Light at the End of a Dark Year
A year into the pandemic, the butcher’s bill for restaurants in the US was grim. In 2020 alone, an estimated $240 billion in revenue vanished, nearly 2.5 million restaurant workers lost their jobs and over 100,000 dining establishments closed temporarily or permanently. Perhaps the bleakest stat of all is that, according to a study by the University of California, San Francisco, the most dangerous jobs during the pandemic, outside of health care, have been in the food and agriculture industries, with the risk of dying increasing 39 percent.
Since March 2020, the only “hot new trend” in dining was finding a way to survive. By their nature as businesses built around gathering people in one place, restaurants were caught in an impossible position: City and state authorities had to shut them down to avert a public-health disaster, but then did little to ameliorate the resulting financial pain.
Yet there’s now rightful reason for optimism as vaccination rates climb and the government help restaurants pleaded for finally came through in the form of a $28.6 billion grant package called the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, part of the American Rescue Plan Act passed by Congress and signed by President Biden. And once it’s safe for indoor service to resume at full capacity, surely people will want to fill those tables as they cast off the shackles of pandemic lockdowns.
In a normal year, we’d use this space to tell you about the best
