The San Francisco Bay Area has long been known for its impressive food and beverage scene. With its numerous Michelin-starred restaurants, award-winning bakeries, and early craft beer adopters, the city has come to be seen as a land of culinary opportunity.  That is, until COVID-19 hit. In reality, the pandemic is only the most recent challenge facing the city's food and drink businesses. Soaring rent prices over the last decade have forced many Bay Area natives to relocate, while firms like Twitter, Uber, Dropbox, Lyft, and GitHub have moved in. Within the last year, a mass exodus of programmers and other tech workers from their offices have left many bars, restaurants, and cafes located in the Financial District and SoMa (South of Market) neighborhoods without their normal lunchtime and after-work crowds. Given that many of these establishments are located far from residential areas and are surrounded by expensive parking meters, even to-go orders been a non-starter. Today, there doesn’t seem to be much relief in site. Despite having spent over $1 billion on the tallest building in the city, cloud computing behemoth Salesforce announced a few weeks ago that it would no longer enforce traditional 9-to-5 work days, and would encourage the continuation of work-from-home policies for its employees (who number more than 9,000 in San Francisco alone).  With over 2,000 local businesses having closed permanently during the pandemic, what do these difficult conditions mean for hopeful entrepreneurs here in the Bay Area? On today's episode, I'm speaking to Arnaud Goethals. Arnaud, along with his wife Julie Vandermeersch, is the co-owner of Vive la Tarte, a bakery and cafe in San Francisco. Recently, it had to close its locations in the historic Ferry Building on the waterfront, as well as its original location on Howard Street, two doors down from Cellarmaker Brewing Company. I first met Arnaud when my wife worked at Vive la Tarte. We quickly connected over our love of beers from his homeland of Belgium. Throughout our friendship, Arnaud has struck me as someone who sees the industry, and his place in it, from a uniquely broad and incisive perspective, and I wanted to hear his thoughts about the future of hospitality in the Bay Area.