A New Normal

“There’s a significant amount of chaos with a full dining room … it’s almost like a high you get managing it, and serving it and pulling it off,” says Delane Blackstock, the co-founder and owner of the Portland, Oregon, pizzeria Dove Vivi. “The phone’s ringing and people are at the counter and it’s a little bit nutty, and sometimes people are wily or frustrated, but there’s nothing like a busy night and pulling it off.”

The food industry’s importance in Portland is undeniable. The city was described by The New York Times as a “full-fledged dining destination” that has “emerged from its chrysalis.” Portlanders don’t have to be involved in the industry to appreciate its significance — eating with others is an integral building block of any community. “People come and create energy together,” says Bryan Steelman, founder and co-owner of ¿Por Qué No? Taqueria, a Mexican restaurant chain with two Portland locations. For both Blackstock and Steelman, a lively, communal environment is a key element of their restaurants’ identities. The same can be said for the majority of Portland restaurants.

This social aspect of restaurants was lost when the COVID-19 virus reached Oregon. While pre-existing limitations on public gatherings and guidelines for social distancing had already restricted restaurants’ in-person business, Governor Kate Brown’s executive order in March 2020 required all restaurants to close their in-house dining areas, making the adoption of delivery services a near necessity for restaurants’ survival.

“During the pandemic, it’s like everything became a transaction … We all looked at each other as vectors of a disease, and it just killed the magic of what a restaurant is supposed to be. And it took a long time to get that back,” says Steelman. Front-of-house workers, for example, whose jobs revolve completely around the community, saw their positions become obsolete. “To provide customer service,” Steelman says, “to provide a joyous place for people to interact and engage in this ephemeral art form of food and all the magic that that brings … I missed that so much when we were in the middle of COVID.” Blackstock says that her sister shared a similar sentiment: “she manages people and works the dining room, but she’s like, ‘I feel like this is so depressing. I’m in a ghost kitchen. The heart, the spirit is gone. It’s just so sad.’”

While Dove Vivi never closed for even one day due to COVID, Blackstock has noticed a lasting shift in the restaurant’s workplace environment. Doing exclusively delivery order preparation during the pandemic, the rush was gone and their work was more dull. Like beating a kindergartener in basketball, the rewarding sense of satisfaction is diminished when the stakes are so low. “I miss people,” she says. “We’re in the service industry, serving people. It’s a challenge, but it’s a thrill, and it’s something really meaningful and kind of nourishing.”

For nearly 15 years, Steelman had been uninterested in using delivery services at his restaurant. While COVID-19 forced his hand, it didn’t fully change his mind. Steelman believes food is always best in-house, served directly from the kitchen — by ordering for home delivery, not only is some quality of freshness lost, but the food is also put in the hands of a third party before it reaches the customer. Until June 2020, when the City of Portland temporarily capped the amount delivery services could charge restaurants at 10% of the order’s total cost, those third-party services were allowed to charge as much as they pleased. They often charged 30% or more, making the option of home delivery financially impractical or even impossible for many restaurants to offer. “They’re charging 30% and (if) your profit margin is 10% or less, it’s costing money to do the delivery,” says Steelman. “It didn’t make any sense.”

Blackstock has a similar view, describing the delivery services’ business strategies as “really predatory.” She says that despite how third-party services may market themselves, virtually any possible benefit is outweighed by the price tag.

The end goal of delivery service companies is unclear to Blackstock and many other restaurant owners: their high charges make it difficult for restaurants to earn money, and the delivery companies themselves keep going out of business. The delivery company Blackstock had partnered with shut down because they had only been charging restaurants 15% — not enough to compete with the profits of other, more expensive, companies charging upwards of 20%. “I was having a conceptual problem trying to understand what is even going on here. They’re not making money, and we’re not making money, and it seems like they’re super bad at providing a service,” Blackstock says. Additionally, when they received complaints from their clients about high service prices, delivery companies were often dismissive of the restaurants’ grievances. Blackstock says the third-party services simply told her to “raise your prices.”

In 2020, the owner of AJ’s NY Pizzeria in Manhattan, Kansas, realized that his pizzas were being sold on DoorDash — which he had not applied for — for a fraction of their original price. They had been receiving multiple negative Yelp reviews from customers who had received cold or incorrect pizzas. Over multiple weeks, the owner and his friend Ranjan Roy — who wrote about the experience in his newsletter “Margins” — decided to try ordering his own $24 pizza for $16. By experimenting with different trade setups, they reached a point where they could earn as much as $75 in profit by ordering toppingless pizzas. According to Roy, DoorDash never caught on. He then critiques the industry as a whole, saying that it harms all parties involved — delivery platforms, restaurants, drivers and customers. “If capitalism is driven by a search for profit,” Roy writes, “the food delivery business confuses the hell out of me … Isn’t business supposed to solve problems?”

Ultimately, Blackstock sees third-party delivery services’ relationship with restaurants as “parasitic,” exploiting the businesses as a means of making a profit. Repeated poor experience with delivery services has since led Blackstock to stop using them, instead having customers place orders on the Dove Vivi website and pick them up directly from the restaurant.

Steelman, however, works solely with Caviar, which was recently acquired by DoorDash, and recently opened a to-go window at the Mississippi location for customers to pick up takeout orders. While there are negatives to takeout orders, they have allowed ¿Por Qué No? to stay busy during the winter months and keep providing benefits to their employees. “(The customers) might not go when it’s raining, they may not make the effort mid-week to go out to eat,” he says. “But just grabbing something to go real fast is easy … We just made it so much easier, because (to-go orders are) such a large part of our business now.”

The restaurant industry is extremely vulnerable to cultural and economic changes, and must maintain dynamic, flexible business models to stay afloat. To Blackstock and Steelman, it’s just a matter of keeping up.

“We’re pretty adaptable. When we first decided to open in (Portland), it was because ultimately, my husband and I could do it ourselves,” Blackstock says. “We knew that even in the worst of times, when you come down to two people working 16 hours a day, we could still make it work. So, we just keep adapting, but some versions are more exciting than others.”