“We had to transform our business overnight,” said Ryan Pernice, the founder of RO Hospitality, which manages three restaurants - Table & Main, Osteria Mattone, and Coalition Food and Beverage - in Roswell and Alpharetta, Georgia.
“We are not a restaurant anymore, we are a takeout and delivery company,” he told me via telephone before heading back to the kitchen at his flagship site to oversee orders and set up for Table & Aid, an initiative he had just launched to feed food insecure individuals in the Roswell area. Like many restaurants owners, Pernice has been assiduously navigating the complications of coronavirus in an effort to save his restaurants, retain as much of his staff as possible, and keep serving his customers. The story of his efforts is a window into the challenges that many local small business owners are facing, but also a prime example of how they are stepping up to support those in the community who have been even more impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Photo: Tracy Hoexter
A Changing Business Model
Pernice has hospitality in his blood. He’s worked in restaurants since age 13 and, after graduating from Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, made his way to Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group to work as the dining room manager at Maialino (Full disclosure: Pernice and I overlapped at Cornell from 2003 to 2005). In 2011, he moved back to his native Georgia and opened his first restaurant. Table & Main, along with his newer restaurants, quickly garnered a loyal customer base as well as consistent local and national accolades; as Conde Nast summed up in its review of Table & Main, “Fried chicken worth the 45-minute drive.” My wife and I dined at his flagship restaurant on a business trip in early 2018 - it was a fabulous and memorable meal.
Then COVID-19 hit.
Photo: Andrew Thomas Lee
Pernice had been preparing for disruption, but had to fundamentally reinvent his business overnight. “When Trump made his national address, encouraging people to limit gatherings to less than 10 people, that’s when I made the decision to implement the plan we had put together. Everyone on the team knew what their role was; we didn’t want to waste any time in mobilizing,” he said. He closed down all three restaurant dining rooms, consolidating operations in the largest kitchen at Osteria Mattone. He also created a single menu and worked to develop a to-go program as well as a “family meal” option to simplify ordering for his customers. While working 12-hour days with the team, Pernice was also spending any spare minute learning about and applying for emergency grants as well as starting conversations with his landlord, who helped by forgiving April’s rent.
Photo: Andrew Thomas Lee
There were many tough decisions. Pernice was forced to cut his staff from 120 employees to less than a third the size, doing his best to at least protect the jobs of a core group. “I had to make some really heart-wrenching calls” he told me. He ended up giving everyone, including the laid-off employees, a one-time cash bonus, recognizing that while it might not be enough, it was in keeping with the ethos of the company and a way that he could at least help cushion the uncertainty.
A Learning Curve
The Roswell community rallied behind RO Hospitality, in part due to Pernice’s effective community engagement and social media savvy; however, it didn’t all go according to plan.
The undertaking to combine staff, menus, and entire business practices took time to coalesce. “We literally had too many chefs in the kitchen. I needed to get people out of the petty drama and ensure they didn’t lose sight of the fact that we were fighting for the life and death of the company,” he told me. Initial take-out orders exceeded expectations, but also translated to long customer waits in the restaurant parking lot. At first, Pernice kept delivery in-house, but that led to reduced capacity. “We would get a huge order in Milton, which is about 25 minutes away, and of course we didn’t want to say no, but it meant that our general manager had to get in a car and drive almost an hour round trip.”
The team kept refining their model, learning from feedback and early results. “We were wrong on some things and made mistakes, but we did our best to learn from them and adapt,” Pernice said. He signed a delivery partnership with DoorDash to allow his staff to focus on other critical parts of the operation. He restructured the family-style menu and started updating the menu weekly instead of daily to streamline operations.
Pernice credits the hard work of his staff, the support of the Roswell community, the generosity of his landlord, and words of encouragement from friends and strangers as being instrumental to keeping RO Hospitality afloat.
Giving Back To The Community
Even as he was working night and day to rally his staff and be a visible presence for the community, Pernice wanted to do more.
In late March, he and his team launched a program called Table & Aid to offer free hot meals to those in need during the crisis.
“Our community has been tremendously generous with donations to help Table & Aid get started. This is one small way we wanted to give back to our friends and neighbors, particularly those hit hardest by the pandemic,” he said. In the first two weeks of the program, Table & Aid distributed over 1,850 meals, averaging 154 meals daily to people living in food-insecure households.
Last week, Pernice found a note that a guest had left after receiving a free meal. “Your generosity and compassion is greatly appreciated,” it read. “I have no income, no insurance, no family. People like you give me reason to continue hoping life will get better. Thank you and God Bless.”
That note hit home for Pernice. “Immediately, our efforts became very real. Tangible. Immediate. And close. The abstractions are gone. This is a more visceral hospitality. And I am humbled and grateful to experience the welling of emotion for being able to do this work,” he later wrote in a post to the restaurant’s community on Facebook. “I'm writing this message and posting this photo so you can see how directly you are touching peoples' lives. This work matters. And you have helped us do it. Thank you a million times over.”
When I got in touch with Pernice a few days ago, he was optimistic, but conceded that takeout orders had started to dip. He sounded unsure if the initial surge of support would hold up long enough to ride out the shelter in-place and social distancing recommendations.
He quickly added, “A leader can say anything except ‘I give up’. We’ll continue the fight.” Hopefully, so will millions of other local restaurants and small businesses.
