How local eateries are handling the change in season
Even as the 1750 Taphouse in Bedford broke ground on a new outdoor patio in May, managing partner Charlie Waitt knew there needed to be a solution for the colder months ahead.
“We knew this wasn’t going away anytime soon,” he said. “As we were coming out of summer, we would say the old Game of Thrones phrase ‘Winter is coming.’ We’ve got to do something.”
Waitt had heard of a few New England businesses with heated dome-shaped “igloos” during the winter, including The Envoy Hotel in Boston’s Seaport District, which has them on its rooftop. On Oct. 8, the 1750 Taphouse posted photos on its Facebook page of four heated igloos the restaurant purchased from the Florida-based company Gardenigloo USA, announcing that reservations for each would be available the following day. The post garnered more than 100,000 views overnight. Nearly a month later, Waitt’s staff is still fielding dozens of calls per week from customers wanting to make reservations inside the igloos. Others are contacting him from as far away as New York and Ohio — restaurateurs with questions of their own about how the igloos work and where they can get them for their establishments.
“I didn’t expect it to take off like it did,” Waitt said. “Weekends are jam packed, and we’re seeing weekdays being booked up too. That’s business we never would have had.”
Outdoor dining has been a saving grace for thousands of restaurants in New Hampshire during the pandemic in what has already been a tough year for the industry. Add the elements of a New England winter and many restaurateurs are now having to pivot operations even more.
“I think everyone is trying to extend dining outdoors as long as they possibly can, but once snow starts to fly and we start to get into those bitterly cold winds in December and January, I’m just not sure how much that’s going to buy you, frankly,” said Mike Somers, president and CEO of the New Hampshire Lodging & Restaurant Association.
On Sept. 24, Gov. Chris Sununu announced the release of updated guidance for the state’s restaurant industry, which included easing the six-foot rule between tables as long as dividing barriers are in place, effective Oct. 1. Solo performing artists are also allowed back inside restaurants and function centers as long as they maintain an eight-foot distance from any table.
“The approved barriers are going to be a huge game-changer for a lot of businesses and, I think, will allow for greater occupancy for some,” Somers said.
On Oct. 29, Sununu announced that, starting Oct. 31, restaurants would be required to keep a temporary database of their customers to assist the state’s contact tracing team. Basic information from dine-in patrons such as their name, phone number and day and time of arrival are to be collected from one person per party and kept for a period of 21 days. The announcement comes less than a week after potential community exposure notices issued by the state Department of Health & Human Services at restaurants in several cities and towns, including Concord, Portsmouth, Atkinson, Lincoln and Peterborough.
As the winter season approaches, local restaurateurs discuss the steps they’re taking to prepare for it, and what more they say needs to be done to help keep their businesses afloat.
Constantly adapting
Each of the 1750 Taphouse’s four igloos is set up on the patio. To keep track of the high volume of reservation requests, Waitt said, three designated times per igloo are available each evening — 4:30, 6:30 and 8:30 p.m. — for maximum parties of six. Since the eatery is open for lunch on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, there are additional reservation opportunities at 12:30 and 2:30 p.m. Parties are given approximately one hour and 45 minutes, while the remaining 15 minutes between reservations is spent thoroughly sanitizing and disinfecting the inside of the igloo. Zippered flaps are open on both sides of the igloo for cross-ventilation.
“We’re taking reservations six weeks in advance right now,” Waitt said. “We take a $50 deposit over the phone that goes on a gift card. We hold that gift card until the night of your reservation, give it to you as you walk in, and then you use that gift card toward your bill that night.”
The igloos are close to seven feet tall and about 11 feet in diameter and are made of a vinyl plastic material that feels like a thick shower curtain. Four hundred pounds of sandbags are around the outside of each dome to keep it in place.
Inside, the igloos have a remote control with adjustable LED lights in a variety of colors and patterns, as well as a space heater for you to adjust the warmth to your liking. Two of the igloos also have low-top tables and cushioned patio furniture.
“People are having a lot of fun in them,” Waitt said. “It’s a more intimate setting. … They feel like they’re hanging out in their own living room, eating dinner and just relaxing.”
A few weeks after the igloos went up, the 1750 Taphouse also added vinyl plastic dividers between several of the tables inside, and clear dividers between every few seats at the bar.
In Londonderry, 603 Brewery is also expected to have heated igloos on its patio from the same Florida company, likely starting on Nov. 13, according to marketing and events manager Morgan Kyle. Four of them were introduced last winter, just before the start of the pandemic. This year, there will be eight that will all operate on a reservation system, for maximum parties of six. Professional cleaning crews have been hired to sanitize them after every reservation.
“They’re all going to be spaced out. There will be four closer to the building, and then four more that are a little farther away in a zig-zag pattern,” Kyle said. “We’re going to have people reserve them online through the website on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.”
Other local eateries have taken unique steps to prepare for the colder weather from inside. Grill 603 in Milford, in addition to putting up plexiglass dividers between each of its booths, has installed UVC light sterilization filters into its HVAC system, designed to kill and genetically alter bacteria and viruses. Air purifiers have also been installed with UVC lights in them.
Surfaces are regularly treated with a quaternary ammonium sanitizer, which owner Eric Griffin said is a more effective and less toxic alternative to bleach.
“It was something that I had known about from a previous career,” Griffin said of the UVC filter installations. “When I used to run big yachts in Washington, D.C., where we had a touring party company, and we had put UVC light filters on our water system there.”
Although most of his patrons were understanding of the new contact tracing measures by the state, Griffin said Grill 603 experienced about a 40 percent drop in sales over the weekend following the announcement.
Tom Boucher, CEO of the Bedford-based Great New Hampshire Restaurants, which includes each T-Bones, Cactus Jack’s and Copper Door location in the Granite State, said air purifying systems to eliminate nearly 100 percent of all viruses on surfaces have been purchased. Between two and three have been installed at each restaurant, depending on its size, with one purifier covering approximately 2,000 square feet in the restaurant’s bar or dining area.
Each location is also currently in the process of building a “Santa’s Workshop” shed that will be placed outside near the entrances. Those are expected to be ready in the coming weeks.
“They’ll be heated, they’ll be lit, and we’ll have an employee in there selling gift cards during the holiday season,” Boucher said. “This way, if customers that perhaps aren’t comfortable inside to purchase a gift card, they can do it outside, and we’ll have dedicated parking spaces real close. … We just thought that it would be a nice, fun thing for people to help keep them in the spirit.”
Even before Sununu’s Oct. 29 announcement on gathering information from restaurant patrons to assist in contact tracing, Boucher said tablets have been purchased for each T-Bones, Cactus Jack’s and Copper Door location. They’re being used to record the first name, last initial and phone number of one person per party and each bar customer. The following Monday after the announcement, Boucher reported that virtually every guest over the weekend was understanding of the new measure — many had seen it on the news and were not too surprised, he said, although a few across the board were bothered by it.
“If [the Department of Health & Human Services] has a situation in some of these restaurants, they don’t have to necessarily do a broadcast release, because they’ve got the names and numbers of people that visited on whatever days they might be concerned about,” Boucher said.
Vikki Johnson, who owns The Post Downtown on Main Street in Concord and The Newell Post Restaurant on Fisherville Road, said booth dividers have been installed at both locations with the help of a carpenter. Each one is made with a wood frame that was stained to match or complement those of the existing booths, with plexiglass inserts.
Dividers have been implemented at all four Red Arrow Diner locations, according to chief operating officer Amanda Wihby, including three in Manchester, 11 in Concord, eight in Londonderry and 14 at its largest restaurant in Nashua. The outdoor tables have been removed at all of the locations except in Manchester — those have been kept for people utilizing takeout.
“The Manchester location usually seats 36 people,” Wihby said in an email. “Without the dividers, we were at 11 seats, [but] with the dividers, it added an additional eight seats.”
Some restaurants are putting the focus back on takeout rather than full indoor dining, once it becomes too cold to eat outside. During the early months of the pandemic, Revival Kitchen & Bar in Concord became a popular spot for its takeout specials, like burger and beer combos, cocktail mixes and hand-cut steak and wine pairings. Owner and chef Corey Fletcher said he plans to start increasing the social media interaction for those types of specials once again, while keeping the indoor dining capacity at around 60 to 75 percent and encouraging reservations.
Stalk, a farm-to-table bistro in Dover, recently announced it would cease all dine-in operations starting Nov. 14, and will tentatively switch to takeout only around Dec. 3. A section of the eatery’s website will also be available for people to find food-related gifts for the holidays, from marinades and spice blends to barbecue sauces, vinaigrettes, jams and more.
A “better than expected” summer
Thanks in part to a mainly dry summer and additional outdoor seating, some New Hampshire restaurants were able to rebound in sales, especially those with large patios or parking lots.
“It’s no doubt still been a challenging year all around, but I think for some folks that had limited to significant outdoor dining, the summer was much better than expected,” Somers said.
At its peak, Grill 603 had about 70 outdoor patio seats, according to Griffin, including two tables that were added this season.
“We were right about where we were last summer,” he said. “I never would have guessed that, if you had told me in May that we were going to pull out of it and have a pretty solid summer like that. It was pretty surprising.”
He said he plans to keep the patio seats open as long as he possibly can until enough significant snowfall forces its shutdown, but he’s also not ruling out reopening them if it warms back up.
“We had a run of 70-degree days in February one year, and I put patio furniture out and people were flocking to it,” he said. “So it just depends on what Mother Nature throws at us.”
Boucher said Great New Hampshire Restaurants, collectively as a company, also experienced a much better summer season from the sales of each restaurant than he was expecting. The newest T-Bones restaurant in Concord, the company’s sixth overall, opened the week after Labor Day and is now generating the greatest revenue.
“We ended our third quarter, at the end of September, down only about 10 percent year-over-year, which I was very, very pleased with,” Boucher said. “That being said, about 20 percent of our revenue is takeout … and then roughly another 20 to 30 percent, depending on the location, was outdoor dining.”
In May, each T-Bones, Cactus Jack’s and Copper Door restaurant set up rented tents in the parking lot, which added dozens more seats in addition to the existing patios. The tents came down last weekend, following a recent drop in turnout due to cold nights, but Boucher said traditional outdoor dining on patios and terraces will continue for as long as possible.
Waitt said the 1750 Taphouse has broken its own sales records multiple times in the last several weeks, and that’s not just due to all the attention it has received from the igloos.
“For us, if there’s been any silver lining from this, it was that it accelerated a lot of the plans we had and put them in motion a lot faster,” Waitt said. “We built the patio, we revamped our menu and our service model, and we brought in a lot of great new people who are just as passionate about making the restaurant successful as we are.”
At Georgia’s Northside in Concord, a takeout-only Southern kitchen and craft beer market, owner and chef Alan Natkiel has enjoyed a massive increase in food sales compared to last year.
He initially closed for nearly three weeks before reopening in April with a retooled business model, implementing an online-only ordering system through the restaurant’s website and installing a pickup counter out in front of the door.
For Natkiel, being transparent with his customers is absolutely essential in the throes of a pandemic — that’s why every several weeks he’ll put out a post on Facebook updating them with his service protocols. He and each one of his four other staff members also take turns getting coronavirus tests every two to three weeks on a rotating basis.
Downtown dining
Expanded outdoor dining on public sidewalks and parking spaces downtown became a major lifeline this summer for many city restaurants in New Hampshire. Most of these regulations are set to end this month, but despite the onset of the winter season, a few municipalities have voted on or are considering extending it even further for interested businesses.
In downtown Manchester, the jersey barriers that accommodated outdoor seating space for restaurants and other businesses along Elm Street were scheduled to be picked up this week.
But according to Lauren Smith, chief of staff for Mayor Joyce Craig, the Board of Mayor and Aldermen voted late last week in favor of extending them for those that want them. Most have elected to keep the barriers, she said, with the exception of Boards & Brews and The Shaskeen Irish Pub & Restaurant. Each business that is keeping the barriers will be responsible for removing snow from inside the enclosed space from the street, but the city’s Highway Department will still plow snow from the sidewalks.
Nashua’s parking restrictions to accommodate outdoor dining on Main Street are currently set to expire on Nov. 15, but according to city economic development director Tim Cummings, there have been talks to possibly get them extended.
Concord’s outdoor dining permits are also valid through Nov. 15. While city health and licensing officer Gwen Williams said no extensions have been discussed, the city council has been working with the Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce to award grants of up to $1,500 to restaurants to help offset any expenses related to increasing capacity indoors, such as dividers.
Chamber president Tim Sink said the grants come from money that was going to be used for the city’s Fourth of July fireworks display, which was canceled.
“The council recognized that the end of outdoor dining in Concord put restaurants in a tough position,” Sink said. “[The fireworks cancellation] created a small pot of money for something like this, and so they contacted the Chamber to see if if they’d like us to manage the grants.”
Within the first couple of days, Sink said he already received multiple inquiries from Concord restaurants. Grant applications through the Chamber’s website are available through Nov. 20.
More aid needed
Although Boucher did acquire Paycheck Protection Program [PPP] funds back in April, Great New Hampshire Restaurants did not qualify for either of the state’s Main Street Relief Funds, even as it approaches half a million dollars in extra expenses since the start of the pandemic.
“It’s not just masks and sanitizer,” he said. “It’s the tents that we’ve rented, the tables and chairs, the propane heaters, the dividers, the amount of signage we’ve had to print, the amount of times we’ve had to change our menu and our website, and the labor that’s gone into all of that. … These are all expenses that never existed before.”
Boucher said he and members of two other local restaurant groups — The Common Man and the 110 Grill — are working with state officials to propose a new fund, which would target businesses that did not get any relief from the first two rounds, and that have accrued Covid-19-related expenses in excess of $100,000.
“This winter, I’ll be grateful if we’re down 20 to 25 percent, but we won’t make money doing that,” he said. “We’ll probably barely break even, and some stores will lose money.”
According to a nationwide survey conducted by the National Restaurant Association in September, 40 percent of restaurant operators think it is unlikely their establishment will still be in business in six months if there are no additional relief packages from the federal government.
“I think New Hampshire has fared a little better than some other states that are still under lockdown,” Somers said, “but without that federal assistance, whether it’s another round of PPP or another program, some of these businesses are not going to make it to the spring.”
On Oct. 1, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the $2.2 trillion Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act 2.0, which includes a $120 billion grant program to support restaurants with fewer than 20 locations by helping to cover cost of rent, utilities and employee salaries. According to Jenni Muns, a spokeswoman for Rep. Annie Kuster, who is one of more than 200 co-sponsors of the bill, the grants would total the difference between a restaurant group’s 2019 revenues and expected 2020 revenues. The bill remains part of ongoing negotiations with the Senate.
Featured photo: The 1750 Taphouse in Bedford recently installed four heated dome-like “igloos” on its patio for you to enjoy its food outside all winter, like the tater kegs with house beer cheese, crispy bacon, Parmesan and scallions. Photo by Matt Ingersoll.
