Alinea Group Announcement 3/14/20

The Alinea Group is committed to the safety and welfare of our patrons and employees. We also understand that during this unprecedented time hospitality and kindness are more important than ever.

Over the past few days I’ve received dozens of emails from customers, fellow restaurateurs, employees, and the press, asking how we are dealing with everything from the safety of operations to the economic impact on our business and the industry. As we’ve built best practices for our restaurant group, we’ve also tracked customer requests, booking inflows/outflows, and modeled our business under various scenarios.

I’ve decided to share all of that here, for those in the industry and for our amazing customers to understand what we are going through, what we are doing for our employees, our flexibility regarding bookings, and the economic impact more broadly. I’ve erred on the side of transparency even for that information which we usually would keep private.

Safety — For Our Patrons and Our Team:

Two weeks ago we began researching ways to calibrate operational safety above all other concerns. This past week we instituted the following policies over and above our already high standards for health and hygiene:

• Every Alinea Group employee is temperature checked when arriving to work, the temp is logged digitally, and any reading over 100F results in the worker being sent home for self quarantine. No one gets in without a temp check, period.
• Mandatory hourly hand washing of all BOH, FOH, and support staff is required, monitored, and logged.
• Any employee who has recently traveled to a CDC Zone 1,2, or 3 country must not come to work for 14 days.
• All travel outside IL must be logged with a manager and Human Resources and the employee will be marked for observation upon return, or quarantined should CDC guidelines change.

Hospitality and Bookings:

Customers may book, cancel, reschedule, or refund at their request, no questions asked. Email: hospitality@alinearestaurant.com / @nextrestaurant.com / @roisterrestaurant.com / @theaviary.com. We are prioritizing replying to customers who are scheduled to dine within the next 24–48 hours. Please be patient as we sort through the requests.

The Alinea Group already has spacious table seating and coverage at most of our venues. Where seating is tighter we’ve removed tables and created more space between guests.

Should any guest show any symptoms of illness we will ask to reschedule or refund them immediately. Please do not take this personally in any way — we are doing our best to be safe during this unprecedented time.

TAG Employees and Business:

All Alinea Group hourly employees are paid above minimum wage, we eliminated tipping many years ago and no one receives the tipped-wage hourly rate, instituted 401k retirement benefits matched by ownership up to 4% of earnings, and offer healthcare plans and paid parental leave to all. One stems from the other — for those diners who think tipping is a good thing… it’s not. Offering benefits to hospitality workers required new thinking. Maybe the FLSA can finally be updated after this crisis.

To sustain our restaurant group in the short term we have:

• Eliminated overtime hours wherever possible — goal is zero
• Reduced our business team’s and managers salaried wages by 35%
• Pressed managers into working stations / service
• Ownership has eliminated our salaries completely
• Requested rent abatement from our landlords for the duration of the crisis
• Planned to utilize and downsize existing inventory of dry goods, wine, liquor rather than ordering more and growing our cellars

If we decide it is prudent to close our restaurants, or are required to do so, we will essentially ‘mothball’ the businesses by furloughing 95% of employees while paying TAG’s share of their healthcare benefits which are critical during this pandemic.

We will work with those employees most at risk to find ways to help.

Additionally, we are considering creative options to stay ‘open’ through pick-up, delivery, and perhaps unique ‘in house’ experiences.

Modeling this all took some time, but we’ve estimated losses of between $170,000 and $900,000 monthly for our restaurant group, depending on various scenarios.

The pace of current cancellations looks like this:

Each party cancellation represents about 4 people. As you can see the rate of cancellations is increasing with the crisis. At some point fairly soon, it will likely not make sense to remain open, even if it is safe to do so.

Extrapolating our small business across the hospitality industry and the broader US and world economy is indeed quite sobering (understatement).

The Broader Industry:

I’ve published statistics from Tock on my twitter feed here: https://twitter.com/nickkokonas/status/1238534449568063489

I will be publishing a separate set of guidelines for Tock restaurants shortly that will include more up to date data as well as product development we are doing to help restaurants during this time.

What Can You Do?

Support your local restaurants by ordering for delivery through their websites or via email — it’s more cost effective for them that way.

Visit local restaurants if you are well and they are practicing safe distancing and employee testing measures.

Support efforts like this one — https://www.breakingbreadvan.com/ — that will no doubt be popping up around the world.

Encourage the government to reduce or eliminate payroll taxes ASAP. I’m aware this seems like it is helping rich guys like me… it is not. It’s helping business owners sustain the business payroll and benefits longer — notice above that in any economic scenario the business ownership is losing money. The longer restaurants are sustainable, the longer people have jobs and benefits.

…And Thank You….

One of the great privileges of owning and operating restaurants is working with people who chose a profession where they are in the business of pleasing other people. It’s really difficult work, actually! Making others happy, delighted, and creating surprising experiences takes a lot of effort.

And when that effort results in stress as it does for me many days, walking through our dining rooms and seeing people laughing, smiling, and celebrating their lives together reminds me why I left one career to build a restaurant with a young, talented chef. That keeps me going another day.

So for now, we will keep doing that as long as is possible. And then, on the other side of this, we’re going to crack open a treasured bottle of wine and reinvent once again. That’s what we love doing.

Stay safe and be kind to each other.

• nick