Go Big, Think Small

According to Yelp, 26,000 restaurants have closed in the last five months (prior to July) and 60 percent of those closures have been permanent. A recent article in the LA Times, downtown LA is a ghost town and most of us have heard the dire predictions for New York City.

The pre-pandemic convenience of urban life has been diminished by a dwindling array of amenities. Without access to museums, bars, entertainment and restaurants, the walls of a 500 square foot apartment can start to close in on you. 

Yet, it may be the size of our restaurants that do them in. It’s not hard to understand why take-out has flourished while eat-in and fine dining have suffered. Let’s face it, all you need for take-out is a kitchen and a walk-up window, the rest is just unnecessary overhead. That model existed pre-pandemic in food trucks, but examples are rare otherwise.

Yet, smaller retail storefronts make for a better urban space. We’d all be better off if there were more small spaces available for small businesses.

There’s a large space that housed an upscale Italian restaurant near my home in Dallas. I’d venture six or more street-facing doughnut shops, Chinese take-outs, sandwich shops, pizza-by-the-slice places could fit in the space and probably wouldn’t have been impacted by the pandemic. Someone might point out that a coffee shop there also closed pre-pandemic, but that space was also unnecessarily large (not to mention dark). 

We don’t know much about the future of sit-down eateries, but perhaps it’s time to rethink the 3,000sf restaurant and plan for smaller spaces, more outdoor seating (or large screened openings to interior seating) and walk-up windows that severely limit how much restaurant workers are exposed to danger just to make a living . 

Here are some businesses I’ve spotted over the years that operate in very small spaces.

Donut shop in Dallas

Cupcake Trailer in Austin

Coffee Shop in Vancouver, Canada

Food Trucks in Portland, Oregon

Coffee Box in El Paso

I couldn’t find my photo of Holy Spirit Espresso in Santa Fe, but here’s a Yelp link.