Caitlin Suemnicht, chief operating officer of Madison’s Food Fight restaurant group, described the last year as figuring out “how we can lose the least amount of money possible.”
Suemnicht was part of Tuesday night’s 90-minute livestream panel discussion, “Restaurants Now and In the Future,” that also featured Craig Culver, founder of Culver’s; Kim Ruhl, an economics professor at UW-Madison; and Gabriel Stulman, UW-Madison alumnus and a high-profile New York City restaurateur who founded the Happy Cooking Hospitality group of restaurants (better known as “Little Wisco”) there. Moderated by Mike Knetter, president and CEO of the UW Foundation, the panel was part of the UW Alumni Association’s “Wisconsin Now” series. Interest in the program was high, with more than 500 viewers of the livestream. (A recording of the panel is available on YouTube.)
Suemnicht, Stulman and Culver all described the sudden, wrenching, devastating restaurant shutdown of last March in gripping terms, almost as if they had been hit by a tsunami. None were immediately prepared to “pivot” — a term Stulman and Suemnicht confessed to being sick and tired of hearing.
The sudden switch to takeout-only was difficult for the primarily eat-in restaurants overseen by Suemnicht and Stulman. Suemnicht described the scramble to find not only enough takeout containers but also PPE, cleaning supplies, masks — the same things everyone in the country was looking for last spring.
Craig Culver was at his home in Arizona when the shutdown of dining rooms started. His immediate feeling was “panic,” but he realized the chain was well positioned due to its drive-through capabilities.
Where Culver’s was lagging, however, was in online ordering. At that time, Culver said, only 19 of some 796 Culver’s had online ordering. “We got caught,” says Culver. “We were not ready as far as innovation and technology.” And that resulted in very long lines (sometimes out the parking lot and down roads) at some Culver’s drive-throughs through the spring and summer.
Now, most Culver’s locations do have online ordering, Culver said. (There is still no Culver’s app, as one commenter noted during the livestream.) Culver said sales for 2020 were up four percent and the chain added about 50 new locations.
In New York, it was “hard full stop, you can’t do anything,” Stulman remembered. “We were eventually allowed to do delivery.” Stulman’s challenge in New York City was trying to get a takeout operation running when New York “before the pandemic already had a saturation of delivery options” and then suddenly every other sit-down restaurant was also trying to do delivery: “You were in a sea of gray noise.” Meanwhile, customers were scarce: “The most affluent New Yorkers fled to their second homes.”
Stulman, recently featured in an article in The New Yorker about the future of the restaurant industry in the city, is emerging as a “voice of advocacy” as he put it. “I’ve taken this pandemic as a call to arms,” he said. “How can I be an actor for change and progress?”
Stulman has closed five of his nine restaurants permanently and is still operating three; he hopes to reopen a fourth soon. (In the New Yorker article, he suggested survival of those came down to rent: “Nice landlord? Good for you. Tough landlord? Good luck.”)
It will be necessary to challenge the government to advocate for the restaurant industry, Stulman said: “I believe our governments on a city level, on a state level, and especially on a federal level, utterly failed the restaurant industry.” Stulman said the restaurant industry needed and needs a targeted bailout, comparing the dollars generated and the number of persons employed by restaurants to other industries that historically have received bailouts. The $25 billion Restaurant Revitalization Fund legislation passed by the House and currently in the Senate is welcome and needed, he said, but it is “a drop in the bucket and it is late.”
Stulman also noted that insurance companies have not delivered on business interruption claims; “That is a scam in and of itself that needs its own inquiry.”
The most contentious discussion came in the Q & A portion of the evening, with a spirited debate of the $15 minimum wage that was not directly COVID-related. In New York, Stulman is already paying $15 an hour and is in favor of a federal minimum wage, but Culver, whose chain employs many high-schoolers in their first jobs, thought that $15 could be too high for them, as well as saying the minimum wage should be left to states, because the cost of living can vary so greatly in different areas.
Despite the struggles of the last year, panelists were optimistic about the future. Suemnicht pointed to an increase in customers over the last several weeks, and Dane County’s announcement of the increase in the capacity limits inside restaurants to 50 percent, even though that doesn’t always change practical capacity in some rooms since tables still need to be six feet apart. But it’s “giving people confidence,” she noted.
Culver sees a lingering lack of customer confidence in indoor dining and thinks it could take the rest of the year to come back.
Stulman is optimistic. “I think spring and summer is going to be amazing,” he said.
“I think about the Roaring '20s of the 1900s; I think we’re going to be the Roaring '20s of the 2000s. I think the food and beverage and hospitality industry in the next 10 years is going to be electric.”
