Fresno restaurant goes back to takeout only, citing omicron, staffing. Will others follow?
Update: Ramen vs. Pho has reopened its dining room.
Fresno restaurant Ramen vs. Pho has closed its dining room and gone back to doing only takeout and delivery orders.
The little restaurant on West Shaw Avenue cited COVID-19 and other issues – including the labor shortage – for the decision.
Will others follow? Especially as the new omicron variant arrives, while the delta variant continues to spread, and the region sees a potential holiday surge of cases as families gather for the holidays?
Hopefully not, said Raul Gutierrez Jr., owner of Papi’s Mex Grill and president of the Fresno chapter of the California Restaurant Association.
He hasn’t heard of any other restaurant doing this. As a business owner, he said restaurants pay rent and hopefully can use their dining space to bring in income, he said.
And the state hasn’t shown any indication that it will go back to mandated dining room closures.
But Gutierrez said he’s also not surprised to see Ramen vs. Pho making such a move.
“I think you’re going to have a lot of businesses where they take a position of being careful with themselves and the staff,” he said.
A tangle of COVID-19, the staffing shortage and rising expenses is driving many decisions in the Fresno restaurant world lately.
Why takeout only?
Ramen vs. Pho is a father-daughter owned restaurant that opened in 2019, serving both the Japanese and Vietnamese soups mentioned in its name. It has a relatively small dining room.
In an Instagram post, the restaurant explained the switch to take-out only, which started Dec. 2.
“Due to the new covid variant we will be taking appropriate measures and doing our part in preventing the spread of the Covid 19 virus,” it said.
In a message to The Bee, owner Keysone Hatzidakis explained that she doesn’t want to overburden the already small staff. The restaurant has six employees working during a typical dine-in shift, with two shifts a day and 15 people working total, including her.
When two or more people are out sick, operating the restaurant gets tough, she said.
Those employees need to test negative for COVID-19 before they come back to work, which can take days, she noted. And with flu season approaching and symptoms of flu or colds often the same as coronavirus, the restaurant could easily end up with half its staff out awaiting test results, she said.
“You don’t want to overwork the remaining staff. You risk them becoming unhappy, feeling overworked, and you risk losing them,” Hatzidakis said. “So my decision to temporarily close dine-in is to keep my staff happy and safe.”
It’s a temporary move, she said, and acknowledges that it will put a dent in sales.
“But we need everyone healthy and safe in order to fully function as a restaurant,” she said.
She’s hoping people continue to order via the restaurant’s website for pickup, or via UberEats or Grubhub.
The switch was met with mixed reactions on Ramen vs. Pho’s Instagram page.
Some customers praised the restaurant for looking out for its community. Others pointed out that ramen and pho just don’t taste the same by the time you get them home.
The labor shortage
Why not just hire more people?
All businesses have been struggling to find and keep good staff, Hatzidakis said. Small businesses have hard time competing with wages of other restaurants that are raising them, she said.
Chains like Chick-fil-A are paying some employees $18, for example.
“How do small mom and pops compete with that?” Gutierrez said.
Throw in the rising cost of supplies and food – some things have doubled in price, he said – and whether or not to pass expenses along to the consumer, and there’s a lot of challenges for restaurants right now.
“It’s just a very tough market to exist in right now,” he said.
This story was originally published December 9, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
