DENVER (KDVR) — March 16 marks one year since Colorado restaurants were first ordered to shut down their dining rooms.
“I will never forget it,” Barolo Grill owner Ryan Fletter told FOX31. “I just remember that night closing the restaurant and locking the doors and I just cried.”
Restaurants across the state faced unprecedented changes and were forced to quickly adapt.
“That first week was pretty challenging because we just really didn’t know if we were even going to make it past a week,” Fletter said.
Between to-go service, outdoor only dining and reduced capacity indoor service, Barolo Grill finally began to figure out how to navigate doing business in a pandemic.
“We kind of weathered through this year, we army-crawled through this,” Fletter said.
Not every restaurant can say the same. According to the Colorado Restaurant Association, around 1,000 restaurants closed either permanently or temporarily. The Whiskey Biscuit in Englewood is one of them.
“The lowest of the low was right before the first PPP loan,” co-owner Aaron Hatle said, referring to the paycheck protection program.
Hatle and his co-owners made the difficult decision to fully close the restaurant from April 1-June 1, 2020. They have been open for business since.
“It breaks my heart because we have a lot of friends whose places did not survive and that is so sad,” he said.
Between help from the state and federal government, vaccines and warmer weather, both Hatle and Fletter say they feel like hope is on the horizon for the restaurant industry.
“Now, I’m not going to say there’s not the uncertainty but I feel like there’s light at the end of the tunnel,” Hatley said.
“We all feel that spring and summer it looks good with a toe curl,” Fletter said. “Italy just closed again and other parts of the world, so it’s kind of feeling a little Groundhog Day today.”
If circumstances remain the same, “approximately 50 percent of restaurants surveyed are telling us they have to consider closing permanently within six months,” the Colorado Restaurant Association said.
That is a statistic Fletter knows personally.
“I have two restaurants and one of them has been massively maimed downtown and is on life support,” he said. “So I feel what so many restaurants are feeling.”