Content area
Full Text
Russian Tea Room latest casualty of economically plagued sector
Scenes from a troubled economy during the restaurant industry's long, hot summer of 2002:
Scene One: When bartenders begin their shifts at Good Life Downtown, an upscale sports bar in Boston's financial district, they immediately turn on the televisions - not to watch last night's sports highlights but to catch the latest score on Wall Street from the financial networks
Scene Two: In the affluent resort destination and retirement mecca of Boca Raton, Fla., where summer historically is soft for finedining operators, some restaurants have cut back to three-night-aweek operating schedules.
Scene Three: Sobs from guests and servers flowed freely with the passing of the famed Russian Tea Room in New York after a 60-year run, whose end was blamed on slow customer traffic and excessive operating costs.
Scene Four: Atlanta restaurant impresario Pano Karatassos said he is "delighted" when he sees guests ordering as many as three appetizers instead of an entre if it brings them back and if that is the way they avoid "sticker shock" in a soft economy.
Scene Five: In reporting his company's better-than-expected second-quarter results,Applebee's chief executive, Lloyd Hill, cited stock shock among customers while telling securities analysts about "erratic" buying behavior in June and July, when his chain's blue-collar loyalists started pinching pennies and giving up extra drinks, appetizers and desserts.
Amid a flurry of conflicting data and other industry reports about the economy in general and the restaurant industry in particular, the one description about the summer of 2002 that most agree upon is that it will not be remembered as one of the restaurant industry's best, especially in fine dining.
Despite a widely endorsed theory that consumers are unwilling to forgo luxurious dining experiences - a point of view recently expressed by noted Chicago chefowner Charlie Trotter at the Aspen Food and Wine Classic - a number of broader economic trends are challenging that contention.
Perhaps the most disturbing is the consensus of several respected economists that the nation may be headed toward a "double-dip" recession - a rare phenomenon in which the economy backslides twice within a year. Such a relapse has not occurred in more than 20 years, the only time it happened in...