At the beginning of 2020, San Francisco chef Anthony Strong had just finished celebrating the one-year anniversary of his local fine-dining restaurant, Prairie. Little did he realize, there wouldn't be another commemoration and the year ahead would force him into one of the most "crushing" decisions of his life.
He had spent months pulling 100-hour workweeks, hustling to build the fledgling restaurant's reputation and skating along razor-thin margins, but Prairie was steadily gaining a loyal following. Strong was beginning to feel more confident about the long-term success of the 80-seat restaurant at 3431 19th St. in San Francisco's Mission District, a neighborhood with Michelin-starred, highly acclaimed restaurants.
Then, like hundreds of thousands of restaurateurs across the country and around the world, Strong's day-to-day challenges of running a restaurant were drowned out by a new reality: the coronavirus pandemic.
"After designing and building out the restaurant I wanted, I had no cushion or money left," Strong said. "Then the pandemic hit and I thought, 'What the hell am I going to do?' We were like every other restaurant in having to contend with what we had to do to survive, so I had to come up with some kind of Hail Mary shot."
For Strong, who categorizes himself as "foolishly optimistic," he decided in the early weeks of San Francisco's stay-home order to spend more than $10,000 in an attempt to pivot Prairie into a grab-and-go general store.
Since the virus's outbreak in mid-March, rolling shutdowns, ongoing capacity restrictions and dwindling margins have thrown restaurants across the United States into upheaval. An estimated 1 in 6, or about 100,000 businesses, are estimated to close before the end of the year, according to data from industry lobbying group the National Restaurant Association.
Restaurants are on track to collectively lose about $240 billion by the end of 2020 and, with no clarity on if and when things will begin to rebound, an increasing number of operators are throwing in the towel.
"I traded one business model that was difficult to run and with low margins that I sort of understood, restaurants, for one I'm completely clueless about with even worse margins, grocery," Strong said of stocking up on pasta sauces, canned tuna and other shelf-stable goods he had never thought to order before. "It sounded like grocery stores were overwhelmed, so we thought we'd throw it at the wall to see if it stuck. And for a short period of time, it did."
At the time, Strong said he saw that grocery store shelves were empty, lines were stretching around the block and it appeared to be a potential revenue stream as business in the restaurant had come to a standstill.
Between April and the early summer months, Strong said, there was even a short window of time when sales were beating those he would normally make in covers, or meals served, if the restaurant was operating normally. However, once grocery stores were able to iron out their initial supply chain challenges, the picture for Prairie began to darken once again.
"By the time I started to figure out how to do it, that's when the grocery and supply chain for retail caught up and things for us took a nosedive," the chef said. "This Hail Mary shot that seemed to be saving us at the beginning ended up biting us." He said that around the start of summer, "I had to start taking a hard look at things and face the music."
By August, Strong decided to close Prairie for good. The chef said that after a period of denial, hours of challenging conversations with his accountants and landlords, and the realization that he hadn't paid himself in more than a year, he came to terms with the fact that as a very new restaurant, Prairie was especially vulnerable to any small hiccup, let alone a global pandemic.
"It was crushing, but also a good decision made at the right time," he said, adding that even if there was a way to withstand another few months of depressed business, the industry's long-term outlook is simply too unclear.
"How would I be able to get by on 25% capacity while I'm deferring rent and having to pay it off eventually?" he said. "In a restaurant, even when you're throwing down at max capacity, your margins are razor, razor thin. That's unfortunately made doing business, especially in San Francisco, even tougher."
With the dining tables empty and another tenant lined up to take the space, Strong has shifted his attention to the private dining business and even purchased a 1980s Volkswagen van to provide intimate, socially distant dinner events.
It means avoiding the high costs associated with employing a 30-person staff or leasing prime street-front space. For now, at least, it's given him the chance to keep cooking and satiate diners' appetite for safe but still memorable experiences.
"Would I ever open a restaurant again? Sure, I'm that foolish," Strong said. "I have no idea how to make it happen right now." But in the future? "Yes."