Another on restaurants (and more webinars)
Allow me, in these times of spiritual torment
To offer you, my countrymen,
From my incarceration my best wishes
On this great holiday of spring!
All will pass and all will go away,
Our sorrows and alarm will fade,
Once again life’s road will be smooth
As in the past, the garden will blossom forth
-Alexander Pushkin. Except from an 1830 poem written during a cholera quarantine
Thanks again to all that made it to our webinar with Nick Bishop, Katie Button and Ford Fry: A Landlord’s Guide To Restaurants. We covered a lot of topics and you can get a copy of the webinar and deck here. Our general conclusions:
Few restaurants can be profitable at 50% pre-covid sales. None can at 25%. This is true even if the rent is zero: there are just too many other costs involved.
Just because your state allows restaurants to open at limited capacity doesn’t mean it makes economic sense to do so.
It costs money to (re)start a restaurant. Anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000.
A restaurant is a constantly moving “wheel”: profits in February pay off costs from January. Re-opening and closing and re-opening and closing is a recipe for failure.
CARES act unemployment can pay up to $55,000 / year. Many restaurant workers will opt not to return before that runs out on July 31st.
PPP is singularly unsuited for how restaurants operate today, especially with the requirement to be open for 2.5 months from receipt.
A lot of restaurants will close for good. Estimates range from 15% to 65%. As always, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.
Since our webinar Georgia has allowed restaurants to open and the early reports are in: by and large local restaurants have remained closed while many chains have opened to limited attendance. But in every submarket there are reports of large numbers of people strolling along retail streets and in public parks, Go Cups in hand. We are becoming New Orleans.
Social Distancing: the Atlanta Beltline on Saturday May 2 (AJC)
Several listeners asked how landlords could help. We came away with several moves:
#1: give your restaurants extra space for To Go inventory storage and seating
Marketing, marketing, marketing. Put your big advertising budgets behind your local operators. Find a consistent message and hammer it home online and onsite.
Air Traffic Control. Coordinate non-food services. For a large property with lots of restaurants (food halls: we’ll be talking about you in a few weeks) designate guest ordering, loading, parking and queuing areas. Make areas for temporary drive-thru.
Technology: encourage your restaurants coordinate through one pre-order app, possibly customized if the project is large enough. Organize WhatsApp or other forumsp for your tenants (and property managers) to share information in real time.
Create, organize and oversee the collection of patron Health Declaration Forms for all of your tenants, ideally online. Patrons will resist this less if it is project-wide.
Group Delivery. With enough restaurants on your property it may make sense to coordinate one delivery service with your or their employees as a CAM expense. Third-party fees, while lower now, are still crushingly high.
Park(ing). All those parking spaces? You don’t need them today. Turn those areas into useable outdoor space for patrons to gather. Encourage guests to picnic throughout the site. You’ll have to add turf and trees and shade and seating, but is that worse than losing 50% of your rent?
Essential Help. Lean on your “essential” businesses to assist. HEB Grocers in Texas sells prepared local restaurant meals in their stores. C’mon Publix, you can do this!
Design. The design of those places where people gather — lobbies, sidewalks, restaurants, stores— is critically important now. Your guests need to feel both safe and welcome, which is a huge task. So huge that we’re hosting a webinar on it. . .
Webinar: on Monday May 11th I’m hosting A Design Cocktail Party. I’ll have three industry-leading architects on with me: Terry Shook, founder of Shook Kelly (Charlotte, LA); Mark Motonaga, partner at RCH Studios (LA); and Michael Hsu, founder of the Michael Hsu Office of Architecture (Austin, Houston). And yes we’ll be drinking. You should be too.
These folks have designed a lot of really iconic places, from Birkdale Village to The Line Hotel Austin to The Row DTLA. We are going to cover all sorts of design topics that are front and center in the time of Covid: hotel and office lobbies, restaurants, grocery stores, town centers and more. For new projects coming out as well as existing spaces: how do we re-think design with various new rules (and worried patrons) to contend with? As always we’ll be taking questions.
A DESIGN COCKTAIL PARTY: Monday May 11th, 5:00PM EST
What We Are Working On. We are putting together F+B operations teams— comprised of professionals we’ve known for years— to run restaurants and bars on behalf of landlords, on hotel-like management contracts. Right now we’re working on three recently delivered (vacant) restaurant spaces. Give us a ring if you’d like to learn more.
Five Reasons We Love Instagram
We’ve been on Instagram for years— not just because it makes us feel inadequate— but because it keeps us on trend better than any other social media platform. Now stuck at home it has been a source of constant entertainment, like this amazing video from Houston funk trio Khruangbin that landed in our feed. It’s like they knew we’d all be in quarantine and would want exactly this.
Love charts? Love sarcasm? @Mattsurelee is your guy. As his tag line says, he simply tries to make a chart every day. From quarantine Venn diagrams to Why I Hate Valentines Day pie charts to subway maps of your office: Matt has you covered.
Really a gateway to the online magazine as much a source of its own content, Punch Magazine has been delivering high- quality insights into America’s bar renaissance since 2013. Full of great interviews, city guides, and of course, cocktail recipes both easy and hard. Forget Mr Boston, Punch is where it’s at.
Atlanta’s Seung Hee Lee makes our town just a little better, and her @KoreanFusion account will do the same for your IG feed. Normally a pop-up restaurant fixture when she isn’t working at the CDC (true story), Seung seemingly spends all her free time now in the kitchen and has the recipes and wine parings to prove it. Her cookbook Everyday Korean is also great.
If you don’t check out any others, please go spend a few minutes with New York’s favorite grumpy Italian uncle / chef @FrankPrisinzano. This decidedly Lo Fi (and oftentimes R-rated) IG account is like a cross between The Sopranos and a 1980s Public Service Announcement. There are no measurements. There are no cook times. There are no recipes. There are only methods. And if you use canned tomato sauce he’ll break your kneecaps.
