A firsthand look at the struggle of independent restaurants amid COVID-19.
By Hannah Withers
MAXINE’S: The pandemic forced owners and married couple Hannah Withers and Ben Gitchel to close the doors of the beloved Fayetteville watering hole six days before its 70th anniversary.
I used to be a restaurant and bar owner. I might still be. The next few years will tell. At the moment I’m some kind of version of a mutual aid community organizer, social worker and one of the thousands of Arkansans on unemployment.
Because of COVID-19, we closed the doors of Maxine’s Tap Room in Fayetteville on March 12, six days before the 70th anniversary of when Maxine Miller opened the place. We know why bars, music venues and restaurants are the first to close and last to reopen. We create these places to be intimate on purpose, but intimacy does not work in a pandemic. My husband, Ben Gitchel, and I also closed our restaurant, Leverett Lounge, the same night with concerns about the safety of our staff and guests. This is grindingly against the grain of what every small business owner learns to become: the person who has the solution to anything that can potentially come up. We have trained ourselves to be ready for anything. But not this.
A report by the Independent Restaurant Coalition found that 85 percent of independent restaurants won’t survive the pandemic. EIGHTY. FIVE. PERCENT. It does not even sound real to me to say out loud. This industry shines with all things that represent each of our little bubbles of culture in our cities and towns. More than three quarters of them will just go up in a poof of unpaid bills and bankruptcy and broken leases. We already have a ticking list of the 20 places that are loved by friends that have permanently closed in my neighborhood. They have packed up and shut off utilities and are waiting for someone to have an answer about what we do next.
My husband and I both started in restaurants in our teens. I wanted to save for a car and got a two-night-per-week job as a hostess at a local neighborhood restaurant a few blocks from my high school. I’ve worked in mostly independent coffee shops, fine dining restaurants and college town and neighborhood joints for over 30 years now, and somehow it’s woven into some kind of a couples career that my husband and I do together as partners, as friends and as co-workers.
The places where I’ve always loved to eat and drink are more than just places to visit. They’re community cornerstones. They’re places that remember my name and regular order. They’re special. You can tell the difference between “just a restaurant” and these eateries and watering holes by the details in the space, or the local art on the walls, or the way the staff talks to you. When you’re in a local business that someone has poured their life into, and their life is deeply relevant in their community, there’s a tangible sense of them being part of what creates that town. It’s glaringly obvious that you are now some small part of what they’re doing: You are engaged not only in their space, but have also been invited into their community. One can tell that the owners are woven into the fabric of the neighborhood where they built this space. You can somehow sense the ads they buy in their local high school theater programs, or the fundraisers for local politicians they host, and the farmers and wineries and breweries they support.
We know parents of kids who worked for us a decade and a half ago who have brought us champagne and thanked us for teaching their kids how to work in our bakery. Ben and I have establishments that work as a community gear in our once well-oiled Fayetteville machine, and my radar is turned up high for places in other cities and regions that do the same. Building spaces that deeply resound with the public is a crafted art that I didn’t know existed when I started in this industry. But now that part of creating spaces has become a deep part of who I am. We spend the majority of our time training our teams of humans to be hospitable and execute the visions of inclusion and duplicate our quality standard of service and experience. We teach them by example that this isn’t just a job. But if they really care and are truly proud of their work, they will do well and make a good living.
We decided to close our doors five days before our state asked us to. We stood at the door of Maxine’s Taproom on that Saturday night, while we monitored the required 50 percent occupancy restriction. We watched as folks got a few extra drinks in them and all the social guards of our happy hour crowd (who were cautiously mentioning that night out as their last hurrah until they were heading into quarantine) started to melt away. People were kissing each other goodbye, hugging strangers they had just met, and we watched what has always been a space designed for intimacy become a Petri dish that was obviously a health hazard by contagion standards.
We immediately flipped our restaurant space in March into a food community center for unemployed restaurant people. We have fed, to this date, almost 5,000 people who have lost their jobs and had their lives upended somewhere in the shuffle of COVID. We asked our amazingly giving community members, who love our places, to foot the bill. We partnered with our newly formed independent restaurant alliance and supplied grocery boxes for food-insecure folks in our industry. A couple we love, who are regulars at our restaurant and own a farm outside town, started bringing all their fresh farm eggs and slaughtered a steer for us. More friends who own bakeries and cheese shops and gardens started donating products. Social worker friends dropped off boxes of tampons and toothpaste. We became what our government was not prepared to supply: a one-stop shop for our people who were in immediate and unexpected need. We supplied unemployment applications while the Workforce Services website was down an unbearingly long amount of time. I’ve heard Tom Colicchio (Top Chef, owner of Craft, Witchcraft) speak numerous times recently as a hospitality activist about shifting our industry into the epicenter of feeding the unemployed, at the tab of the federal and state government. It is a brilliant idea that would keep our people employed and off unemployment and give us an opportunity to float our businesses and do what we do best: feed. But we don’t have state or federal leadership thinking out of the box these days, let alone for an industry that has long been considered the red-headed stepchild of the economy. We employ 15 million people in restaurants in our country, two times more than the airline industry (which has received multiple government bailouts) employs GLOBALLY.
I cringe when I think about the over $80,000 we’ve spent to keep current our permits, insurance policies, taxes, and payroll taxes on our PPP loan, and all the other odds and ends to keep two places standing so we can, we hope, come back to them. I have zero idea how we scraped that together. It is considerably more than our household makes in a year when we are operating at full tilt.
This improper and lackluster response is another nail in the coffin of the hospitality funeral procession. While friends who have owned restaurants for 30 years are now doing dishes 60 hours a week to cut labor costs, and talented chefs are hunched over tinfoil containers for family pack meals, most of the places I’m in the know of are running 15-35 percent of their sales. The clock was ticking on all of us this summer as we waited for the unemployment timeline to run out July 31. We will have to reopen in August, whether or not our tiny places are safe to operate. We risk losing 22 employees who are our family. We risk losing our home. We risk losing everything. We’ve broken bones, worked years in a row without a day off, and put as much time into our businesses per week as we did raising our own child. We will be choosing our economic health over our physical health, and operating on a slimmer staff and with no profits to be made. Just to keep our spaces here in case it ever goes back to normal.
We try and put our fingers in our ears when someone mentions “the next wave of COVID.” We don’t have an option for shutdown that next round. We will have to work through it.
The classism that has been exposed by this virus shocked me. I’ve never realized how much more financial cushion other people have. My friends who are working from home on their computers indefinitely are in a position that I can’t relate to. Their jobs are intact, their income never faltered, and they can do grocery pickup all day long, and not eat out and mourn the days that they used to go boutique shopping. I acknowledge my own privilege in our luck on a PPP loan, and a little savings, and over 400 community members that pitched in to help us feed 5,000 people. I know we are better off than a lot of small businesses I know. We have a network we created through texting for mental health checks with over 40 small restaurant owners. They are tired. And reconfiguring a business model under massive financial strain in a consumer market that is almost nonexistent. They are not OK.
I sit here in our empty dark bar and pour myself a cocktail, and we have just finished assembling 100 cocktail kits that our friends from a liquor store are selling for us, because standalone bars were left off the list of emergency executive orders to expand outdoor service areas, or to-go/curbside sales. We cooked a four-course, healthy meal for 125 unemployed people for 12 hours today with a combination of donated ingredients and a little cash flow from donors who live in our town. We are doing circus tricks with our monthly budget while we balance the mental health of our staffs and ourselves and many in our industry. I’m thinking of countries that enacted rent and mortgage moratoriums, and countries who put the public health of their communities before their economies. Ours is not one of them. In our country many states are handling safety requirements successfully. Arkansas is not one of them. Many industries will come out of this with new safe, innovative ways they’ve evolved. The world of small shops and downtown business culture is not one of those.
Hannah Withers is the co-owner of Maxine’s Tap Room and Leverett Lounge in Fayetteville.