Specialty Food Magazine

York found that the number of small businesses owned by Blacks, Latinx, and Asians declined more sharply than the number of businesses owned by whites, suggesting that immigrant- or BIPOC-owned businesses had a greater chance of shuttering. For immigrants especially, a lack of resources due to citizenship status, increased spouts of racism, and fewer opportunities to tell their stories in the press have made surviving the pandemic that much tougher, foreign-born foodservice operators told Specialty Food. "We all came to America for a better opportunity, and I would hate to give up on that," says Halpern. "But every day we do not know if we are still going to be able to survive, even if we created a smaller version of our business." Before Halpern closed her doors, she felt she had tried everything. It was heartbreaking, she says, to let her staff of 30 people go and to see her five years of hard work seemingly disappear. She applied to two banks to get a Paycheck Protection Program loan and attempted to negotiate her rent with her landlord. Though she had a corner location on the Upper East Side, she could only put out a handful of tables on one side, not two, per her outdoor dining permit. Her 20 weekly catering contracts were canceled as staff at nearby companies began working from home. She could do takeout, but the revenue she was bringing was only 20 percent of pre-pandemic levels. It wasn't enough to cover the rent. If she took the state's moratorium on rent, she'd owe more than $100,000 by the end of 2020, a debt she didn't want to take on. "The PPP first round did not help the business; it helped the people who were employed by the business," Halpern says of paying her employees and landlord with the first round of PPP capital she got with the help of Square. "It was like privatized unemployment. I could pay my landlord—great— but it did not really move us forward in any way." What Halpern realized she could do was run her business solely out of her industrial kitchen in Long Island City, New York. She spun up an e-commerce site shipping baked goods. It's tricky, she says, being that the items are perishable, and costs quickly racked up: it was initially $80 to ship overnight. Thanks to a flexible landlord and negotiating with shipping carriers, she is making just enough to cover her expenses. She can keep three employees on payroll and her brand going. Not only does she want to see her goal through, but she also doesn't want to leave. Halpern holds a green card, but if she left the United States for Brazil, she wouldn't be able to come back. As a business owner, she couldn't get unemployment despite paying into it for her employees. She survived for six months on savings and the help of her boyfriend, plus the emotional support of a Whatsapp group of 200 restaurant owners all trying to navigate a global pandemic together. NYC's Chinatown In downtown Manhattan, Grace Young, a James Beard Award-winning cookbook author, has been chronicling the effects of the pandemic on NYC's Chinatown, the largest in the United States, spanning some 40 blocks and 150,000 people, for the past year. The area was one of the first hit during the pandemic, as the virus outbreak was linked to China. Customers immediately began avoiding the area, and some owners and businesses became victims of racist remarks, actions, and vandalism. In January 2020, two months before the lockdown began in Manhattan, Chinatown restaurants reported a steep drop in revenue, with some losing up to 80 percent of their business. Young says she was alarmed to hear that 59 percent of independently owned Chinese restaurants nationwide had ceased credit card SPRING "My fear is that if we don't protect Chinese mom and pop restaurants, in the future, we'll only have big chains."

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