Major global city could lose half its restaurants over Covid – Stephen Jardine

Nearly a third of restaurants in London and half in New York could go under, writes Stephen Jardine.

A US Navy Hospital Ship travels up the Hudson River to Manhattan in March to provide beds for non-Covid patients (Picture: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images)

At journalism school they teach you a variety of more or less useful things. In my time it was mostly teeline shorthand and fiddling expenses. Now it is probably gender pronouns and lifting quotes from Facebook. However one thing is sacred. In the words of the old tabloid hack, “the news goes in the nose”. I never did get the exact reference but the point was, never bury a good story. That’s exactly what The Times did this week.

Hidden in the 11th paragraph of an interview with one of London’s leading restaurateurs, Jeremy King, there was this bombshell. London will lose “potentially 30 per cent” of its restaurants, New York “50 per cent”. Sorry, what? The man responsible for The Ivy, Caprice and The Wolseley thinks a third of the restaurants in London will shut? That is not just burying a story, that is encasing it in concrete in a mineshaft drilled halfway to the fiery pit where Donald Trump will end up.

Worst of all, he’s probably right. If two-metre social distancing is enforced as a result of coronavirus, 30 per cent of the 15,000 restaurants in London might well shut up shop with appalling consequences for unemployment. But if the outlook looks bleak for London, spare a thought for New York. Eating out is one of the highlights of any trip to the Big Apple. It is a cacophony of delis, sushi bars, steakhouses and diners and that is before you get to Little Italy or Chinatown. Now we are being told up to half of those businesses could go.

That sounds far fetched so to check it, I spoke to New York’s restaurant king. The founder of the Union Square Hospitality Group operates 21 venues in the city, including the legendary Gramercy Tavern. If anyone has their finger on the pulse of eating out in New York, it is Danny Meyer and, unfortunately, he confirmed the worst fears of his counterpart in London.

“This is, without doubt, the most challenging period we have ever encountered. After 9/11, New York was hit hard but eating out was how people showed their resolve and determination,” he told me. “This is different. We’ve never seen such a sustained and massive threat to both the physical safety and the economic livelihoods of the hospitality industry as a whole.”

Without the Government support we have enjoyed here, Meyer has been forced to shed more than 2,000 staff to protect the rest of the business. He now spends his days trying to find ways to generate revenue to support those workers until they can be re-hired and has even diverted his full salary into the pot.

Meyer is optimistic the restaurant business will rebuild itself. “The industry is full of entrepreneurs and they always find a way around problems,” he said. However that will take time. Meyer is hiring architects to examine how his restaurants can be adapted to social distancing but he won’t rush to make any decisions.

“There is no interest or excitement on my part to having a half-full dining room where everyone is getting their temperature taken and wearing masks, for not much money,” he told Bloomberg recently.

Most restaurateurs here will echo those sentiments but how many of them will actually survive the current crisis, we won’t know until later this year.

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