or at grocery stores, Harrell said.
Hawkers also has a wood shop where restaurant furniture is built, which could turn to business-to-business opportunities, potentially even selling partitions it manufactures to keep diners socially distanced at other restaurants.
Gordon described the moves as “gravy.”
“They just have to do it, and they have to have a sales relationship,” he said. “It’s better than just sitting around and sending people home early.”
Harrell said he has no doubt Hawkers will get through the pandemic and hopes they can continue growing after it by taking advantage of real estate opportunities. The chain’s planned restaurants in Nashville as well as Bethesda, Maryland, are still slated to open this year.
“I think if you look at it tactically, it’s day to day,” Harrell said. “I have an enormous amount of faith in our team.”
‘Nothing makes sense anymore’
Hawkers isn’t the only Central Florida restaurant reporting business slumping again.
In downtown Sanford, the popular German restaurant Hollerbach’s Willow Tree Café said business for the week ending May 24 was only down about 2% compared with last year. But that figure dropped to down about 15% for the week ending July 5, owner Christina Hollerbach said.
Her business, which received a $300,000 PPP loan, was wrapping up an expansion when the pandemic hit and recently opened a new upstairs area that offers rooftop dining.
But with no city sponsored event on the Fourth of July to bring people to the lakefront business district, Hollerbach called the holiday the “worst Saturday in the history of Saturdays.”
“I can look at numbers and I can make projections and best guesses, nothing makes sense anymore,” Hollerbach said. “My whole goal every day is taking care of the people that are part of my team.”
Hollerbach points toward news media attention to the growing coronavirus numbers as well as a confused public, particularly after Florida banned serving alcohol at bars but not restaurants, as reasons for the slump.
“People think there’s no alcohol on premise, period,” she said.
She also was disappointed that the state’s Department of Business and Professional Regulation announced the shift on Twitter.
“I never thought I would see the day that a Tweet could un-employ hundreds of thousands of people in an instant,” Hollerbach said.
Takeout stays hot
Nashville-style chicken food truck Chicken Fire, which began serving out of the À La Cart food truck park at the start of the year before moving to outside East End Market this month, is seeing a different story unfold.
While sales were down 15% to 20% in March compared with February, June’s numbers were up 70% compared to that month, owner Kwame Boakye said.
“June was an absolute breakout month for us,” Boakye said. “We’re known now as a takeout spot.”
Boakye attributes this success to both being a food truck operation as well as fried chicken being a good fit for takeout.
“I think being takeout focused is the way to go right now,” he said.
At its height, Chicken Fire, which Boakye said received about $3,000 in PPP funds, had eight employees, but now has four after people left on their own at different points during the pandemic. He said the food truck is hiring to return its staff to eight to 10 employees.
He also wants to bring Chicken Fire to a brickand-mortar location as soon as possible but said he has had issues in finding a space as landlords are tentative about bringing in a new business because of the uncertainty caused by the pandemic.
Darrin McNatt, a 61-year-old Orlando resident, was visiting Chicken Fire at East End Market with his friend Arvin Blank, 63, also of Orlando. The two, both wearing masks as they sat outside, have returned to dining out.
“I don’t even think about it much because I think most of the restaurants are doing what they can do,” McNatt said. “I feel very comfortable when they’re enforcing the ‘you can’t come in without a mask [rule].‘”
Hawkers CEO Harrell, meanwhile, said he has seen consistency in takeout business.
“Through the ups and downs, we haven’t really seen that much change in takeout,” Harrell said. “The crowd that’s getting takeout is pretty steady.”