When asked how business was going at his downtown Neopolitan Italian restaurant Partenope, still in its first year of operation, chef and co-owner Dino Santonicola’s answer was to the point — “I have one word for you: bad.”
Downtown Dallas restaurants were given a one-two punch by the pandemic and largely peaceful protests in May that for at least one night turned destructive. Today, with few visitors coming to the historic commercial center, some restaurants are at risk of closing while others work to recuperate.
Santonicola opened Partenope, his first restaurant, in the Titche-Goettinger building on Main Street after seven years of working as the pizza director at Jay Jerrier’s hit pizzeria chain Cane Rosso. Owning a restaurant was something the Italian-born chef had dreamed of since he was 13, as he told The Dallas Morning News for the story on the restaurant’s opening. He strategically chose downtown Dallas for the location of his restaurant because, as he says, before March, “downtown Dallas was at its peak.”
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the flourishing commerce of Dallas had the world’s attention. In October 2018, Esquire Singapore warned other “heavyweight” cities about a “thriving metropolis keen to take a meaty slice out of their tourism share.” Dallas is described as “booming” with “unique entertainment options, plush hotels, big portions and good ol’ fashioned American charm.”
The next year, Visit Dallas’ 2019 annual report recorded 27.7 million visitors, a group that spent $5.2 billion while here. The majority of visitors came for conventions, business meetings and vacations, and 54% of them stayed in hotels, including the most historic ones in downtown Dallas. Visitors most certainly visited spots the Esquire article recommended: The Statler; the French Room’s bar; Bullion, now a to-go restaurant selling COVID-19 tests; and Mirador, once a fine dining restaurant, now a special event space.
Dallas’ suitability for conventions has been consistently lauded by Cvent, a global meeting and event management provider that ranked Dallas as No. 5 on its Top 50 Meeting Destinations in the United States in 2019 — the only Texas city included. In 2018, Dallas was previously in the top 10 at No. 6.
Added to tourist and convention traffic on any given night downtown were sports fans and concertgoers drifting over from American Airlines Center.
Now there are far fewer hotel guests, no sports games or concerts, and scarcely any office workers, leaving downtown restaurants relying on residents and intrepid diners to stay open.
“I used to get phone calls asking, ‘Where can I park?’ Now, people are calling to ask, ‘Is it safe down there?’ ” Santonicola says.
His PPP money is “long gone.” He’s reduced the staff to five while he works 14-hour shifts five days a week to try to keep his dream alive. If something doesn’t turn soon, Santonicola says he’ll “really have no choice but to walk away.”
In an attempt to raise awareness of the plight of independent restaurants, he includes a SaveRestaurants.com flyer with every to-go order. “The little guy? They’re suffering,” Santonicola adds.
On the bright side, he likes to tell people, “Now is the best time to come to downtown Dallas. There is parking everywhere.”
More “little guys”
Another independent restaurateur, Beau Nazary, owns the 24-year-old Mediterranean restaurant Cafe Izmir. He opened the restaurant’s second location downtown on the corner of Ervay and Pacific in 2016. He says that before March, the lunch crowd along with catered office lunches were the restaurant’s “bread and butter.” In a typical hour and a half on weekdays, he was able to count on serving approximately 200 people his Persian mother’s famous hummus and tapas.
Worsening the loss of the office lunch crowd, Nazary’s downtown location suffered considerable damage on May 29 after the protests. At the time he was guarding his own downtown apartment, he received a call that people were busting out windows at his restaurant. Armed with a gun, he went to defend against further theft and destruction until the next morning.
With multiple windows broken and a dashed stock of wine and liquor, Nazary estimates $10,000 in damages from that night and says he is “90% sure” he will not reopen the downtown location. His employees are gone, and he will not be restocking the kitchen. As he says: “Downtown is dead. This virus is not going to be over for at least another eight to nine months.”
His focus is on sustaining to-go orders at the original Greenville location, where due to its small size, he is waiting to resume dine-in service until permissible restaurant capacity is at 100%.
Dude, Sweet Chocolate owner Katherine Clapner echoes Santonicola and Nazary about the loss of a “viable weekday business.” The windows of her Main Street shop were also broken the night of May 29, but fortunately for her, Headington Companies, which owns 1604 Main Street, paid for her repairs.
Of the protests, she says, “I agree with safe protesting, but we got hit with anger. And I get it — they should be angry.”
After cleaning up with the help of volunteers, she reopened the shop but closed again shortly afterward due to lack of business. This month, she’s trying again with preorders and pick-up on Fridays through Sundays.
Downtown’s biggest obstacle today, as she sees it, is the lack of foot traffic due to racing and scooters that overtake the streets at night. The fact that so many businesses remain closed has created wide open streets that one resident described as a “literal playground.”
“The protests were a hiccup” and not the source of the problems present today, Clapner says. In her view, what downtown needs is people walking around again. “Places have to be open. If only half of us are open and the other half are not, it’s really difficult. And if we’re going to have a tourist area, visitors are going to have to feel safe.”
Dallas Police Department’s media relations team did not respond to a request for comment on street racing or scooters violating traffic rules.
Corporately owned restaurants
Though still facing challenges, corporate-owned restaurants provide a slightly more positive recovery report.
Kevin Lillis, the CEO of Hospitality Alliance, says business at Jaxon Texas Kitchen & Beer Garden has “generally continued to grow each week” since reopening. The busy periods have simply flipped from weekday lunches and happy hours to dinners and weekend brunches.
Hospitality Alliance was the company hired by AT&T to install Jaxon Texas Kitchen in the AT&T Discovery District as part of a hefty campus improvement project. Lillis attributes Jaxon’s success to an approachable menu with sandwiches, salads and barbecue, as well as the restaurant’s expansive outdoor space that includes a wide second-floor porch.
Lillis reports there have been “frequent protests,” partly due to the restaurant’s proximity to City Hall and police headquarters, but that the majority of interactions have been positive and have “opened an important dialogue.”
“We’re happy to be a haven of sorts for people coping in an extremely difficult time — so the challenge is trying to protect that experience for our guests while respecting the protesters’ message and rights to express that message.”
Miriam Jimenez, who partnered with mega-restaurateur Shannon Wynne to open Miriam Cocina Latina across from Klyde Warren Park, says business has been “up and down” since reopening on May 1. The main entry door of the restaurant was broken on the first night of protests, costing $3,000, but she is working to attract customers back downtown with drink promotions and margarita kits to-go.
In order to return to steady business again, she says guests need to feel confident they can have an enjoyable time in a clean and socially distanced environment.
DRG Concepts, which owns downtown’s Wild Salsa, Chop House Burger and Dallas Fish Market, is keeping eight of their nine full-service dining locations closed. Only Chop House Burger is operating with curbside pickup and delivery.
Nafees Alam, CEO of DRG Concepts, says in order to feel confident about a reopening plan, there will need to be a “very full containment of the virus.”
A State of the Market report by Downtown Dallas, Inc. states that the impact to the hospitality operators downtown from the pandemic has been “significant” but short-term. “Longer impacts to the industry at large will be influenced by the speed of the overall market rebound fueled by a rapid stabilization in public health,” the report states.
“We ALL have to do our part to make that happen,” says Lillis of Hospitality Alliance. “We have to wear masks when we can’t socially distance (and even when we can), respect the fact that we’re part of a larger community and something bigger than ourselves. And ultimately, we all just have to take this seriously. The sooner we do that, the sooner we’re back to ‘normal.’”
