1 year later: Did COVID-19 cause as many restaurant closures in North Texas as expected?

In the year since the coronavirus pandemic forced the closure of dining rooms in North Texas on March 17, 2020, restaurant owners like Vicki Cisneros and her staff members have faced incredible sadness. A set of siblings who work for Cisneros’ Tex-Mex restaurant Los Vaqueros in Fort Worth experienced the deaths of their mother, father, two aunts and an uncle in one month.

A woman who made salsa for the restaurant — she lovingly “prayed over the salsa every day,” Cisneros says — was another deep loss for the restaurant when she died from COVID-19 in February.

Each week for a year, the restaurant shouldered new challenges, some that seemed insurmountable, Cisneros says. She gave rent money to Los Vaqueros workers who needed it, and she opened her office to employees’ kids who didn’t have internet at home for virtual learning. She moved one of her restaurants to a new, smaller location to save money.

Through it all, Cisneros and her family did not lose their three restaurants. Some days, it seems like a miracle.

“Restaurant people are stubborn. We will dig in probably when we shouldn’t. We will keep on when we probably shouldn’t. But at the end of the day, we’ll make it through,” she says. Two rounds of federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) money totaling just under $900,000 kept the businesses afloat during the most challenging year in Cisneros’ 38 years working in restaurants.

But the financial blow of the past year might haunt Los Vaqueros for some time.

“There were days where I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, are we going to lose everything we’ve worked so hard for?’” Cisneros says. “And then, I thought: ‘No way. People have to eat. We’re going to figure this out one way or the other.’”

The Texas Restaurant Association estimates that 2,500 restaurants in North Texas closed because of pandemic challenges. Restaurant closures included the 95-year-old Highland Park Cafeteria and the iconic Five Sixty by Wolfgang Puck at the top of Reunion Tower.

But restaurants across North Texas fared better than forecasted.

In 2020, the TRA predicted that as many as 30% of independently owned restaurants could fail statewide. North Texas lost about 18% of the 14,000 restaurants in Dallas, Fort Worth and Arlington cited by 2019 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Closures in North Texas were not as widespread as in other regions. About 22% of the state’s 50,000 restaurants closed, says TRA president and CEO Emily Williams Knight.

New York, California and Illinois saw more devastating restaurant closures than Texas did, Knight says.

“I am hopeful,” she says of the months to come. “But it’s really hard not to reflect on the number of restaurants that closed, at no fault of their own. These were not new restaurants. In many cases, these were legacy restaurants, the mom-and-pop restaurants. Ones that can’t be replaced.”

Why some restaurants failed

As dining rooms were shutting down in mid-March 2020, Fort Worth chef Tim Love delivered a blow that exposed the extreme vulnerability of restaurants: “Those who own two [restaurants] need to focus on one,” he said back then. Knight called the impending pandemic “catastrophic.” They were both right.

Overwhelmingly, the greatest challenge restaurant owners faced is that they didn’t have the cash reserves to keep them afloat in a crisis that could last weeks, months or — as we see now — an entire year.

“There was relief that came, but it didn’t come fast enough,” Love says, speaking of federal PPP money, which he and thousands of other restaurant owners in Texas were able to secure.

Jon Bonnell, executive chef and owner of four restaurants in Fort Worth, says lack of savings was the biggest problem.

“Very few restaurants ever put money away,” Bonnell says. Any leftover cash is often spent on upkeep.

“Everything could be going just fine, and then an $8,000 oven needs to be replaced,” Bonnell says. “Imagine how many steaks it takes to replace an $8,000 oven.”

For many restaurant owners in Texas, early 2020 felt like an elevator ride headed up, up, up. Then it plunged.

“We were headed into spring, with March Madness with our brand-new sports bar. And catering out the wazoo,” Bonnell says. “We had all the graduation reservations ready to go, then wedding season, then charity events. The calendar was just packed. The first week of March, 100% of that disappeared.

“It hit harder than most people realized, in a business that is cash starved.”

Bonnell called an emergency meeting at Waters Restaurant one day in early March. “I said: ‘I’m sorry guys, I wish I had a better way to say this. I’m going to fire everybody except four people. We don’t have the ability to stay open anymore.’” He had the same conversation that day at his other three restaurants: Bonnell’s Fine Texas Cuisine and two Buffalo Bros. sports bars.

Bonnell furloughed 234 people that day.

‘What saved us’

As the coronavirus continued to stir confusion and concern among restaurant owners and diners, Bonnell became a de facto information-sharer for restaurateurs, civic leaders and other businesspeople. He had a good line of communication to Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price and to Sen. John Cornyn’s office, and the group — which largely communicates via email — has now grown to 160 people.

Bonnell’s early answer to the dining room shutdown was to sell “family four-packs” for $40. The idea was to serve a high volume of people for a low price. But it meant Bonnell had to forget about fine-dining food for the moment.

“I don’t think anybody in this city needs tenderloin and lobster and oysters on the half shell,” he told his staff in March 2020. “I was crying when I said it.”

One of the earliest family four-packs from Bonnell’s was barbecue: brisket, sausage, mac and cheese, salad and brownies, for $40. The company sold all 150 dinners, which fed 600 people.

And then he kept doing it. “The line kind of got to be a fun place to be,” Bonnell says. Some would even show up three hours early and watch movies on an iPad or get out and play Frisbee.

The tips were big enough that he was able to pay his furloughed employees for 2 1/2 months. “That’s just people coming to the curb with a $100 bill for a $40 tab,” he says.

Cisneros’ team got creative, too, and that’s “what saved us,” she says. Los Vaqueros started doing pop-up dinners in neighborhoods, thinking that if customers couldn’t come into the restaurant, the restaurant would come to them.

“When we’d pull up, people would start clapping,” she says. They’d make $5,000 or so each evening — which was only 5% of what the three restaurants might have made on a typical Saturday night, combined. But it was something.

“When we would do something like that, I would feel great. But I have to tell you, I would go home at night and we would worry,” she says. “It was a constant worry to try to find another stream of revenue.”

Could 2021 be ‘one of the best financial years for restaurants’ in a generation?

Love estimates that he lost “a little under $1 million” during the pandemic. His managers took a reduced salary but were able to keep their insurance. He cut 342 people from the payroll among his 14 restaurants.

Love has since hired back about 300 people. In November 2020, he realized it was time to stop playing defense.

“It’s not the new normal. This is normal,” he says. And so, he’s thinking positively: The company is opening a hotel near Gemelle in Fort Worth next month; he’ll open a few concepts in the Fort Worth Stockyards after that.

And are better times ahead?

“We’ve said it a bunch of times: Surely, it can’t get worse. But then we have the snowpocalypse [in February],” Love says. “It’s almost comical now. But I do think it’s going to be better because people want it to be better. ... I personally think spring and summer will be epic.”

Bonnell and Knight agree. Knight says convention traffic in downtown Dallas could take up to three years to recover. But “game-changer” medicine like the Johnson & Johnson one-and-you’re-done vaccine, plus the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, which includes $28.6 billion for restaurants, signals a recovery is near, Knight says.

Bonnell has already had customers ask to save dates for graduation parties, weddings and other catering events in 2021 — events that, in the past, have made up to a third of the sales for Bonnell’s Restaurant Group.

“Once we really do feel safe [from the virus],” Bonnell says, “I think it’ll be the most liberating and one of the best financial years for restaurants since I’ve started this business.”

For more food news, follow Sarah Blaskovich on Twitter at @sblaskovich.