EconomyFinancialThese restaurants managed to survive COVID-19

These restaurants managed to survive COVID-19

Succeeding in the restaurant sector in the midst of the pandemic was a daring that few can boast. Above all, because COVID-19 hit the sector hard, which to circumvent the closures had to invent ways to maintain communication with consumers.

In the last year, restaurants in the country experienced closures, capacity and reduced hours, while maintaining take-out service or home deliveries, even installed in parking lots, terraces or removed the glass from the windows in order to find how to maintain their operations.

As if it were against the current, Ivet Patiño, general director of the Playas de Sinaloa seafood restaurants, also felt the ravages of the health crisis and saw how sales fell 77% in the first weeks of confinement. To recover their income, the challenge was to keep the customers captive, and also to grow their purchase receipt. To achieve this, he added new dishes to his menu, such as barbecue, charro beans and tamales, cooked in the Sinaloan style and added other products for sale such as cheese, machaca or chilorio, which they brought from the north to the capital of the country.

Patiño also opened a second branch during the pandemic. The entrepreneur says that planning began before the crisis and since she could not negotiate with the owners of the premises to reduce the rent, less to cancel the contract, she decided to maintain the strategy that gave her results in her first restaurant, which opened four years ago. then vacationing in Mexico City and noticing that there are a significant number of people who ate away from home.

“I tried to avoid the commitment of the second store but there was no way. The tenants were very insistent that the contract had to be respected or they were going to penalize me almost with the equivalent of the investment. The only thing I could negotiate was that they did not charge me rent for the time that the remodeling of the place lasted ”, he says.

With the closures due to confinement, the dark kitchen was one of the lifesavers of some brands and had a strong growth. This concept, which had boom since 2019, had been little explored in Mexico and that, with the closings and the growth of delivery, became a business opportunity.

Under this concept of kitchens without tables, chairs and canopies, Gori Gori Ramen was born. The concept of this ghost restaurant is to sell ‘Mexican ramen’, that is, they adopted the family recipe for this soup and adapted the flavors to offer birria, shrimp, chile morita or habanero ramen on their menu.

Sergio Su, one of the founders, says that the venture began in the home of Enrique Pacheco, his partner, and after the dish had been successful among his acquaintances, in addition to being an option to obtain income during the pandemic. A year after starting the project, this dark kitchen grew its orders 200%.

Pasta is served in one-liter glasses and can be accompanied with drinks made by the restaurant. “When we started creating the concept we decided we wanted to sell a fun, portable experience. We wanted to be practical and for the ramen to be ready to eat anywhere, ”he says.

Entrepreneurs agree that one of the keys for diners to become frequent customers of their businesses one of the successes was to maintain a relationship with their customers, know their tastes and ask them their preferences.

“Social networks make us have the largest ramen restaurant in the world. We had 6,000 followers, now we have 20,000 followers. Networks are a direct communication channel and allow us to have a dialogue beyond just flipping and telling people to consume us, ”says Su.

In Playas de Sinaloa, Patiño managed to create a community in which the Sinaloans who live in Mexico City are a group of outstanding clients, while for Gori Gori Ramen, social networks are the way to have this feeling of closeness with the customers.

Not all restaurateurs survived the crisis, this is one of the unions that has suffered the most from the economic damage of the pandemic. The National Chamber of the Restaurant and Spiced Food Industry (Canirac) counts that about 120,000 places in the country had to close permanently. This means the loss of 400,000 jobs of which 160,000 are direct.

The industry foresees a slow recovery to simmer, even Canirac projects that it will be close to five years before the restaurants that closed reopen their doors and regain the jobs, income and value they had before the health crisis. .

Growth after the crisis

The economic reactivation advances as infections are reduced and vaccination increases. For now, each of the local governments is responsible for issuing the rules with which businesses operate. In Mexico City, from the first week of May, restaurants can close at 10:00 p.m. indoors and until 11:00 p.m. outdoors, with a capacity of 40%.

While the sector recovers, Playas de Sinaloa prepares the opening of its third branch in Mexico City for this week, and with this opening its workforce is 140 workers. For Ivet Patiño, the future is encouraging and expects to close this year with a 40% increase in sales.

“With the low demand there are several empty stores and we entered one in the Roma neighborhood and since we lacked space, we decided to set up another branch. Daily consumption gives us the guideline to know what is required in the next branch ”, he says.

Gori Gori, meanwhile, plans to open another dark kitchen to shorten home delivery times, which it does through its own delivery men and which range from Tlatelolco to Santa Fe. They will also establish a physical unit, but there is still no date for the start of operations.

“The challenge for this year is to work on the positioning of the brand, improve the relationship with customers and go from ‘let’s try it’ to being part of the people. This is a business that was born in the pandemic to help us have money and survive, now we see it in the long term ”, Sergio Su concludes.

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