NEW ORLEANS – Mask mandates and crowd size restrictions are a thing of the past, but New Orleans restaurants are still feeling the effects of the pandemic.
Stan Harris, president of the Louisiana Restaurant Association, said the unprecedented events of the last year and a half have changed the game for restaurant owners in many ways – and not equally.
“Probably the simplest word to describe the state of the industry is ‘challenged,’” said Harris. “You’ve got workforce pressure, and not only finding people to work. You’ve seen the cost of hiring people get more expensive. You’ve got commodity pressure, as you’ve seen prices go up for a lot of the center-of-the-plate proteins: seafood, crab, meat, beef, chicken. And even the price of frying oil has doubled or tripled from what it was a couple of months ago just due to supply chain issues.”
“Also, we’ve got a lot of restaurants and bars at risk, because they’re operating on compressed hours. And many of them are operating on compressed days of the week. … I overnighted in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago for an event, and we were trying to find a drink at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday. And that was somewhat of a challenge. Of course, we walked a couple of blocks because we were diligent.”
The LRA’s annual Restaurant Week New Orleans promotion begins today and continues through June 27. LRA members will be offering special meal prices to entice diners. The LRA is also getting the word out about the New Orleans & Company Job Fest starting at 10 a.m. Wednesday, June 23 at the Morial Convention Center.
Harris said full-service operators were hit the hardest by the pandemic and they are the ones struggling the most with current operating conditions.
“The quick-service restaurants and fast casual restaurants and those places could pivot more quickly to delivery and drive thru,” he said. “And they typically have food that is packaged to travel. If you’re Raising Cane’s, you had an amazing year, right? Because you moved everything to the window, you closed your dining room, you allowed some curbside pickup. So all of a sudden you didn’t need people to clean and keep your dining rooms up. And you were able to focus those people on efficiency of delivering that product. And the product travels well. A piece of sauteed fish, a sizzling steak, you know, a beautiful cassoulet probably doesn’t travel as well.”
Despite all the challenges, New Orleans has lost fewer restaurants than the 30% many experts predicted a few months ago.
“I think we’re at about half that number right now,” said Harris. “We’ve probably lost about 15% of our restaurants, probably the same number in our bars. There are no banks that are going to loan you any money to hold on. So if you’ve run through your credit cards, you’ve run through friends and family, you’re just out of luck right now.”
With that in mind, Harris and his fellow restaurant lobbyists are pushing hard for more federal help from the industry. Rounds one and two of the Paycheck Protection Program covered about “24 weeks of a 60-week calamity,” he said, and the first phase of the federal Restaurant Revitalization Fund grants top out at $28 billion nationwide.
“I believe we need to fund this next piece [of federal relief], which I consider not the icing, but the cake itself,” he said. “Let’s get us over this hump through the summer. You know what summers in New Orleans look like? They’re not 100% capacity. The weather’s hot. People aren’t visiting.”
Good news: the Louisiana legislature has agreed to dedicate $77 million in American Rescue Plan funds to help with tourism promotion statewide. Harris thinks that will help bring in more customers for the restaurants that have been working hard to adapt to the new reality.
“I’m encouraged by how hard people have worked and how creative they’ve been over the last 15 or 16 months,” he said. “They’re reinventing their business. Some of my favorite restaurants have 12 entrees instead of 24. And they’ve got four appetizers instead of 12. I know that’s hard for them because their creativity is what makes them so unique. But they’re also being smart, because they’re adjusting it to their staffing the supply chain, and they’re trying to keep it where it’s attractive cost wise for people to come and eat with them.
“So hopefully we’ll be able to start using some of these American Rescue Plan dollars and plant those seeds and start building our economy back.”
