'You're in for it': Western Pa. restaurants brace for coronavirus slowdown

Kevin Joyce said it’s “white knuckle” time for Pittsburgh’s hospitality industry.

The owner of The Carlton Restaurant and Eadie’s Kitchen and Market, both Downtown, said food and beverage establishments across the city are feeling the impact of coronavirus.

He said his restaurant was booked for Friday night with a Celine Dion concert scheduled for nearby PPG Paints Arena. Dion canceled the show and Joyce cut the staff down from 11 cooks and seven servers to five cooks and five servers. The Carlton, he said, would also feel the pinch of the NHL’s decision to suspend its season.

Both of his businesses are located in the BNY Mellon Building. He said about half of the employees there are working from home.

“The impact is considerable, and is going to continue to get worse.” Joyce said, adding that he’s cutting shifts for cooks and servers, but plans to remain open. “We’ve been here 36 years. We went through 9/11 and we went through the financial crisis in 2008. You just kind of know you’re in for it.”

Joyce, who serves on the board of Pennsylvania Restaurant and Lodging Group, said he’s heard similar stories from other businesses in Pittsburgh.

“I don’t think you’ll find anyone who isn’t feeling this,” he said.

Sean Casey, owner of the Church Brew Works in Lawrenceville, said his food business has been down by about 60% over last year at this time.

“What we’re seeing is people are coming and sitting at the bar and having beers, but there are fewer people actually dining,” he said. “At 12:30 (p.m.) I think we had two tables and normally we would have had 25 tables on a Friday like this.”

Casey said he’s taking extra precautions, including taking the temperatures of staff before they start work, to ensure safety. The establishment has developed a two-page check list of common touch points such as handrails, chairs and light switches, that staff is sanitizing about four times per day.

The Brew Works is switching to paper menus that can be trashed after use. Casey eliminated bread from the menu because multiple servers use tongs to grab it.

“We went through this once before in 2009 with the swine flu,” Casey said. “We’re ratcheting it up even more with this.”

JG’s Tarentum Station Grille operates out of a 1913 train station with a relatively small staff. The 22 employees include waiters and waitresses, kitchen staff, bartenders, and bus boys.

Manager Allison DiNatale says that, so far, none of the JG’s employees have called in sick with covid-19 symptoms. She said any employee feeling ill is being urged to stay home.

DiNatale said she has not yet discussed with the restaurant’s owners how employees would be compensated if they can’t come to work.

“We realize that our employees are paid biweekly and a lot of them work on tip money and it’s not fair to tell them to stay home and not compensate them,” she said. “It’s something that we have to discuss moving forward.”

DiNatale said business has been slower than usual the past week, but it’s too early to tell how coronavirus concerns are going to affect the Tarentum restaurant in the long term. She does not anticipate any layoffs.

“I think we are all just hoping that everything will be OK. We’re just trying to maintain normalcy as much as we can while taking the precautions we need to take and, as of now, everybody’s schedule has been solid and everybody is staying on.”

Meanwhile, DiNatale said they are trying to make sure everything in the restaurant is as clean as they can make it.

“We’re actually having a company come in next week to do our bathrooms and to deep clean. It’s just kind of a lesson for all of us for general awareness of cleanliness and doing stuff we should probably be doing anyway.”