As restaurants in Georgia welcomed diners back on Monday, Bo Peabody, a member of the Georgia Restaurant Association called Georgia “a dress rehearsal for the entire country. If this goes well, I think most restaurants in Atlanta will be open by the middle of May. If it doesn’t, then I think the whole country will be set back by a month or two. That’s the risk.” For those that reopened, it was not life as normal. Restaurants are now required to adhere to a set of 39 guidelines laid out by the state government that includes keeping a log with every customer’s first and last name and contact phone number that must be maintained by the restaurant and kept for 30 days in case it’s needed for contact tracing. All employees must wear fabric face masks and customers are encouraged to wear them as well, unless they are eating. At the Waffle House chain restaurants, and more than twelve other restaurants in the Atlanta metro area, the diners who ventured out did so with caution. At the Savannah Waffle House, regular customer Corey Brooks ordered a waffle and pork chops and noted how quiet the normally bustling restaurant was. He is still working from home and still thinks it’s too soon to return to the office or get a haircut. “This would be the only restaurant I would come and sit in,” Brooks said. “I know the people here.” While most of the restaurants reported that the customers who did come in thanked them for being open...they said it was, unfortunately, really slow. Many eateries, on the other hand, have opted to remain closed amid safety concerns and community backlash. “I, as a chef and restaurateur, refuse to have the people I employ and work with used as sacrificial lambs for an economic uptick that is far from guaranteed anyway,” writes Hugh Acheson, chef and owner of several restaurants in Georgia, in the Washington Post. While Hugh Acheson, chef-owner of Five & Ten in Athens and Empire State South and By George in Atlanta, also voiced his opposition in a tweet: “I am the leader of my restaurants. I will say when we open. It will be when I feel it is safe for those I employ, my family and my customers. No one tells me when to open. Period. And not Monday.” And Bob Amick, founder and CEO of Concentrics restaurant group that operates three restaurants in Atlanta said, “The big question is, when will people get over their fear? When will they feel it’s safe enough to dine out?” Many operators agree that the customers remain a wild card in the reopening scenario. There’s no doubt that people are anxious to go out to eat, but while you can control the environment and your employees, “You can’t control what customers do,” says McCarthy of Miller Union. “One customer can sneeze because of an allergy, and you’ll create a riot in the restaurant.” He cites LA County’s decision to flag restaurants with COVID-19 cases. “It could be the customer’s fault, but that would mean the death of your restaurant.” So...although many Georgia operators are starting to feel pressured to reopen, there are many experienced voices in the industry advising against opening prematurely. If you don’t reopen properly, it can permanently damage your business. Their advice: There is importance in being second and learning from other’s mistakes.

The coronavirus crisis is forcing all consumers to adopt new habits, and poll data from a recent survey by AMC Global, a market research firm, indicates that some of those behaviors may have long-lasting impacts for restaurants well after the current COVID-19 threat has passed. According to this recent survey, 45% of consumers said that they are currently eating less fast food than they normally would, and they expect to be much less reliant on takeout after the pandemic is over. At the same time, 33% of the consumers polled reported that they are baking more than they typically had, and 32% said that they also plan to make more home-cooked meals after the virus passes. While social distancing rules have definitely forced people to spend more time in their homes...and in their kitchens, many reputable sources predict that people will remain as busy and as lazy as ever once the pandemic is over. They do not foresee home cooking having a radical and lasting resurgence. Yelp’s Coronavirus Impact Report found that after the pandemic passes, many consumers actually plan to place a greater focus on eating local, with 38% of consumers reporting that they will support local businesses more in the future. There’s no doubt that millions of young people who have been eating out since the day they left high school will become more comfortable in the kitchen and will have the tools and ingredients to whip something up when they next hear a rumble in their stomach. But...there are clearly everyday things people miss, took for granted, and can't wait to have back after the coronavirus. So, restaurateurs take heart, according to a report from ABC News, “As everyone resorts to cooking at home or ordering takeout, the idea of sitting down for a meal, prepared by chefs in a professional kitchen sounds like a dream!”

Every day across the United States, weary travelers and truck drivers pull off the highway and into rest stations, where they step out to stretch, take a break from their journeys, and eat a hot meal. It’s a quaint picture. Too quaint, if you’re Elon Musk. Musk’s idea — building a novelty throwback restaurant at a Tesla Supercharger location — gives an interesting glimpse into how an electric vehicle future might reconfigure the often-derided yet classically American rest stop experience. “We can just have the menu pop up as soon as you put the car into park,” Musk said on Twitter when asked how patrons would order. There would be collectible medals for different Supercharger restaurants, as well as “an outdoor screen that plays a highlight reel of the best scenes in movie history”— so it would be a part drive-in theater as well. Tesla put in an official application with the city of Santa Monica, CA to build the project. Whether it will go forward is anyone’s guess. But the Tesla brand, name and MSRP on its vehicles alone would seem to give the re-imagined rest stop a real shot. For nearly a century, the rest stop was an American dining tradition — not a destination itself, but a place to stop for a quick bite on your way elsewhere. A few even had drive-in movies or wait staff on roller skates. Rest stops became iconic American landmarks that dotted the nation’s major highway routes. In recent years, however, cash-strapped transportation agencies have been shutting down rest areas across the nation, including Florida, Michigan, Ohio, and South Dakota, along with an initiative to do so in Connecticut. Simultaneously, Tesla just added over 2,000 new Superchargers during the second half of 2019, reaching over 15,000 total Superchargers worldwide. If Musk’s flagship operation in Santa Monica succeeds at rekindling national affection for the rest stop, the infrastructure is already in place for rapid expansion. In addition, many existing state-funded rest stops are now being revitalized with private funds. Delaware, for example, recently contracted with airport retail operator HMSHost to operate a new 42,000 sq ft welcome center on I-95, featuring dining and shopping options for travelers. Combined with Tesla’s existing and planned charging stations, the foundation for a new generation of roadside restaurants continues to grow. While Musk moves ahead with his experiment in Santa Monica, developers across the nation have an enormous opportunity to follow suit and turn their roadside rest areas into tourist magnets.

It’s a fact...in the U.S., between 30-40% of food is wasted. Every day Americans waste enough food to fill the Rose Bowl! Restaurants across the country are beginning to take notice. San Diego does not yet have a zero-waste restaurant, but Chef Davin Waite and his wife Jessica aim to be the city’s first with their upcoming restaurant, The Plot. At the same time, Chef JoJo Ruiz has convinced the Hotel Del Coronado to buy fish from local, sustainable fishermen and women for its new restaurant, Serea. Around the world there are a handful of restaurants that are also pushing the zero-waste, trash-free business model. In 2019, Frea in Berlin, Germany became the world’s first vegan and zero-waste restaurant, with the restaurant Silo in the UK doing the same. A project called Restauranglabbet in Sweden is using a combination of tech, science, academic research, and design to create a futuristic, waste-free restaurant, while establishments around the world are experimenting with ways to do zero-waste ‘cooking’ using all parts of plants that are sourced locally. If this all sounds terribly expensive, it is! While the concept might today be unattainable for most businesses, this wildly expensive and rather inconvenient model for a restaurant could actually pave the way for more affordable solutions in the future — ones that other restaurants could incorporate into their own operations. It’s not unlike Tesla. The company’s high-performance, all-electric cars have historically come with a price tag that’s out of the question for most buyers, due in part to the vehicles’ high-tech design and expensive components. But, by enticing those who could afford the cars to come up with the cash, Tesla has created a demand for this sort of vehicle that’s having a ripple effect on the entire auto industry. Automakers, once reluctant to dabble in the world of all-electric vehicles, are now coming to market with their own offerings. Meanwhile, the demand Tesla created eventually enabled the company make a more affordable (although still expensive) model whose components could be easier and cheaper for other carmakers to iterate. When it comes to restaurants, your average mom-and-pop eatery will probably not be able to pay $800 to recycle its cooking oil, but the mere fact that such an option exists could lead some company to come up with a cheaper solution and then some of the elements that are introduced will help to move the industry forward towards a more sustainable way of doing business...just think “Tesla”.

Friendly's went bankrupt, and Subway is closing 500+ locations. But even as fast food and casual dining stalwarts struggle, people haven't stopped eating out — in fact, they're spending more at restaurants and bars than ever. Where they choose to go, however, is fundamentally shifting. “Fast food” is no longer just greasy burgers and fries. It’s a perfect espresso shot pulled in record time by a fully robotic barista. And “casual dining” is a far cry from a family meal at Applebee’s. It might mean a night out with friends at a food hall that doubles as an event space or visiting a restaurant that has meals for you and your dog. As many of yesterday’s casual dining brands are dying, it’s not because millennials “don’t eat out.” Americans dine out more than ever before. The National Restaurant Association reported annual restaurant sales of $799B, close to 48% of the total amount that Americans spent on food, in 2017. And that’s not a new development. In the past decade, restaurant and bar purchases have grown at twice the rate of general retail spending. Market share is simply shifting away from big chains that haven’t successfully innovated, flowing instead to new models for creating and selling food to customers. Demand for inventive, exciting meals is also becoming more geographically dispersed, moving beyond New York and Los Angeles to smaller cities, while purchasing power has shifted to diners ages 22 — 36. This age bracket seeks meals that are healthful, gentler on the environment, and aesthetically pleasing. While many of these models target millennials, who now make up the majority of the workforce in the United States, others (like Tesla’s Supercharger Drive-In) cut across generations to target all types of affluent customers. QSR magazine (Quick-Service and Fast Casual Restaurant News and Information) has predicted that in the next 10–20 years, what they have started calling “Fast Casual 2.0”, will change the restaurant industry as much as the original fast-casual category did in the last decade—if not more.