ASHEVILLE, N.C. (AP) - Restaurants are in a state of perpetual motion. Even when the dining room is dark, the refrigerators hum. The ice machines rumble and refill. It seems like something always must be fixed, prepped or paid.
When North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper announced the mandatory closure of in-house dining starting at 5 p.m. on March 17, shutting it all down felt for some restaurant owners like the path of least resistance.
Patrick O’Cain had already closed one restaurant. He wasn’t about to close another.
“When everyone was shutting down, I knew right then that we could not fall into that trap - the loss of momentum of closing the doors,” said O’Cain, the owner of Gan Shan West, a casual pan-Asian restaurant in West Asheville.
O’Cain understands why some closed their doors at that time. Restaurants never go quiet. Sometimes they need more money to stay open than they bring in.
“So they took the break because the government was saying, ‘Hey, you can’t have any guests in the restaurant anymore,’” O’Cain said. “And I knew that, for me, that was going to be a kiss of death, if I stopped what I was doing.”
In search of a more normal life, O’Cain had closed his flagship Gan Shan Station in North Asheville, two months before the pandemic wreaked havoc on restaurants across the country.
Gan Shan Station was always an energetic place, especially when it was brimming with diners and staff. But there was a sadness in the last month, he said.
He didn’t want to watch the energy drain from a restaurant again, not even temporarily.
“And if you close, that’s what stops,” he said. “It’s really hard to recreate something after it’s already been stopped, and so what I chose to do was to deeply focus on how we could continue serving people food, and to keep everyone employed.”
With a team of about a dozen employees, O’Cain threw his energy into Gan Shan West by darkening the dining room and opening the takeout window.
“I thought, ‘This situation, as frustrating and terrible as it is, there’s also got to be some hidden opportunity,’” he said.
It quickly became clear to O’Cain that, with a few other key restaurants closed, takeout could be the big break. It could also break him. The restaurant was soon flooded with a crush of orders a hastily added second phone line could not handle.
“In the early days it was rocky,” he said. “We were unprepared. But we’ve gotten into a rhythm now that really works.”
He opened online ordering through the BentoBox platform, which helped smooth the rough edges.
Customers found the digital storefront easy to use. The software helped stagger orders so the kitchen didn’t get overwhelmed. It handled payment so staff could focus on other things.
Soon, the restaurant’s sales exploded, with a customizable rice bowl becoming the eighth-most ordered dish last year among BentoBox’s 6,000 U.S. restaurants. An old-school mail campaign also drove big sales.
O’Cain sold 9,000 of the $9 rice dishes from March-December through BentoBox alone, numbers comparable to those of restaurants in major metropolitan areas including Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C.
As the restaurant streamlined ordering and dropped lunch service, it cut its open hours in half and still managed to double pre-pandemic revenue and keep staff numbers intact.
Still, O’Cain, who has launched a second career as a real estate agent, said there were moments when he wasn’t sure his restaurant would make it, particularly in the beginning of the pandemic.
“That was the one time that I thought, ‘Are we gonna get through this?‘” he recalled. “And I think that’s what inspired me to buckle down.”
He attributes his success in a large part to luck, while acknowledging success sometimes means making your own.
But the pandemic was a brutal wild card. In the first six months of the pandemic alone, one in six restaurants closed, putting millions out of work, according to data from the National Restaurant Association.
Those numbers underscore why O’Cain said he once struggled with something akin to survivors’ guilt.
“But at the end of the day, what does guilt give me?” he said. “Not much.”
He’s since worked on turning guilt into gratitude, and encouraged the same among peers who felt bad thriving as others suffered.
“I’ve encouraged them not to sit in that,” he said. “As long as you’re treating your guests and your staff with respect and making it a net positive for everyone involved, then great. If you’re being greedy, then shame on you.”
Even as the pandemic shows signs of loosening its grip on the country and on restaurants’ bottom lines, O’Cain still has his worries.
He wonders if inexpensive rice bowls passed through a window will be enough to propel his business into a very different future.
“I’ve been thinking about this for a while,” he said. “Are we a pandemic restaurant?”
To keep momentum means figuring out now how to stay relevant to a post-pandemic consumer.
“This whole thing has been scary and frustrating for a lot of people,” he said. “We just have to keep going.”
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