TIPPING POINT
If we ever find our bearings again after the pandemic, celebrity chef Tom Colicchio thinks restaurants will be key. “You want to sit at the bar and have a cocktail,” he told my colleague Tom Philpott. “You want to go have the dish you crave.”
Such local haunts are in deep trouble: Service industry workers made up the largest group of Americans who filed for unemployment in judge, used his star power to help push for a restaurant-specific bailout from Congress, and federal lawmakers answered with a $120 billion proposal in June. Without serious government intervention, Colicchio predicted that more than half of all independent eateries will close for good.
