To understand the challenges Portland restaurants face today — exemplified, perhaps, by the spate of closures last fall — it helps to look at the problems that have confronted the food and beverage industry since the start of the COVID pandemic.

The reasons that forced some places to permanently close during the pandemic — and since — while others launched and have succeeded (so far) are as varied and complex as the coronavirus itself.

In the five years since the pandemic swept into Maine, Portland restaurants have contended with rising food, utility and labor costs, as well as a nationwide staffing shortage that has hit the hospitality industry in this state particularly hard. Maine had 3,100 fewer restaurant workers in December 2024 than in December 2019 (a 7% dip), according to the National Restaurant Association, the second-biggest drop-off in the country behind Maryland (-8%).

Restaurants’ location, size and — certainly during the pandemic — their suitability to offer takeout also helped decide their fate. Even weathering the storm came at a steep cost: The National Restaurant Association’s data show that 43% of restaurants nationwide today still carry debt they accumulated during the pandemic.

For some local restaurants, the unremitting pileup of problems led to permanent closures. Of the roughly 300 independent restaurants, bars and cafes in Portland at the start of the pandemic, a third have closed.

But nearly as many have opened — and a couple dozen more have come and gone. The pandemic didn’t lead to a mass restaurant die-off in Portland, rather to a period of intense turnover. Local commercial Realtors say we’re now in the middle of another such turnover period. It may even be a sign of the industry’s strength.

Why did some restaurants succeed and others fail in the face of daunting challenges? We took a look back at the pandemic years and their aftermath to try to understand how COVID’s lingering impact still affects Portland’s restaurant scene today.

SWIFT PIVOT TO TAKEOUT

Consider the plight of former Old Port Thai restaurant Cheevitdee.

The restaurant’s focus on Thai breakfast and brunch offerings proved a poor match for the early demands of the pandemic. Many of Cheevitdee’s dishes simply weren’t adaptable for to-go orders, like omelets served in hot cast-iron skillets and congee in cast-iron pots. “And people don’t tend to get takeout breakfast anyway,” co-owner Darit “Dee” Chandpen said. “That hurt us a lot.”

After struggling through the first year of the pandemic, Cheevitdee’s ownership team chose to close the Fore Street venue in February 2021. Their lease was up, and the new one cranked up their rent by an unaffordable $700 a month. Even more dire, while their landlord had allowed them to pay less rent as an emergency measure in 2020, under the terms of their agreement, they had to pay back the $30,000 difference at the end of the lease.

In lieu of raising the cash, the owners transferred all of Cheevitdee’s kitchen equipment and furnishings to the landlord for him to sell to new tenants. “It was a big learning experience,” co-owner Darit “Dee” Chandpen said.

After they closed Cheevitdee, they turned to smaller restaurants, opening Mitr on Outer Congress Street and Indy’s sandwich shop in South Portland. Both launched in 2022 and both remain open today. “And for both, we own the buildings too,” co-owner Wan Pitafai said.

“That’s what we learned, to be our own landlord,” laughed co-owner Pattira Tedford.

Any money the owners spend on the Mitr and Indy’s properties is equity. “At Cheevitdee, we spent $240,000 to open a restaurant,” Pitafai said, “and walked away with nothing.”

Some restaurants that had the bad luck to open right at the start of the pandemic had to upend their business models on the fly to meet the demand for takeout. Ramona’s sandwich shop on Washington Avenue was slated to launch in March 2020, just one week before the shutdown.

“We were somewhat fortunate because we were two days away from bringing in perishable product, so we didn’t take a loss there,” said Ramona owner Josh Sobel. “But we had all this great momentum, and it came to a screeching halt in a day, basically. I have a family, and this was going to be my source of income, so I needed to make it work somehow.”

A & C Grocery across the way on Washington Avenue was selling food through an ad hoc takeout window. If they can do it, Sobel thought to himself, we can do it. Ramona’s opened its own takeout window, with limited hours and a limited menu, in April and May. They were serving the full menu for takeout by June. Of course, the service model didn’t require a dramatic shift for Ramona’s. “Our plan was to make takeout sandwiches from the start,” he said. “We’re a little place with seven seats, and we knew takeout was going to be 90% of our business.”

Sal de la Tierra, near Congress Square Plaza, was also set to open in early spring of 2020 but had to delay the launch until August. “When the pandemic hit, at first it was kind of like, I don’t know how you say it in English,” said co-owner Isai Galvez. “We say ‘balde de agua fria,’ like if you throw cold water on somebody. It’s just like a shocker.”

Fortunately, because the menu had plenty of portable items like tortas, tacos, burritos and quesadillas, they did enough business to get through the critical first year.

“Our food makes good takeout food, good food to walk down the street and eat,” Galvez said. “The fact that it is that type of restaurant helped us make it through. If it would have been a fancy sit-down restaurant, no way we’d make it.”

PRIME LOCATION 

Established restaurants also found themselves implementing a takeout program. At upscale pan-Mediterranean restaurant Tiqa, co-owner Deen Haleem estimated his Commercial Street restaurant did as few as two or three takeout orders a week before COVID. But when the pandemic hit, his team quickly developed a full takeout menu, and signed on for delivery services. Takeout suddenly accounted for half of Haleem’s business, a shift that continued even after the initial lockdown was lifted.

Deering Center restaurant Bird & Co. offered no takeout when it launched in March 2019. “Once you open the floodgates of takeout, you can’t control the quality of food,” co-owner Wills Dowd explained. But once the pandemic hit, it was “adapt or die,” he said. They quickly turned to takeout, and after about three weeks, were significantly busier than before. “It was a blessing in disguise, for sure,” Dowd said.

Location was also a major factor in Bird & Co.’s ability to survive the worst of the pandemic. Being situated at the corner of Forest Avenue and Woodford Street at the intersection of several off-peninsula neighborhoods was a boon. At certain times of day, the streets were lined with the cars of customers, said Dowd’s business partner, Jared Dinsmore. “People were also walking down,” Dinsmore said. “You could ride your bike there. It was the right place at the right time.”

The momentum continued. Dinsmore and Dowd estimated that business at Bird & Co. roughly tripled between February 2020 and February 2022.

Location helped Sal de la Tierra, too; Galvez believes being in a comparatively busier downtown was a lifesaver. “If we were anywhere outside of downtown, we’d probably be closed by now,” he said.

Still, a downtown location was no guarantee. Rachel Sagiroglu opened The Maker’s Galley at 5 Commercial St. in November 2021. The worst of the pandemic had passed, but knock-on effects were very much in play. As a former Wex employee, Sagiroglu knew that office workers in that part of town wanted a nearby place to eat.

“In my mind, I’m thinking, ‘When the offices start coming back in, I know I’m in a prime location,'” she said. But with the mass switch to remote work spurred by the pandemic, staffers never returned to downtown offices in numbers that could support restaurants.

Sagiroglu had also counted on promised nearby development that was supposed to make the neighborhood a destination. But projects like 58 Fore — a plan to turn 10 waterfront acres into a mixed-use residential and commercial neighborhood and slated to break ground in 2021 — remain stalled today.

“It just never happened,” she said. “If (The Maker’s Galley) was two blocks down in the Old Port, it would have been completely different. I’d still be open. One-hundred percent.”

SMALL PROBLEM/BIG PROBLEM

Damien Sansonetti, co-owner of the former Italian restaurant Piccolo, called its location at 111 Market St. a “dead zone” at the outset of the pandemic. “There wasn’t enough foot traffic around that area,” he said.

Even worse, the intimate size of the restaurant at a time when indoor dining was restricted.

“With social distancing, I think we could have had about two two-tops. We joked that we’d open for a super fine-dining experience,” Sansonetti said. “Piccolo was financially successful for all of its lifetime. The pandemic forced us to shut it down because we couldn’t get the guests in there that we needed to.”

After six years in business, the 20-seat venue was one of the early victims of the pandemic, closing permanently in July 2020.

But the pandemic also provided the impetus for Sansonetti and his wife, chef Ilma Lopez, to launch the coffee shop and luncheonette Ugly Duckling on Danforth Street in early 2023.

“When we were stuck at home during the pandemic and had super-reduced business hours, Ilma started making English muffins,” Sansonetti said. “Then she started selling them to coffee shops and wholesale accounts, like Speckled Ax and Sur Lie. She was even selling them to (Lost Kitchen owner) Erin French in Freedom for her market once a week. Some of that ended up becoming why we opened Ugly Duckling. So you look at the silver linings of what can come out of things, and you have that.”

As late as 2022 and 2023, restaurants were still being affected by customers’ pandemic concerns. When Jordan Rubin launched Bar Futo on Fore Street in December 2022, it was too cold to eat outside yet some customers were too nervous to eat inside. “It was a challenge for us just getting people in the restaurant,” he said. At Tiqa, Haleem faced similar anxieties.

Michelle Corry and her husband, Steve, closed Petite Jacqueline on Market Street after 12 years in business in the fall of 2023, citing the impact of the pandemic among their reasons.

“Social distancing made it difficult for small places to have enough seats to make their service financially viable,” Corry said.

Petite Jacqueline’s full capacity was 50 seats, though social distancing requirements left them with room for only 25-30 customers. In warmer months, the restaurant’s special permit for outdoor seating added another 20-25 seats, bringing them back up to capacity — which helped.

STAFFING WOES

Yet other issues, such as the staffing shortage, proved insurmountable. “Staffing levels were definitely our hardest challenge,” Corry said. “It wasn’t just the number of bodies, but consistent and key bodies that we were missing, like a chef and sous chef and high-level managers we needed and just weren’t getting.”

By the summer of 2022, diners were returning. But Petite Jacqueline had to trim its hours and close one day a week because the restaurant lacked the staff to meet the demand. “It was frustrating,” Corry said.

“Staffing was a huge issue for me,” Sagiroglu said of The Maker’s Galley. “Turnover was big. It felt like I spent all of my time putting out ads, setting up interviews. I’d set up a day of interviews, three or four in a row that I’d blocked time for, and they’d just not show up.”

To lure reluctant workers and keep them from working elsewhere, restaurateurs had to raise their pay rates significantly. “To get a dishwasher that wasn’t a high school kid who could only work two days a week, they’re $20 an hour, when before COVID they’re making $12 or $13 an hour,” Sagiroglu said.

Some employees from pre-COVID days were hesitant to return to work, especially older staff, as Chandpen experienced at Cheevitdee.

“My staff came back (from the initial COVID shutdown) really, really shell-shocked,” Haleem said. “They had gone from hiding in their bedrooms for two and a half months, avoiding human contact, to being in a restaurant with 15 or 20 people working, dealing with guests. It was such a radical, immediate shift that it freaked some people out.”

Over on Pine Street, Sansonetti and Lopez were operating Chaval, their French- and Spanish-influenced fine-dining restaurant, with “a severely reduced team. A couple of our team members came back (after the shutdown). A lot of them didn’t.”

Lopez was working with their young daughter in tow — and while pregnant with their son — because schools were closed. For an entire month, Chaval operated with just Sansonetti in the kitchen.

Tiqa, likewise, had a bare-bones staff. “From a kitchen perspective, I was always one (staffer) away from closing,” Haleem said, “meaning if one person called out sick, I would have to close that day.”

As time went on, staffing woes escalated, leading Haleem and his wife and partner Carol Mitchell to close Tiqa for more than a year, from April 2023 until August 2024.

“It got to a point where it wasn’t just difficult, it was almost impossible (to properly staff). I didn’t believe I could offer the food and service I wanted to offer with the labor force that I had,” Haleem said. “The experience in the talent pool was lower than it’s ever been, and the expectations for compensations were the highest they’d ever been.”

‘RESTAURANT WORK FLIPPED ON ITS HEAD’

Tiqa now pays experienced line cooks $23-$25 per hour, up from $16-$17 before COVID. “The labor cost has gone up, and I don’t think it’ll ever go back down,” Haleem said. “But the people I can get now are good. It’s much easier to justify — they’re talented, hard-working, want to do a great job. And I can find them.”

Those workers were nowhere to be found for Haleem in 2022 and early 2023, when much of the public started to regain its appetite for dining in restaurants.

“The amount of pent-up demand that we were observing was just off the chart,”  Haleem said. “In the ’22 summer, I probably turned away just as many people as I seated because of my staffing challenge.”

For their part, staffers at Portland restaurants faced their own challenges. Kristen Mixter, now co-owner of Vesta restaurant in North Yarmouth, was bar manager at Tipo at the outset of the pandemic. After the shutdown, the restaurant reopened with a much smaller staff “who felt comfortable working together with maximum safety precautions,” Mixter told the Press Herald in an email.

“It felt like restaurant work flipped on its head for those of us serving,” she went on. “The management team would have weekly meetings to make constant changes and adjustments to our operations, which became difficult at times. As the months went on, and we allowed some outdoor dining, we struggled to find a happy medium between the service that our guests wanted and what we were comfortable with.”

Mixter added that while many customers were cooperative and grateful for the restaurant’s safety precautions, some were “obstinate and rude. Emotions were high, and it took a great deal of energy to keep calm during those situations.”

Burned out and frustrated, Mixter left the hospitality industry for a few months. But when she learned that Crispy Gai was opening a brick-and-mortar location (it started life as a pop-up), she was drawn back, impressed by its owners. By the time of the restaurant’s launch in June 2021, “indoor dining with minimal restrictions was the norm, and restaurant workers had really started to assimilate to the COVID safety procedures.”

Just as importantly, Mixter said she felt a sense of stability working at Crispy Gai during such a volatile time because the business had previously established itself as a viable takeout operation. “I believe that is exactly why Crispy has been a success,” she said. “Having launched during the dine-in shutdown, they provided a fun, bold, accessible menu of food that travels well.”

THE PUZZLE OF PRICING

Beyond labor, restaurants faced other operational expenditures like soaring food costs, a problem that has not gone away.

Chandpen said when Mitr opened in November 2022, the price of a basic ingredient like chicken, for one, had tripled. “But even though the cost is rising very fast, I’m also scared of raising prices too fast,” he said. “The customers might not come back.”

Corry echoed that sentiment. “You can raise your prices, but at a certain point the customer is not going to want to go out to eat, or can’t afford to go out to eat often,” she said. “Petite Jacqueline was supposed to be a casual bistro for the community, and the prices were becoming so high that it was more like a fine-dining restaurant.”

Over at Tiqa, “You were tempted to almost put ‘market price’ on everything (on the menu), because you just didn’t know what your food and labor costs were going to be next week — things were just constantly going up,” Haleem said.

To tempt cost-conscious diners, when Tiqa reopened last August, it lowered its prices. They were able to pull it off in part by trimming portion sizes and swapping salmon and cod for pricier haddock and halibut, for instance.

For Haleem, the spate of recent closures suggests that each restaurant needs to prove its worth to the dining public. “I don’t see the (Portland) dining scene deteriorating a lot,” he said, “but I do see it getting a haircut. We’re seeing a tightening up of the market, and if you’re not really good at what you do, if you’re not well funded, it can be extremely challenging to keep it moving forward.”

Indeed, Portland saw 11 restaurants close this fall, from places open not quite a year to decades-old venues like Local 188. Market observers differ on the significance of the recent rash of closings.

“We’ve seen it before,” said Derek Miller, partner and broker at The Boulos Company. “It’s not uncommon to see a cluster of closures going into the winter months. These things are cyclical in the restaurant business, just like they are in life.”

Joe Malone, founder and president of Malone Commercial Brokers, agreed that winter turnover is nothing new. “The thing that’s a little different this time is that these are significant, experienced players turning over – it’s not first-time restaurant owners. The turnovers now are more problematic.”

SIGNS OF A REBOUND?

Josh Miranda, owner of four Old Port restaurants and bars, said he fully agreed with Malone’s assessment. “The margins in a restaurant are incredibly slim right now, and people don’t have the disposable income they once did to go out to restaurants and bars,” he said. “And this younger generation doesn’t go out as much or drink as much.”

Miranda painfully felt this changing dynamic during the year and a half that he operated Henry’s Public House on Fore Street. He closed it in February.

“We tried to be a true public house and be open seven days a week, for seven lunches and seven dinners, and it just wasn’t manageable,” he said. “And it’s such a big space. We were full every night at least once, but I needed it to be full two or three times. Those kinds of places aren’t popular right now.

“The market has changed,” Miranda added. “I think if Henry’s was in business 10, 15 years ago it would have done a lot better.”

Sad as it is to see a place close, vacancies like Henry’s often become “second-generation” restaurant spaces, eventually filled by other restaurateurs seizing the chance to launch a new operation without the burdensome costs of a full build-out and buying kitchen equipment. This gives several developers hope.

“When some of these businesses fail, that creates opportunities for other operators to backfill those spaces,” Miller said. “That’s what we’ve seen in the past, following the pandemic: the resiliency of the market. I was pleasantly surprised then by how quickly the market absorbed all the available space. I think we’ll see that again.”

Once such second-generation space is absorbed, Malone predicted that Portland will see fewer new independent restaurants. Well-capitalized local restaurant groups may have the money to launch a new place, but the steep cost “will keep some of the mom-and-pops out, for sure.”

But despite the dispiriting fall season and quite a few closures over the winter, too, Malone foresees Portland’s restaurant scene remaining robust.

“There’s going to be a quick revival,” he said. “It’s a lull. The operators who are looking at the current vacancies are extremely experienced. I do believe it will come back strong.”

Indeed, Dowd and Dinsmore opened the upscale Chinese food and cocktail lounge Lucky Cheetah last summer in the Moulton Street space that had housed the Old Port Tavern for 50 years. And so far, more than a dozen new restaurants are slated to launch in Portland this year, including ZA pizzeria in the former Slab Sicilian Street Food space, and Silver Street by Taj in the former North Point venue.

“One of the bright spots on the restaurant scene right now is that second-generation restaurant space is actually very sought after,” Malone said. “Those closed spaces will not stay closed for long.”

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