For Restaurants Owners Post-Pandemic, Change Is the Only Constant

That was February 26, 2020.

Two weeks later, Stieber was spending the $2,000 Little Bear had earned in profit on takeout boxes and disposable cutlery, trying to figure out if menu items like beet egg drop soup or catfish okonomiyaki would travel well. Little Bear would serve takeout only for the next 18 months.

Little Bear’s story could have ended in tragedy, an anticipated restaurant wiped out before it even got a chance to try. But it didn’t! Five years later, Little Bear is going strong, experimenting with new menu items and themes, and launching a digital cookbook. “What I originally envisioned is the restaurant that exists now,” says Stieber. “No takeout, a small staff, an open kitchen so we can interact with the guests. It’s definitely been nice to see that dream become a reality.” Especially when so much of its five-year lifespan didn’t resemble that at all.

There is never a “good” time to open a restaurant. Margins are tight under the absolute best circumstances, and anyone in the business can tell you most are just one slow week, or basement flood, or fire from shuttering. And yet, restaurants open every day, including the days in which COVID-19 spread into a full pandemic. Against all odds, many are still thriving, having pivoted and reshaped themselves to keep going until something resembling “normalcy” appeared again.

But normalcy is increasingly a fragile concept, and in recent years, the cascade of disasters related to climate and environmental change has become its own ongoing crisis. According to the National Centers for Environmental Information, in 2024 there were “27 confirmed weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each to affect the United States,” including hailstorms in Texas, flooding in the upper Midwest, and Hurricanes Debby and Helene. (The latter had disastrous effects on Asheville’s restaurant scene.) Already this year, unprecedented wildfires in California devastated several Los Angeles communities, and, by extension, its restaurant industry; winter storm Enzo forced many restaurants to temporarily close in Houston.

Restaurant owners across the country now, with increased frequency, have to apply those early pandemic questions to their business with some regularity: having to consider how to pay employees if the restaurant closed, how to activate and help the immediate needs of staff and community, and how to calculate whether or not, depending on the event, it is even safe to be open. In the face of these onslaughts, it seems like there may be something to be gleaned from restaurants born during those early months of the pandemic. Those restaurants certainly have learned some tricks. But does surviving one disaster, even one as unprecedented as COVID, really give you insight into how to survive the next?

Randi Lee and his wife, Jeanette Zinno, took over the storefront that would become Leland Eating and Drinking House in Brooklyn in February 2020, ready to fully demo the space. After their contractor got stuck in Canada, they wound up doing it themselves. When they finally opened that December, the restaurant looked nothing like they planned. “Instead of lunch, we had vinyl hour, a place where you could come and put your laptop up, maybe have a cocktail and some snacks,” says Lee. “Back then we just had snacks and fresh bread. It was unusually warm — like 65 degrees — and we just put tables outside. We didn’t even know what we could do.”

An ease with shifting strategies has stayed with them for the past five years, even as they returned to full service. Zinno learned to bartend. They built dining cabins on the sidewalk outfitted with donated hs. And most importantly to Lee, they leaned on their relationships with local farmers, and took whatever produce or meat they were offered. “The thing that made us survive is that our local farmers were there, more than happy to just give us as much food as we could handle,” says Lee, which led to an ever-changing menu.

Nimbleness seemed to be a throughline to navigating COVID lockdowns and restrictions. Mariah Pisha-Duffly, owner of Gado Gado and Oma’s Hideaway in Portland, Oregon, opened Gado Gado with her husband Thomas Pisha-Duffly in June of 2019, while also finding themselves about to have a baby. “I gave birth, I went on maternity leave, I came back for like, a week, and then restaurants were required to shut down,” says Pisha-Duffly. The couple agreed Gado Gado’s food wasn’t fit for takeout, so instead, they tried something new. “We decided to put Gado to bed for the moment, and return to our pop-up roots, do something that was a little bit more playful and nimble,” she says. They started Oma’s Takeaway, a pop-up slinging fun, third-culture dishes like Flamin’ Hot chicharrones.

Crucially, it was something that could be done with the bare-bones team of the Pisha-Dufflys and two others. Even after the legal lockdowns ended, many restaurants found value in keeping operations small. Kylie North, co-owner of Water Bear Bar in Boise, Idaho, says she and wife Laura Keeler operated with the motto “live tiny, die never,” inspired by the micro-animals their bar is named for. After opening their cocktail lounge in July 2019, they had to pivot to making to-order to-go cocktails (Idaho’s liquor laws forbid premade or batched cocktails), catering outdoor events, leading Zoom cocktail classes, and eventually, slowly letting people back in a table at a time.

During lockdown, they figured out how to keep the lights on with just the two of them, plus one bartender who doubled as a chef. They now have a staff of about seven, inclusive of the two of them, about half the size of what they opened with. But now, “we don’t hire specialists,” says North, who is still dealing with the effects of long COVID, opting instead to train the entire staff on both front-of-house and back-of-house operations. That means anyone can jump into any role, especially if someone gets sick.

Staying small, training staff to do multiple jobs, and diversifying tactics are all ongoing tricks restaurants continue to use. If Little Bear has to close for a week for a flood, it can still sell its digital cookbook. If bartenders at Water Bear Bar fall ill, at least everyone knows how to make cocktails. If the pandemic taught any lesson, it’s that restaurateurs shouldn’t put all their eggs in one basket.

But staying small and loose and cautious isn’t a guaranteed roadmap to survival, or even any sort of norm. Lee first responded to the question of what kept Leland afloat with another question: “What about all the restaurants that pivoted and closed anyway?” The Washington Post calculated that “in 2020, about 72,700 more restaurants and bars than normal closed, apparently due to the pandemic, a 95 percent jump over the average annual rate.” And over the past five years, many who have closed restaurants said they never recovered from COVID lockdowns, especially after Congress didn’t replenish the Restaurant Revitalization Fund in 2022. How many of those restaurants pivoted to takeout or created outdoor seating? How many furloughed their staff while serving cocktails through a to-go window? How many applied for a PPP loan and were denied, while larger chains benefited?

Leland Eating and Drinking House

Luck, more than anything, appears to be why some restaurants born in the pandemic made it through. Lee notes that he and Zinno have a great relationship with their landlord, who forgave rent for a few months, but plenty of landlords weren’t willing to give their restaurant tenants a deal. Pisha-Duffly says that while looking for a commercial kitchen to expand the retail dumpling business she and her husband started during lockdown, chef Andy Ricker mentioned the former Whiskey Soda Lounge space was open, and at a steal. “We were like, wow, we might never have an opportunity to be able to afford to get into a lease like this again,” she says, and they jumped on the opportunity to eventually open Oma’s Hideaway there — permanently.

Stieber also says that while his experience running pop-ups helped, “we had just opened, so we got sympathy orders. There’s no way around that. If we had been open for a year, it wouldn’t have been the same.”

During the next disaster, they might not be so lucky. North says she wants to rehire the amount of staff they opened with at Water Bear Bar, but revenue is down, now that more people are working from home and there’s less happy hour foot traffic. “Unless the circumstances of child care change, I don’t see that changing. It really does affect communities with third spaces and cocktail bars, because those people just aren’t walking around,” she says. And Stieber says that while his small, new staff allowed the business to pivot in a hurry in 2020, it’s bigger and older now.

Pisha-Duffly says she tries to be adaptable to change and looks for positive opportunities. She participated in the James Beard Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership program, and looks to those connections and friendships as “a group of leaders to ask for advice and bounce ideas off.” She’s also become more conservative with money. “We have savings goals that are definitely more aggressive than they were pre-COVID, and we are much more strategic in our spending and budgeting than we ever have been in the past,” she says. “We used to shoot from the hip a lot more and that no longer feels comfortable to me.”

But Stieber says it’s difficult to plan for a hypothetical future crisis when just keeping the lights on is hard enough. “If I could build up extra savings for anything I’d be happy. That’s impossible in restaurants realistically, at least ones that aren’t rip-off cash cow concepts. We haven’t put anything proactive in place because I’m not sure what we can do, there’s no way to just magically make and save more money,” he says. “When a disaster hits, all we can do is react and adjust as quickly as possible and hope there’s some governmental support financially.”

Both point to larger industry issues getting in the way of restaurants being able to weather literal and metaphorical storms. The COVID pandemic made the lack of a national sick leave policy and low industry wages urgent issues. It seemed like finally the country would be forced to change, but those conversations never materialized into long-term action. There is still no national sick leave policy, no universal child care or parental leave, and minimum wage — especially for tipped workers — doesn’t cover rent anywhere in the country. Restaurant rents keep increasing. An individual restaurant implementing a generous sick leave policy or trying to pay staff a living wage doesn’t create a safety net for the whole business if they have to shut down for months. “If COVID [lockdowns] happened tomorrow, it would be a huge disaster,” says Pisha-Duffly. “I don’t think we’ve had the opportunity to put all of those learnings into practice as an industry.”

Change remains the only constant for everyone. Leland offers events like butchery classes, vermouth tastings, and special holiday menus, responding to what diners seem excited about. Water Bear Bar consistently changes the menu based on the interests and skill set of its bartenders.

Maybe these restaurants are more comfortable with uncertainty, or maybe their spidey senses would tingle a little bit earlier if something bad seemed to be approaching. But you can’t pivot to takeout if your restaurant burns down. You can’t pop-up if there’s no running water. Under every story of resilience and quick thinking is the fact that these businesses and workers should not have had to fight so hard, including risking actual illness and death, to stay afloat. There are lessons to be learned about staying nimble and embracing chaos. But at a certain point, there’s no substitute for a safety net.