Now Is the Time to Start A New Restaurant
by Robert Mcgarvey
Call this the ultimate counterintuitive path to riches: right now, across the continent, tens of thousands of entrepreneurs are moving ahead with restaurant startups. Crazy? Maybe just crazy smart.
The crazy part is this: the country is littered with dead, closed restaurants, casualties of the pandemic. Food industry research firm Datassential has a gloomy obituary report. Its numbers show that 10.2% of all restaurants in the US closed permanently since the start of the pandemic when health policies in much of the country required restaurants to eliminate indoor dining. For many restaurants, that prompted them to shut down. Almost all had planned to re-open, but as the pandemic continued to play out — it’s now 15 months and counting — quite a few have just walked away from their leases. How many? Datassential says its count is 79,438 that have closed for good, and that’s as of late March.
Probably another 10,000 have closed since.
That’s why those who are jumping into new restaurants are thinking differently. The old playbook just won’t work today.