Pandemic protocols eat away at bottom line
Customers are coming back to their favourite restaurants, but the look and feel of dining has changed for the foreseeable future.
At Romer’s Burger Bar locations in Port Moody and Vancouver, staff are wearing masks and Plexiglas shields envelope the bar. Portable shields have been placed between tables — already spaced to keep patrons at least two metres apart — to create virtual booths.
“Whatever the size of your party, we want to make sure you are absolutely protected,” said co-owner Kelly Gordon. “It cost us a chunk of dough, but we are glad that we did it.”
The measures have reduced the capacity of dine-in restaurants by at least half, but are needed to keep the spread of COVID-19 in check.
“We have a whole bunch of new protocols for handwashing and bathroom checks,” he said. “I did three safety audits this past weekend alone, but that’s what you have to do to stay afloat right now.”
Guidance issued by the B.C. Restaurant and Foodservice Association dictates that staff must wash their hands before and after breaks, after touching or cleaning a table, after touching their face, hair or phone, after blowing their nose, using a computer or ordering system, and after using the toilet.
Romer’s locations earn about 70 per cent of what they made in the pre-COVID era — and that’s on their best days. Gordon hopes that good weather and patio expansions will help.
“People feel a lot more comfortable in the open air and, for now, we have pretty darn good demand from the consumer,” he said.
Before opening for dine-in service, they brought back some staff to provide takeout service. While take-away revenue increased by 150 per cent, total revenue dropped by 75 per cent.
Orders from meal delivery apps have increased, but the commissions — between 10 and 25 per cent — scrape the profit that would have gone to the restaurants.
“We feel like we have to do it in tough times. You still have to hold market share and people will migrate to the other guys if they can’t order from us,” said Gordon.
Restaurants with mainly Chinese clientele have felt the effects of the pandemic keenly and their downturn came months earlier.
“People were talking about COVID-19 in December and by late January people stopped going to restaurants,” said Tom Mah, manager of Richmond’s Continental Seafood. “When people should have been celebrating Chinese New Year, we lost 350 reservations.”
When the province limited gatherings to 50 people, Continental — with a capacity of 450 people — switched to takeout only.
They reopened in May with just 144 seats and quickly regained their dim sum lunch business, but dinner service remains very slow. Their usually lucrative wedding banquet bookings have vanished through the end of the year.
Family dining traditions also appear to be on hold in the Chinese community, he said.
“We usually have families come on the weekend. You bring your parents and that’s when they see their grandchildren. We aren’t seeing very many families anymore.”
In mid-March, when it became clear that COVID-19 infections were picking up steam across B.C., Autostrada Osteria went from crowded hot spot to full shutdown.
“We didn’t know what was going to happen, but we knew we wouldn’t be able to reopen right away, so we laid off all our staff immediately,” said chef owner Lucais Syme. “It was so crazy, every day there was a new way of thinking about things and what we could do business-wise.”
Three months later, two locations tell very different tales.
The Main Street location is open seven days a week and earns about 75 per cent of normal. The downtown location earns more like 40 cent of normal based on five nights a week and the early weeknights are quiet enough to wipe out any notion of profit.
“Main Street is paying the bills for downtown, but we want to hang on,” Syme said. “We are about to start swinging hammers on a new location at Vancouver House.” That’s a new residential highrise near the Granville Street Bridge.
While the future of fine dining is far from certain, Symes is taking an optimistic view. “I hope that the world can get better and we want to be in the right position when it does. If it collapses, I guess we are going down with the ship.”
A survey conducted earlier this month by Restaurants Canada found that about 60 per cent of food-service businesses are losing money and 10 per cent are already permanently closed. Half say they are in danger of shutting down forever.