In The Spotlight: A restaurant’s journey to survive the pandemic, protests

Perhaps one of the worst impacted industries this year has been restaurant and hospitality services. By mid-March, executive orders and other official announcements mandated restaurants across the country to close down to the public but allowed takeout and delivery services. Many fast-food restaurants thrived – as they already had an alliance with delivery services, including Grubhub or Doordash – and continued to generate revenue. But for many dine-in restaurants, the transition wasn’t that easy.

These major and unprecedented changes left Edgar Villongco, the owner of the popular New York City cheese-focused restaurant Raclette in the East Village, at a loss of how to continue his business. But just when he started seeing a pickup in revenue, he said, the protests came along, forcing him to deal with damage – both outside and inside his restaurant – that added up to almost $1,000. In an interview, Villongco shed light on the struggles restaurant owners like him have grappled with in an attempt to keep their doors open.

Editor’s note: This interview has been slightly edited and condensed.

What happened to Raclette when New York City became the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States?

It was pretty sudden, the pandemic hit and at that time, California had closed down, Washington too and we knew that it was coming but people were still coming, we were still quite busy. And then, within one week, New York said that we were required to go to 50% capacity, which we did. So, we had one weekend when we were working at 50% capacity. And after that weekend, on that Monday, which I believe was the 16th of March, they abruptly said that by 7 p.m. that day, they were going to be requiring that all restaurants for dine-in close down. So, it was really from one day to the next.

When you say “they,” who are you referring to?

Actually, it was very unclear. We didn’t get any kind of email about the 50% capacity; we didn’t get any official stopping by or anything like that. We didn’t get a phone call, we just read about it in the general press and I consulted with some other restaurants around the area and they said: “yeah, apparently, this is a requirement.” But we were never actually communicated to until we did it voluntarily. And then there was, I think, a general communication by executive order that we were going to be required to close at 7 p.m. that Monday. And that one was also [communicated] through the grapevine, but we did research it on the web and there was an official communication on the web about that.

Well, we had to tell all of our employees that we weren’t going to need everyone the day after and that we would keep them updated on what the situation is and when we’d be allowed to open. And, basically [every restaurant] closed up that Monday. On Tuesday it was just myself, my chef, and one of our servers who came in and tried to gauge the situation of whether we could do takeout and delivery and so forth. So, the next day it was focused in planning.

Because you had never focused on doing delivery or takeout, how did this change affect you?

Those first couple of days we didn’t get any orders, we probably got one or two orders per day. It was mostly deliveries, but it was really very, very difficult. There were no orders coming in. We hadn’t planned anything; we didn’t have a takeout or delivery menu. We didn’t have any delivery services set up. The only reason that we decided to just not close and try to [continue working] was because we had several thousand dollars’ worth of food in our fridge that was going to spoil.

And at the same time, every morning, we would put out perishable items outside with a sign telling people in the community that they could just take whatever they needed. So we would put out a number of items that we thought really needed to go right away and said: “Take just what you need and leave only what you can.” And it was purely voluntary, but we just put a cup out there and a few people did put in a few dollars, but that wasn’t at the point of it. The point of it was just to try to not waste anything while providing some people they needed the food.

But it became really hard for us to get food supplies, fresh food supplies that we were getting before. We were still getting deliveries every day but there was a certain limit for deliveries from the supplier. So, we had to try to do our own shopping but, after that, the full lockdown went into effect where only essential employees were allowed to be outside. And that affected a lot of the ability of our staff; a lot of them live far away from New York City, we’re in Manhattan but a lot of them live in the Bronx and far out neighborhoods like Queens and Brooklyn. And so that really limited our resources in terms of labor.

And obviously because we weren’t set up for delivery and pickup, we hadn’t done any advanced marketing services. All of the restaurants that already had those kinds of services set up were doing a certain percentage [of orders] through those channels, and they had a huge advantage over us. They could just keep going and people knew about them. They were all off seamless and Grubhub and Caviar and Doordash and so forth while we weren’t. So, it was just very difficult to sit there and not get any orders and still have to prepare the food with a much-reduced labor force that we had. At the end, it just wasn’t really working so we tried different models and we started doing MealpPal but the margin of [benefit] was so small compared to the labor and the cost of goods that we had to invest, that it really wasn’t worth it for us. And now we are operating purely on a delivery and pickup model where people have to order in advance of one day and there’s a $30 minimum.

Do you have a specific plan about how Raclette will reopen again to the public?

We’re really looking forward to when we’re allowed to open, and we’re hoping [we will open for dining in] in mid-July. But, realistically, it’s going to be at the end of July. I know that on Monday, we in New York City will start with phase one of reopening, which is manufacturing and something else, I forget. And then phase two will begin two weeks after that, which is going to be retail and then phase three, which is where hotels and restaurants are going to be allowed to do a dining-in reopening will be after that. So, we’re looking at roughly four weeks from now.

Well as of now where we are open to the public with the stipulation that any orders placed today, they have to choose a window for pickup or delivery the next day or any time after the next day. We are operating on that basis. The only reason that we are not open for dining in is because of the order. But we’re prepared to do that, we have a plan in place and to get everyone back employed. We have the plan to keep everyone safe and a capacity control plan. Everything that’s going to be required by the health authorities we will comply with, and the health authorities obviously will require that all servers, kitchen workers, hosts and hostesses, and servers wear masks in order to protect our customers. And we will comply with the capacity constraints, which I don’t think they have officially come out with [yet], but we’re expecting to be at 50% capacity initially. On top of that, we’re going to be moving to a reservation only system where we don’t allow walk-ins and we don’t allow open-ended reservations. We’ll have a predetermined time slot on a beginning and an end time so that we can control exactly how many people are in the restaurant at the same time. And we’ll also schedule 30 minutes of disinfecting time in between dining slots. So, let’s say we have a seating from seven to nine, from nine to nine thirty we’ll have a cleaning and disinfecting period before we seat the next group of people. And we’ll also be putting up glass partitions between tables and we’re going to be cleaning the restroom after each use.

Do you have any concerns about opening up again?

In general, we are concerned that people will be a bit hesitant to come to restaurants and other venues because of what’s happened but what our main concern is that a lot of people are already relaxing the measures that they’re taking personally just to reduce the spread of the virus right now. And on top of that, with these mass gatherings with the protests and other things, it seems that people have largely forgotten about the pandemic. So, we’re afraid that the second spike in cases in New York City might just be a huge disaster for everyone involved, including our restaurant. That’s our main concern.

Has the opening plan for Raclette been affected since the protests started a week ago?

The protests were a setback for sure, but it wasn’t a major one. [Around that time last week] we were starting to pick up with the MealPal and with the pickup and delivery same day orders. We were starting to get some volume. But a few things happened: my chef had some financial crisis that she had to deal with and had to move to another house, which affected us in the sense that there was definitely zero help [in the restaurant] that I could rely on. So, we closed for that and when we started opening up slowly again for same day pickup and delivery, the protest started.

We got vandalized and we got looted. They smashed through our front door, which was a glass security door, and then they went in and they smashed our cash register. There was a television that was there that they also smashed. They went downstairs to get to the safe and they smashed a bunch of desks and chairs and things like that. The major part of the expense was the damage to the door. But that setback, although both physical and financial, wasn’t a major one. We did spend $900 for the cleanups that we had to pay out of pocket.

It was kind of like the accumulation of all the issues coming one after the other that really set us back and that made us want to say: “For now, we’re not going to do same day pickup and delivery. We’re going to go to a one-day advanced ordering model until we can make sure that we have the volume to go back to the old model.”

As a restaurant owner that has suffered damage, what’s your opinion on these protests affecting restaurants?

I don’t think they have anything to do with the protest, per se. They happened at the same time as the protests, but I think they were a cover for a lot of people who had a different agenda than the protesters. I don’t want to associate the protest with what happened to us at all, it was a completely different issue. It happened at the same time, but it wasn’t the same group at all and I’m sure of that because what happened was I made sure that the shop was okay on Monday evening when the protesters were coming through the neighborhood – they had come through the neighborhood and, by 9 p.m. the streets were clear. I had secured the restaurant by that time, so I went to bed, and I checked on it again at about 11:30 p.m. and everything was still normal. I woke up very early in the morning and around 5 a.m. and that’s when we noticed that a lot of other businesses as well had been vandalized. So, these were people that were not part of the main protest group at all.

Every single person who is an owner of a restaurant that’s near me or in the area feels exactly the same way that I did. They go so far as saying that they support the protest just like I do and like everyone in our restaurant does. We fully support the protest because it’s really a wakeup call for everyone.

How has the pandemic and the damage affected your plans of expanding and opening a second Raclette location in the U.S.?

Ever since we started having a certain level of business that we knew the restaurant would survive in its current business model with its target clientele, we have been looking to expand. But having had no access really to capitals or investors, it’s been a search ever since for that capital, so it hasn’t been a very urgent thing. It is kind of growing the business organically until such time that we had the resources to be able to do that. It wasn’t a front burner project but with a pandemic obviously we just have to make sure that the core of the business, which is this one location survives, and that we’re able to have a sustainable business moving forward.

Did you benefit from the PPP loan program that Congress passed in order to help restaurants affected by the pandemic, or did you have any financial help of any sort?

We did get a PPP loan and it just didn’t make any sense for us. The rules have now been revised, but the original rules were that we had to spend 75% of [the loan] in labor within the first eight weeks. And that was just going to be a complete waste of not just a loan, which has intended first to help our employees survive but it would have been extra on top of unemployment and stimulus funds. I think it was more important to make sure that we would survive the crisis so that we’re able to continue employing them rather than a short-term fix, which would run out in eight weeks.

After that, we decided to wait and see if the rules would change: If they would allow more of the loan for other purposes, if they would extend the period that we can use it throughout, and if it would lower the percentage that we would have to spend on labor because that would ensure that we’d have a business even after this crisis it’s over.