Corby Kummer: “It’s Going to Get Worse Before It Gets Better” for Restaurant Industry, Closures

Craigie on Main, The Asgard, Tiger Mama, The Kinsale — these are just a few examples from a long list of Boston-area restaurants that have shuttered during the pandemic. With the end to outdoor dining this winter and uncertainty around the future of COVID, more restaurants could meet the same fate.

“It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” Corby Kummer told Boston Public Radio on Tuesday. “There's so many factors, all of them precipitated by the close downs of the pandemic.”

Long-term, industry-wide issues, such as low profit margins and low pay for restaurant staff, were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, restaurants are facing new pandemic-era challenges in the high number of staffers leaving the industry and “fights over rent,” as was the case of Eastern Standard and Island Creek Oyster Bar in Kenmore Square.

Kummer notes that some restaurants, however, may have closed due to inadequate business planning.

“Some very sharp business people are saying [that] there are so many restaurant business people who shouldn’t have been in business in the first place, if they didn’t have three months of reserves or if they didn’t know how to write a business plan,” he said. “That means there should be more assistance to restaurant owners on how to run businesses.”

Kummer is the executive director of the Food and Society policy program at the Aspen Institute, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a senior lecturer at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.