Local restaurant owners persevere during COVID-19

For North Iowa’s restaurants, the past year has been full of challenges and new ideas.

On a national scale, the restaurant scene in the midst of COVID-19 is still somewhat grim.

In a recent survey by the National Restaurant Association Research Group, it found that 87 percent of full service restaurants have reported an average drop in revenue of 36 percent, and 17 percent of all restaurants are closed permanently, or long-term.

But locally, many restaurants have done their best to persevere over the past year, and have found creative ways to stay in business.

One such local restaurant proprietor is Doug Brown, who owns Papa’s American Café, and Prime N Wine in Mason City. He has shifted much of his operations to takeout and food delivery, but admits that he is still not back to where he was before the pandemic.

“You might lose 40 percent of your dine-in business, but you gain 20 percent from takeout and delivery,” Brown said. “But then you are still missing 20. That is kind of what it is right now.”

Brown has added an extra delivery driver, and says that sometimes, he gets so many takeout orders on Friday and Saturday nights that the kitchen gets overloaded, which can lead to some occasional customer service issues. With a limited amount of sit-down customers, much of the food being cooked in the kitchen is going out the door.

“That is a hard thing to balance,” Brown said. “When you are a sit-down restaurant, and you do take-out and delivery, there will always be a couple hours on Friday and Saturday, where you get a lot of all three.”

One of the biggest issues Brown says he has run into lately is the lack of available workers. While he is continually advertising that his restaurants are hiring, Brown says that he has had a hard time finding enough people to staff his restaurant.

“If things went back to normal tomorrow, every restaurant would be in a world of hurt, because they don’t have any help,” Brown said. “Because of all the unemployment. I’ve been in business 30 years, and I’ve never had a help situation this bad.”

A big change Brown made at Papa’s is the addition of an outdoor patio, which Brown added in response to the challenge of indoor seating restrictions this past summer. That patio seats around 80 people, and was full nearly every day when the weather was nice.

Now, with the cold weather, the patio is not an option, but Brown’s business is starting to bounce back nonetheless.

“Things have gotten better,” Brown said. “November was probably the worst month overall, other than April, when we were closed. As soon as the numbers spiked, business fell big-time. It slowly has come back, not back to normal, but for (January), we’re probably only off between seven and 10 percent.”

Across the highway at Taco Tico, things haven’t changed all that much, other than the restaurant’s dining room being closed for the past several months. With a drive-through and a recognizable brand, the Mason City Taco Tico franchise has kept right on rolling.

“We still had a good year, we were down only like one percent for the year,” manager Cory Parsons said. “I have buddies that run businesses in the cities that were down like 80 percent. I’ll take that any day.”

Parsons said that he plans to try to reopen the dining room soon, which should help close the gap.

“If we can get the dining room open, it can be like it was 10 or 11 months ago,” Parson said. “That’s my hopes anyway.”

A third local business, Fat Hill Brewing, has seen a much more dramatic shift in its day to day operations. In normal times, Fat Hill would be full of patrons drinking nearly elbow to elbow on the weekends, as live music played on the stage. For close to a year now, the brewery has operated in a much different way.

“It’s a whole new world, very stressful,” Fat Hill co-owner Molly Angstman said. “In the middle of March, we definitely had a lot of scary discussions over a stack of spreadsheets. What would the books look like if we operated at 50 percent or 40 percent? It was all very doom and gloom. The way our business is set up, 50 percent just didn’t work for us financially, long-term.”

After those discussions, Angstman said, she and fellow owner Jake Rajewsky made the decision to switch to a to-go business model, which was designed to cut costs while still making sure the product was going out the door.

Angstman has been pleased that since the new model was implemented, many of Fat Hill’s most loyal customers still come in on a near-weekly basis, and spend close to the same amount of money they would in normal times. The only difference is that they are consuming the beer at home, rather than in the tap-room.

“It’s not our favorite way to do business,” Angstman said. “But it has worked for us, and it saved us.”

Because of the pandemic, Fat Hill’s owners have also found the time to finally get started on a few long-awaited projects that they otherwise wouldn’t have had time for, like getting new bar tops and a doing historic restoration of the brewery floor.

The brewery has also started a bottling line of barrel-aged beer, and has tried to introduce a brand-new beer to their menu every single week, in an effort to try to break up the day to day monotony of life during COVID-19. They have also kept doing community events, such as the brewery’s book club, but over Zoom instead of in-person.

Suffice to say, they have kept busy.

As Angstman put it, before the pandemic, they thought of themselves as just brewers and event planners. Since then, they have become true business-people.

“I think a lot of small businesses will come out of this era having learned a lot,” Angstman said. “They might not be richer, but they will be tougher. We will all be pretty hard to scare after this.”

This article originally ran on globegazette.com.