This was supposed to be the year that launched Jane Valliere to retirement.
Valliere, the owner of Concord’s Hermanos restaurant had it all. She had the banner year of sales in 2019 – her best ever. She had the strong start to 2020 and a wave of momentum. And she had the grand plan: to sell the South Main Street business she built in 1984 and stride to her next chapter.
That’s not how it’s happening, though. Restaurants are shut to foot traffic. Customers are staying home. And weeks into an all-hands effort to mitigate a deadly global pandemic, Valliere is now fighting to keep her business going.
“We’re making the best of a bad situation,” she said. “We’re surviving.”
Sales are down 75%, though takeout orders are leaving every evening. Twenty-one staff are on payroll – 29 fewer than usual. But Valliere says they’ll make it to the other side.
Others are struggling even more.
“It’s affecting us quite extensively,” said Alan Andrian, owner of Alan’s of Boscawen. “Actually it’s devastating. We were going from doing really, really well to all of a sudden basically nothing.”
It’s a grimly common tale. Five weeks since Gov. Chris Sununu issued an executive order shutting down in-house dining in restaurants – just before St. Patrick’s Day – the industry is still reeling.
Currently, only half of New Hampshire’s restaurants have managed to stay open via takeout and delivery options, according to Mike Somers, president of the state’s Lodging and Restaurant Association. And of the half that are still open, half of them expect to have to stop doing that within the next 30 days.
Andrian counts his restaurant among them. “Are we getting a few takeout orders here and there? Yes,” he said. “Is it something we could substantiate? Probably not.
“We won’t make it just on takeout.”
Some businesses have shut down temporarily; others have closed permanently, Somers said.
Overall, the impact is hard to fathom. The industry expects to lose around of $800 million in New Hampshire – for all projected losses in March, April and May, said Somers.
And the staff toll has been high. An Association survey of its members found that 93% of responding New Hampshire businesses have laid-off some or all workers.
“Our best guess and estimates for the organization is somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 to 50,000 people have likely been laid off in the hospitality and tourism sector,” Somers said.
The crisis is affecting restaurants to different degrees.
At Hermanos, Valliere has managed to ramp up the takeout operation they’d had before. Calls come in, payment is made by card, and staff take food out to cars in the parking lot.
“We’ve always done takeout,” Valliere said. “It hasn’t been a huge part of our business, and now it’s all of our business.”
At the start of the crisis, Valliere was able to give her whole staff a week’s vacation. Now, her staff levels are down, but in many cases by choice. Anyone who wants a shift can get one. Some are working part time. Others, like two kitchen employees, still put in a near-full 38 hours a week.
Alan’s of Boscawen is a different story. Sales have been devastated – down by at least 85%, Andrian said. The restaurant has flung itself into takeout and delivery, but it’s only having so much of an effect.
“We’re not a takeout place,” Andrian said. The pizza places are doing great, he noted. The full-service restaurants are struggling.
Alan’s staff levels are down by 75%; shrinking from 40 before to about nine now after a wave of layoffs. He plans on bringing everyone back, but he doesn’t know when that will happen.
There isn’t any one expense that’s squeezing Alan’s the hardest. It’s all of them at once, Andrian says: rent, electric bills, gas, inventory.
“At the end of the week if you add up the numbers, and they don’t total up what you need, it doesn’t work,” he said.
Some places have more easily transitioned.
At Chief’s Place, a pizza and sandwich shop in Penacook, conditions are somewhat better: a 25 to 30% drop in business since the restaurant switched to pickup.
Perhaps that’s because of the type of food being served, or the strong loyalty of local customers, owner George Blatsis said.
But so far, it’s meant that Baltsis has not had to let any staff go.
And he hasn’t needed to switch to a delivery model yet. Besides, he doesn’t want to: It would not be fair to the restaurants that need that business, Blatsis said.
“I hope we make it through this,” he said. “I’ve been here almost 20 years. My customers feel like a family.”
The shutdown has forced those restaurants fighting to keep their customers into innovation mode. When majorities of customers are confined to their living rooms, creativity counts.
For Alan’s, it’s meant a switch to online ordering and payment, a new model for him.
For Tucker’s, a chain of breakfast restaurants in Concord, Dover, Hooksett, Merrimack and New London, it’s meant finding a new sales opportunity: essential goods.
The chain has tapped into its distribution chain to allow customers to pick up locally sourced whole eggs, milk, bread, butter and more – including coveted supermarket items like flour and toilet paper.
That’s been a boon to business, Business Development Manager Meghan Clifford said. It’s a needed service for some customers, and a novel way to support the restaurant for others.
And it’s one of many reasons the New Hampshire chain is doing relatively well, Clifford said, with business down about 25% of what it was before. The restaurants already had a take-out option before the crisis – an option that already was more popular than might be expected for breakfast items.
“We’re in a groove,” Clifford said. “We know how we can safely serve our community while keeping our team safe for now.”
Tucker’s also successfully secured a Small Business Administration loan earlier this month, which has helped it maintain payroll.
The comparative stability has meant that while staff is down to three-quarters of its levels, the restaurant is able to provide work to anyone who wants it; Clifford said. Some have opted to collect unemployment and wait out the crisis.
Not every restaurant has been as successful with the federal loan program as Tucker’s.
Across the board, the same remedy that has buoyed other businesses, like retail outlets, has been less helpful for restaurants. The Paycheck Protection Program – a loan program, which gives forgivable loans to businesses that keep their staff on payroll, has been slow to roll out for restaurants.
Blatsis applied for a loan for Chief’s Place, but was told by his bank that while he was approved, there’s no more money. Now, he says, the restaurant is dipping heavily into savings.
Valliere also applied for an SBA loan for Hermanos – as early as they became available on April 3, she says. She’s now been waiting three weeks.
The problem isn’t unique to New Hampshire. Nationally, only 8.9% of the initial $349 billion in aid that went out last month was directed to the hospitality industry, according to Somers, who cited the National Restaurant Association. Congress has appropriated an additional $330 billion to the program, after it ran out, but many restaurants have been waiting weeks.
The loss will also mean a significant drop in revenue from meals and rooms taxes for the state.
“This has legitimately been catastrophic for our industry,” Somers said. “We as an industry are going to need significant support as part of this program.”
For Andrian, of Alan’s of Boscawen, the loan could make a major difference for the 30 employees he’s laid off. It could mean a return.
“I plan on bringing everyone back,” he said, referring to the moment the loan clears. “We’ll work in the restaurant, whatever it takes to keep them working, and if I can pay them I will pay them, and we’ll do something.”
As they struggle to recalibrate their approach to food service, Concord area restaurant owners are divided on the question of when to re-open.
Andrian says there should be some limited option for restaurants to let some customers dine in again. Nothing too fast, he specified. But enough to get people thinking about about restaurants again.
“I think that people are still concerned, as I am,” he said. “We have to be careful. Do I want to hurt anyone by opening and having them come in here? Definitely not. But at least what I want is a shot so we can at least stay open.”
But many others say they’re against it.
“Safety comes first these days,” Blatsis said. He wouldn’t want to re-open if it meant endangering staff and patrons.
“I want my group happy, the community too,” he said. “…Maybe it’s a little bit hard a few more weeks, a few more months,” but “safety is more important.”
And others say even if the state gives the go-ahead, the customers aren’t going to necessarily return in a hurry.
The usually bustling upstairs bar in Hermanos is likely to be quiet for a while, Valliere said. “You want to squeeze in with a bunch of other people with runny noses at a bar?” she said.
For the lucky businesses, Valliere predicts, it’ll be takeout as far as the eye can see.
“I can survive,” she said. “It’s just maddening. It’s really maddening. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just difficult.”
(Ethan DeWitt can be reached at edewitt@cmonitor.com, at (603) 369-3307, or on Twitter at @edewittNH.)