I grew up in the restaurant business: my family started their first restaurant, Nino’s, in the heart of downtown Manhattan in the early 1980s, and the summers I spent in their restaurants, as well as the lunches after that. school that I cooked with my grandmother, shaped my love for food. My parents often worked late, so I spent a lot of time with my Nonna – and every day she taught me a different recipe. Sometimes we would cook a light frittata; others, she taught me how to make cavatelli. To this day, I still remember the feel of his wooden pasta board.
As I got older I decided I wanted to learn more about the business side of the restaurant, so I enrolled in the University of St John’s and got a degree in hospitality. My older brother, Franco, who already ran this first restaurant in the city center, decided to enroll at the French Culinary Institute. And even though my brother and I eventually took over my parents’ first restaurant and renamed it Nino’s 46, we always wanted the opportunity to open our own, in Queens, where we grew up.
We finally did it in January 2019, launching Nino’s AQ, a contemporary Italian restaurant in Astoria, the district of Queens where we grew up.
Operating a restaurant in New York had become a difficult juggling act in recent years, even before the pandemic. Restaurant profits were slashed on all sides – from high rents to rising food and alcohol prices to taxes – and margins evaporated faster than the water in my pasta cooker. Many restaurants were already losing money, breaking even, or keeping less than 10 percent profit per year.
People in my neighborhood often express how shocked they are to see a local restaurant close, and they always say the same thing: “This place was always packed! Unfortunately, being “packed” with customers doesn’t always mean being profitable.
But even with all the challenges of running a restaurant in New York City, never in a million years would I have imagined what would happen if I tried to do it in something like our current situation.
Nino’s 46 is completely closed, which reduces our sales by 100% there. At Astoria, we’ve kept Nino’s AQ afloat – barely – by introducing Nino’s AQ Italian Market, which gives customers access to my pasta, cheese, sauces, etc. homemade at affordable prices. But even with the option to move to an “Italian deli” style business, our sales are down 75%. This means that my brother and I are trying to keep two restaurants – with all the costs of both built in – and keep our own families afloat with just 12.5% of sales (not profits) that we had before.
We are, of course, not alone in our predicament; governors across the country have issued stay-at-home orders closing eateries, and most have yet to reopen for anything other than take-out and delivery. The restaurant industry, however, was projected to achieve nearly $ 1 trillion in sales this year, which is said to have supported more than 15.6 million employees and billions of dollars in taxes to federal, state and local governments.
We all knew the federal government had to step in if the restaurant industry – and, in particular, restaurants like mine – were to survive this global pandemic. And it has finally answered calls from our industry and other small businesses in the form of payment protection program loans through the Small Business Administration.
The P3 program would have been designed to help small businesses by allowing us to take out loans that would be canceled if we continued to pay our employees or rehire anyone we let go. Since the loan was designed to get small business employees back to work, the majority of the loan should be used to cover payroll for eight weeks after the loan is issued, but businesses can use about a quarter of the funds. for other expenses.
We decided to apply for a PPP loan as soon as it became available the first week of April – without realizing how the process would be a nightmare. We were told that we had to use the institution we had previously done banking with, but this was unsuccessful. I had to fill out the forms on my bank’s website over 250 times, but it crashed on every attempt. After all of my attempts, the website finally closed completely and didn’t even allow me to log in to try. I called everyone I knew in the industry and found that other people were submitting their applications manually. I called my bank and was then told that they are not accepting requests through the manual process at this time. Last Thursday we found out that the PPP fund for loans has been completely exhausted.
Watching the news this week I started to see how many large listed companies been approved for massive PPP loans when I couldn’t even apply. Companies like Ruth’s Chris, J. Alexander’s and Belly, which has thousands of employees, received loans of $ 20 million, $ 15 million and $ 10 million, respectively. Globally, nearly 45 percent of program money went to loans over $ 1 million – Where, by the terms of the program, to people whose payroll for just eight weeks should have been $ 750,000 or much, much more.
I was shocked and angry: P3 would have allowed me to get my small team back to work and help me pay some rent bills for my small business, but it was being used by large companies that already had millions of dollars. I understand that during this crisis everyone needs help, but if the government calls something a “small business loan” then it has to make sure it goes well with small businesses.
I’m hopeful now that the Senate passed $ 320 billion in new funding for the program, that I will be able to complete my application for both locations – and that, this time, the companies for which this money was intended will indeed be able to access them.
Meanwhile, even with all the negative news, we’re still trying to find positive ways to serve our community – after all, we grew up here. We’ve started “pasta drops” to bring our fresh pasta to local seniors who can’t always make it to the store or access ingredients to make theirs, and we’ve partnered up with a local blog, Give me Astoria, to send our pizza to local hospitals to honor workers who are trying to save lives. We are trying to do our part to help the community and hope that once we are fully open we can continue programs like these. We just need a little help, like everyone else, to survive until then.