‘Pretty dire.’ Tri-Cities restaurant owners join Cantwell in plea for COVID relief
A Tri-Cities business owner is part of a group asking Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell to help get more relief funds to restaurants before it’s too late.
Cantwell hosted a roundtable discussion on Tuesday with restaurant owners from across the state, including the Carrie and Doug Lundgren, owners of Cedars at Pier One on Clover Island.
During the hour-long discussion, restaurateurs laid out a dire prediction for the industry.
Carrie Lundgren said they are doing everything they can to stay open.
The Lundgrens took over the restaurant just before the pandemic hit, and have been struggling to make it work ever since. She said they lost about $1 million in revenue in 2020 and about the same in 2021.
Last year the Lundgrens applied for relief from the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, which was part of the American Rescue Act.
Cantwell said that because of overwhelming demand about half of all restaurant owners who applied for relief funds weren’t able to get them.
Out of 7,236 applications from Washington restaurant owners, only 3,247 received money.
More than 2,300 restaurants have closed in Washington state during the COVID-19 pandemic.
She is working with a bipartisan group to bring the program back with more funding.
“It is a crisis, these people are barely hanging on,” she said. “They should have gotten help and support.”
The Lundgrens applied for $750,000 to help cover some of the losses.
Lundgren said their overhead is extremely high because they’re an upscale steak house, and that in addition to their mortgage and other bills, they also lease the land from the Port of Kennewick.
Their mortgage, the land lease and insurance costs alone come to about $13,500 monthly, she said.
“Both our bank and the port have been amazing through this, but you still have to pay it,” she said. “We’re not unique, we feel fortunate to still be in business.”
“I’m hoping they do backfill that fund, we were one of the people that was eligible, but didn’t get the funds,” Lundgren said. “That would really go a long way in recovering the major hit we’ve taken in the past two years.”
Lundgren said the community support has been amazing, but between shutdowns and shifts to delivery orders, their model was hit particularly hard.
“We work on volume, and we’re a sit down, dine-in experience kind of restaurant,” she said. “Tri-Cities is not a ‘sit on the patio’ in winter kind of place, and we’re not the kind of food that works for delivery. You can’t Door Dash a lobster and have it still be good by the time it arrives. We just don’t have that kind of food.”
COVID impact
They’re also reluctant to raise prices, despite increases in food costs. Steve Valenta, owner of The Mighty Bowl in Vancouver, said average food costs for restaurants were up 24% in the fourth quarter of 2021.
“We just want to stay open and keep our people on staff, but are struggling to do so at this point,” she said. “2022 is looking pretty dire to be honest, we hate to be vulnerable. We don’t want to give the impression that we’re giving up because we are not.”
Lundgren said that while people want to get out, diners are still wary of COVID-19. She said they’ve had several instances where large parties have had to cancel reservations after someone caught the virus.
“It’s not over. Everybody is starting to feel like we’re at the end of the pandemic, but the community needs to remember we’re not through this yet,” Lundgren said. “No one is. We’re all still fighting to regain footing.”
Lundgren said being able to receive relief funds would be a boon for Cedars.
“This would really put us back on track and allow us to do the things we wanted to before COVID hit.” she said. “We had a lot of plans. This has just really set us back two or three years.”
Restaurant workers
Washington Hospitality Association president Anthony Anton said restaurants are being hit with issues that on their own would be enough to cause major concerns. Anton said owners are rapidly accruing debt in order to stay afloat and try to keep employees on payroll.
“Here in Washington alone we’re short 40,000 workers. Then we have ongoing challenges with supply chains and products,” he said. “We’re raising the red flag that this race against debt isn’t going well.”
The lawmakers are proposing standalone funding after President Joseph Biden’s Build Back Better program fell apart. Cantwell said they are trying to get the program up and running within two months, with $60 billion in funding, which is twice the amount of the original program.
Cantwell said they would be taking the information from the roundtable back to Washington, D.C., to help push for a second round of funding.
“This is so important to do because what we’ve heard just from the National Restaurant Association surveys ... is that restaurateurs are worse today than they were just three months ago,” Cantwell said.
“So it shows us that the Omicron variant of the COVID pandemic is just one more wave of pressure on our local restaurants which are such great employers for our community.”.
She also is pushing to have distilleries included in this round of funding, after they were disqualified on a technicality in the difference between the program’s eligibility requirements and Washington state regulations.
Under the previous funding, restaurants needed to have 33% of their revenue derived from on-site sales, but Washington law limits distilleries to 30% of their sales from on-site consumption.
Anton estimates that the debt that restaurants are building now will take years to pay off, if restaurants do manage to stay in business, and that it will be three to five years before the industry is fully back to normal.
This story was originally published January 26, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
