Can restaurants survive COVID? Two of the Carolinas’ top chefs weigh in

It’s been six months to the day since I last sat down to a meal in a restaurant. I love restaurants—unknown and renowned, shabby and chic - and have sought them out around the world for the last half century. As southern food authority John T. Edge recently wrote in Garden & Gun magazine: “When I go out to eat, I go looking for joy.”

Is it somehow inappropriate to even admit feeling loss for such a first world luxury while much more serious consequences of Covid-19 consume the country? Since my March meal at The Grocery in Charleston, 167,000 Americans have died of coronavirus, food banks are overrun, and parents are agonizing over school plans.

Even so, our collective absence from the public table has had serious consequences. An estimated one in four Americans who lost jobs worked in the restaurant industry, many of them low paid. By July, some 16,000 restaurants shuttered permanently. The Independent Restaurant Coalition estimates that, with government bailout funds set to expire, some 11 million of its employees could soon lose their jobs. Perhaps another 5 million people in the supply chain, including farmers and fishers, are harshly impacted.

Here in the Carolinas, the implosion of the restaurant business threatens not just economic catastrophe, but the possible evaporation of a great source of cultural pride over the last couple decades: the artisanal, “fine dining” restaurant in the southern vernacular. Except for New Orleans, award winning southern chefs running restaurants are a relatively recent phenomenon. Now, the pandemic has them holding on by the skin of their teeth.

I called the chefs at two of our very best restaurants: Justin Stanhope, who runs Charleston’s FIG and was the 2015 winner of the James Beard Award for Best Chef Southeast. My favorite at FIG: Burnt eggplant, cottage cheese and benne tahini (trust me).

Also, Katie Button, the James Beard nominated executive chef and owner of Asheville’s Curate’, the exquisite Spanish tapas restaurant and my choice for best international restaurant in either of the Carolinas. Favorite: Jamon Iberico de Bellota (aged ham from free-range Spanish black-footed pigs fed on acorns).

Both were shut down by mandate for several weeks but are now reopened with limited hours and capacity.

“I feel like such a hypocrite,” says Stanhope. “I work in a restaurant every day. I trust in our protocols. I believe we’re safe. But yet I haven’t been to a restaurant in five months.”

He describes “wearing masks and gloves 12 hours a day” in a business serving half the “covers” as before, employing 2/3 of the staff, yet still trying to focus on sustainability, and quality.

“Restaurants aren’t known for having low manageable overhead,” Stanhope says, “and we want to take care of our work family financially. We have lots of adults working in this restaurant. They love hospitality, but they have real financial obligations—kids in college, mortgages…” Without the government PPP funding and a GoFundMe to help with health insurance, he doubts FIG would’ve made it this far, adding: “another shutdown without support would be a death blow to our industry.”

At Curate’, Katie Button describes a thriving pre-Covid business model that included 401k’s, paid time off, and bonuses (including trips to Spain). Then, she says “On March 17 (the day Gov. Roy Cooper ordered a statewide shutdown), we lost everything we had. We lost all our capital to keep the wheel going.”

The restaurant business, she says, “isn’t meant to shut down. The revenue from the night before pays for the next day’s food. So we paid our staff and laid off our entire company — 130 people. Most of our costs stayed fixed. We went into the red overnight.”

Button is adamant in her belief that the restaurant business needs to be singled out for more financial aid: “Without PPP and EIDL loans, we could not have reopened. Without more, we are going to see a mass closure of restaurants across the country.”

It is hard to imagine looking at a business model that is singled out in the CDC’s list of five to-do’s — “Avoid restaurants and bars” — and conjure a survival plan. As Button says, “Our business only functions on people gathering together in tight spaces. That’s what makes it work.”

The concept of the American “fine dining” restaurant is less than 200 years old, having begun in 1837 with the opening of Delmonico’s in New York. Can it survive?

Stanhope’s answer is familiar to us all by now: “A vaccine could solve a lot of our problems.”

This story was originally published August 14, 2020 at 4:45 PM with the headline "Can restaurants survive COVID? Two of the Carolinas’ top chefs weigh in."