What the Future of Restaurants Might Look Like

Why It Matters

An estimated 90,000 restaurants in the U.S. remain closed permanently or for the long-term as a result of the pandemic. That represents around 14%—a less apocalyptic number than early estimates, which ranged from one-third of the country’s restaurants to 75% of them.

It’s a sobering number, nonetheless. Annual closings typically number 50,000, and the majority of closed businesses were established spots that had been in business for 16 years. A survey by Lending Tree reported that half of the respondents said a restaurant they loved had closed because of the pandemic; in the Northeast, that figure was 65%.

Now consider that in addition to tens of millions of direct restaurant jobs, which accounted for almost 4% of U.S. gross domestic product before the pandemic, workers at such purveyors as farms, slaughterhouses, butchers, and wineries are affected, too. Upscale dining rooms help support related businesses such as florists and dry cleaners.

In many ways, the crisis has laid bare how broken parts of the industry are, from supply chains to service fees. Evolutions that might have happened over years or longer have been compressed into a few months. New business models—from added outdoor seating and ghost kitchens to programs like groceries and meal kits—were quickly introduced.

As Danny Meyer, one of America’s foremost restaurateurs, put it early in the pandemic, “Places [are] paying more than they can afford, talent is not making the living they need to make, while the restaurant isn’t making margins they need to make. The system needs to change, or this crisis is only accelerating what we were heading for, anyway.”

Fast forward to spring 2021, when Meyer, now chairman of the New York Economic Development Corp., told Bloomberg that his restaurants were “halfway back from the pandemic.” It’s a start.