Restaurants Left Reeling After Back-to-Back Winter Storms

The snow and ice may have finally melted, but for local restaurants across the Triangle recent storms are anything but over.

“We had a similar situation last winter in January and February, and it took us seven months to recover so much loss,” said Cheetie Kumar, owner of popular neighborhood restaurant Ajja in Raleigh. “[This year] the first Saturday [of snowstorms], I think we did 20% of our normal revenue and normal volume.”

Anytime a restaurant unexpectedly closes can be disastrous financially. But two factors made the back-to-back winter storms even more catastrophic for businesses last month: They happened during January, already the slowest month of the year for many restaurants, and they hit over the weekend.

“If [the winter weather] happened on a weekday, it would have been expensive,” explained Shannon Healy, owner of Alley Twenty Six in Durham. “Happening on Friday or Saturday, it’s devastating, because the weekend is 60% of our business.”

“The weekends are the money that fills out the payroll and fills out the rent and everything,” added Chandra Yadla, owner of Indian restaurant Barsa in Durham. “Nothing like being closed changes the payroll, and nothing changes the rent, insurance, and all those things for that month, so the weekends are the big thing.”

The owners I spoke with for this story all said they’d lost tens of thousands of revenue from being closed two weekends in a row. Effects go beyond a restaurant’s bottom line: Staff members, who also count on weekend tips—a large portion of their income—also significantly suffer.

Kumar said she tried to keep the restaurant open as long as she safely could, both weekends, to try and mitigate these losses, saying she and her team were “constantly” checking five different weather apps and even texting local meteorologist Elizabeth Gardner for updates.

“We wait until the last second to close,” she said, “we literally count down to the hour just trying to make it so some of our folks can get some hours, and can we make it so that we’re not losing literally $40,000 in the red for the month.”

Closing on back-to-back weekends during an already tough month added insult to injury for the community’s restaurants, which have already been facing tough headwinds from the country’s economic climate while trying to stay afloat. In downtown Durham, a rash of break-ins has also frustrated business owners and strained resources.

“When an industry is in a precarious position, as the restaurant industry is right now, then it’s these types of unpredictable and unforeseen circumstances that can kind of push them over the ledge,” emphasized Shawn Stokes, owner of Luna Rotisserie and the newly opened Hops & Flower in Durham.

There’s no guarantee that any of these restaurants will be able to recoup the losses from the storm. Healy said he hopes to be “back where the restaurant should be” by May. He said he’ll need to be tighter with the cash he does have on hand, which gives him fewer options to try to grow the business. It’s a catch-22.

“If you’re short on cash, that means you can’t invest in things that would be a good idea, like advertising, that might pay dividends,” he said, but there isn’t any other choice.

Given the circumstances, it’d be easy to think that all of these owners would be despondent from the storm’s impact. But the only thing to do is move forward, they all said, and to hope that the coming weeks will bring steady business to try to recover.

“We love our customers who have supported us,” said Yadla. “And we would love to thank them in advance for supporting us for the coming weekends.”

“We have been incredibly fortunate to be in Durham and to be so well supported by our community,” added Healy. “We could use the support going forward.”

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