Restaurant Closings Inflict Collateral Damage on Other Businesses

Mark and Kerry Marhefka were feeling optimistic about the future of their 15-year-old business, Abundant Seafood, when they opened their first processing plant this month in North Charleston, S.C.

Mr. Marhefka catches vermilion snapper, triggerfish, banded runnerfish and several kinds of grouper on two-hook lines he drops into the Atlantic from the side of his 39-foot boat. He and his wife, Kerry, sell those fish directly to some of the most acclaimed restaurants in the Southeast — Husk, Fig and the Ordinary in Charleston, for instance, and the Grey in Savannah, Ga.

The fish are sold whole. This has held back their company’s growth because few restaurants have a cook who knows how to clean and cut fish. The new plant, built with money the Marhefkas had put aside over the years, was going to change that. They hired eight people to carve fillets, clean whole fish that could go straight on the grill, pack seafood orders or to work in a small retail shop out front. Their first day was March 15.

A few have closed for now, wondering how long it will be before it is safe again for people to eat and drink together. As local and federal governments debate measures to help the economy, they are watching to see when relief will come, what form it might take and whether any of it will reach them.

Orwashers Bakery, one of the handful of independently owned bakeries in New York City that sells fresh bread to restaurants, has already laid off 20 of its 110 employees. Wholesale revenue, most of it from restaurants and the distributors that supply them, “was the economic engine of the whole company,” Keith Cohen, the owner, said. Since early March, he said, “it has been in a progressive downward spiral.”

In any other week, Orwashers would have been making daily deliveries of its tender but sturdy hamburger buns to restaurants like Upland, Superiority Burger and the Dutch. Its Rustica and Campagna loaves, familiar by sight if not by name to many New Yorkers, would have been waiting at restaurant doors in the morning.

A few fast-casual lunch spots, including By Chloe, Chopt and Fresh&co, are still serving some Orwashers bread to their pickup and delivery customers. Many of their locations, though, cater heavily to office workers who have now been ordered to stay at home.

For many vendors, the closings could not have come at a worse time of year. January and February are two of the slowest months for eating out. New spending lags, and old invoices aren’t paid even at the end of the 30-day terms that most restaurants demand.

It’s the nature of the beast,” Mr. Cohen said. “So as a small wholesaler, you get killed.”

Outside the wholesale business, Orwashers sells bread at local farmers’ markets and in stores, including two of its own. Mr. Cohen is throwing all his energy into retail now, like many others who deal in edible products.

So is Jason Salvo, who grows vegetables on 15 acres of Snoqualmie River Valley farmland east of Seattle, in Duvall, Wash.

Last year about 100 Seattle restaurants bought produce from his farm, Local Roots. With almost all them closed for now, the arugula, radishes, spinach and other plants that he seeded in the ground on Sunday will probably end up in the boxes he sends out each week to summer members of his C.S.A. (for community supported agriculture). Already he is overwhelmed by subscription requests from people who are cooking more than they ever have before.

On a far larger scale, wholesale vendors at Eastern Market in Detroit are storing case after case of unsold vegetables. They are fresh now, but won’t stay that way for long. Daniel S. Carmody, the president of the nonprofit group that runs the market, said that one vendor held a total produce inventory at the end of last week worth $850,000, which was almost the same as at the start of the week. Another is sitting on 20,000 pounds of broccoli.

On Tuesday, the market held a drive-through sale, which Mr. Carmody called “the first of a set of experiments to make it easier to get food without human contact.” Retail shoppers could select cases of produce from a form. Boxes filled with 20 pounds of avocados, two dozen heads of lettuce, 50 pounds of potatoes, among other things, were loaded into car trunks and payments were taken by a mobile credit-card-processing unit.

“Part of the challenge is how to get the supply where it’s needed, because it’s shifted so dramatically,” he said.

As she fielded the phone calls and emails canceling orders that equaled 95 percent of her business, she imagined the sales pitches she could make to people now working from home.

“ ‘Treat yourself to flowers,’ ‘White glove delivery,’ where it just gets dropped on your front step,” she said. “Or plant delivery: ‘Turn your brown thumb into a green thumb.’ ”

Almost as soon as that hope occurred to her, it collapsed. “No one is going to want these things in this time,” Ms. Shouse said.

In any another year, Bottle & Branch would have hired 10 or so seasonal workers last week to get ready for “patio season.” Instead she put nine of her year-round employees on furlough — unpaid leave — and put the 10th on part-time status. She said that Chicago’s two wholesale flower markets, where the salespeople work on commission, had been brought to a virtual standstill when the restaurant trade died.

“We went from spending $4,000 a week with one salesperson to nothing,” she said, “so that’s food right out of his mouth.”

Certain restaurant vendors are as busy as ever this month, not that they’re happy about the circumstances.

“I’ve become a therapist,” said Terence Hanley, whose hospitality accounting firm in Brooklyn serves more than 50 restaurants. “Weekends mean nothing now.”

Most chefs and restaurateurs ask him about the same few issues. “The number one concern is, can I take care of my people?” Mr. Hanley said. “And unfortunately, the answer is, no, you can’t. That was the first few horrible days. A couple of people are trying to give it a go with takeout and delivery with limited success, or no success at all.”

Jasmine Moy, an attorney in Manhattan who specializes in hospitality law, said in an email that she, too, had received “a barrage of inquiries” about layoffs. Her clients also had questions about paid sick leave and visas for workers from other countries.

Fielding these calls filled some of the time that used to be taken up in negotiating new restaurant deals. Last week and the week before, she said, about half of those deals “basically died on the spot.”

Ms. Moy said that once the urgent employee issues had been handled, she expected to spend the next few months in one of two ways. For restaurants that are reopening, she said, she will try to get rent abatements or deferrals. For the restaurants that go out of business for good, her job will be “the assignment of lease and sale of assets,” she said.

“I don’t have any idea at this point how many will fall into that bucket,” Ms. Moy added. “But hopefully they will be few and far between.”

source: nytimes.com