After Hurricane Beryl, Houston Restaurants Strive to Recover

Days after Tropical Storm Beryl, a weather event initially classified as a Category 1 hurricane, slammed into Houston, much of Houston was left without power. Houstonians, left in record-breaking temperatures, clung to anything, desperate for nearby restaurants and businesses where they could charge their phones, eat hot food and cool off with air conditioning. Meanwhile, the businesses they usually rely on were also suffering.

Several local restaurants lost tens of thousands of dollars in a matter of days due to the power outage, which seemingly affected large swaths of the city indiscriminately. While Montrose restaurants like Doris Metropolitan steakhouse had access to power, restaurants just blocks away like Little’s Oyster Bar, Hugo’s, and the entire Goodnight Hospitality campus (March, the Marigold Club, Rosie Cannonball, Montrose Cheese & Wine) are still in the dark.

For Houston, this is the fourth devastating natural disaster in the past five years, including the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which closed many restaurants for months, and the massive freeze of 2021. In May, the city suffered Tropical Storm Derecho, a severe storm that left thousands without power. Many believe that Houston, the self-proclaimed energy capital of the world and a region no stranger to natural disasters, should have learned from this and prepared for another extreme weather event, while others have taken their frustrations out on energy provider Centerpoint. Restaurants, however, have had little time to process the situation as they scramble to recoup their losses. For many, it has required getting creative.

Downtown bar Angel Share, owned by Mary Ellen Angel, quickly reopened, expressing its frustration by emblazoning one of its martinis with the word “CenterPointless” — a dig at the energy company (the word had been scrawled in graffiti on a Houston underpass days before). East End Italian restaurant Mimo, which didn’t get its power back until Sunday, circulated a link to its Circolo del Vino wine club in hopes of getting memberships while its doors were closed. directed by Top Chef: Houston Finalist Evelyn Garcia hosted a walk-up-only pop-up at her Heights restaurant while it was still without lights or air conditioning, and Squable, who was still without power on Monday, July 15, hosted pop-ups at Refuge Cafe.

After five days without power, East End Mexican restaurant and cafe Cochinita & Co. stopped hosting outdoor pop-ups and finally reopened July 13 with limited hours and menus. Victoria Elizondo, chef-owner of the James Beard Award-nominated cafe, says she started worrying about financial losses midweek. She knew she would have to pay her employees, repurchase expired ingredients and products, and pay for repairs to her cooling equipment and refrigeration system. “I own and fund my business 100 percent with my own money and the support of my customers, so cash flow is very important. We don’t have that backstop that we can rely on to deal with emergencies. It may not be good business practice, and the goal is to eventually get there, but we don’t have any wiggle room,” Elizondo says. “Even one day of closure can have serious consequences for a business.”

Elizondo says she felt defeated at first. But when she picked up the phone at the restaurant at home, where she was fielding more than 100 calls a day, she realized: “I didn’t want to accept donations because I knew other people were hurting and it didn’t feel right,” she says. Instead, Elizondo wrote an Instagram post pitching the idea of ​​having customers buy gift cards, a way to pre-purchase their own or other people’s meals ahead of their scheduled visit. On the first day, Elizondo says Cochinita & Co. received $1,000 within hours. By the end of the weekend, the restaurant had received $10,000 in gift card sales. “I lost my mind because that covers most of the labor costs for the week, which was my main concern,” she says.

The Saturday after it reopened, the restaurant was packed, but elsewhere, Elizondo says she could still see Beryl’s effects. The Pasadena carniceria where Elizondo buys a specific chorizo, for example, was empty after much of its produce went bad. It also impacted Cochinita’s menu, but Elizondo worked around it. “I didn’t want to serve something that wasn’t what we serve,” says Elizondo, who says she makes a point of supporting small suppliers. “And I don’t want to buy chorizo ​​from HEB. I’d rather not carry it at all.”

In just one week, the Southern Smoke Foundation, the nonprofit run by James Beard Award-winning chef Chris Shepherd and executive director Lindsey Brown, has received more than 300 requests for funding and emergency assistance in just five days. Most of the funding is for damages, flooded cars, and fallen trees, a stark contrast to the requests received after Derecho, which were largely for lost wages or food supplies.

“I didn’t think Beryl was going to do this,” Brown said. “I thought we’d have a break after Derecho.”

Brown says Southern Smoke works hard to vet each applicant, which requires they have worked in the industry for six months at least 30 hours a week. Once vetted, applicants are ranked based on severity of need. Applicants who suffered damage so severe they can’t live in their home or get to work because their car was flooded will be processed first, Brown says, followed by businesses that have been closed the longest. Funds haven’t been distributed yet, but Brown says the first round of grants should be out by the end of this week. She already predicts more money will go to Beryl than Derecho, which saw 372 recipients totaling $330,600, with an average of $888 awarded per person.

Now, as restaurants reopen and try to return to some semblance of normalcy, many chefs and restaurateurs are trying to process what they can do differently in the face of another natural disaster. “I hate to say it, but when you go through something like this, you have to have Plan Bs and Plan Cs,” says Vanarin Kuch, the chef-owner of Koffeteria in East Downtown. Since the 2001 freeze, Kuch says the James Beard Award-nominated bakery has been more stable and can pay its employees in the event of an outage. Still, Koffeteria nearly moved to another restaurant to make up for the days lost after Beryl — but it got its power back on Saturday.

Before heading to Beryl, Kuch says he knew this time around that he had to clean out all the freezers and immediately turn off all the circuit breakers (a detail Kuch says he learned recently from Street to Kitchen after the power outage killed his electric oven). The long-term goal is to get a generator. “I took the initiative to go out there and do it,” Kuch says. “That’s the hard part: making the right decisions and getting the operation done.”

Elizondo says she’ll be reviewing her insurance policy to make sure she’s covered for anything that’s at risk in the event of bad weather, including ingredient losses. She also says she’ll think twice before restocking or purchasing certain items ahead of a predicted storm to avoid waste, and she knows it’s critical to create a contingency fund for emergencies. “We’re grateful for all the support. It’s just wonderful, but at the end of the day, we’re all hurting and we’re all going through a crisis, so I understand that not everyone is going to be able to afford it,” Elizondo says.

Still, it seems like support from other restaurants, chefs, and diners is essential to keeping Houston restaurants alive during tough times. At Cochinita’s pop-up, local chefs like Kuch and Joseph Boudreaux of Boo’s Burgers, a smash burger pop-up, could be seen among the dozens of diners who visited Elizondo after her Instagram plea for help. And when Koffeteria was looking for a place to relocate its bakery operations, Kuch says restaurants like Pudgy’s Fine Cookies and Winnie’s offered their space.

“It was nice to see a disaster naturally turn into a moment of mutual support,” Kuch says. “I feel like we need to lean on each other.”