Before the pandemic, people waited in line for 2 1/2 hours to eat at Two Fish Crab Shack in Bronzeville. But in March 2020, business ground to an abrupt and frightening halt when Gov. JB Pritzker ordered non-essential workers to stay home to curb the spread of COVID-19.
“You go from having a full house with noise, doors slamming to complete silence,” said owner Yasmin Curtis, who opened her seafood restaurant in 2016. “It was dreadful, like mourning.”
Curtis was especially worried about the approximately 30 employees who relied on Two Fish for their livelihoods. “It was a heavy burden,” she said.
During the shutdown, Two Fish started offering carryout services for the first time. “You know when things are that dramatic, things will never go back to the same way,” Curtis said.
Restaurants in 2020 were hit by a perfect storm of challenges, including snarled supply chains, inflation that reached a near 40-year high, labor shortages and more costly safety regulations — not to mention a deadly virus. Five years later, many have since shuttered or never recovered.
But Curtis is an outlier. During the shutdown, she created frozen seafood bags that customers could pick up at the restaurant. Frozen crab legs and shrimp could be boiled and served at home with Two Fish’s special sauce.
In summer 2020, Curtis introduced her frozen seafood bags at a small marketplace event with Mariano’s. She sold 100 bags in 20 minutes. That year, she launched her frozen food business Two Fish Foods.
An executive at Kroger, the parent company of Mariano’s, took notice and helped refine Two Fish’s packaging. In January 2021, her products went on a trial run at four local Kroger stores; they sold out in one weekend. Curtis also became a manufacturer that year when she opened a seafood packing facility on the West Side.
Now, Two Fish products are available nationwide at Kroger, Walmart, Meijer, H.E.B, Harris Teeter and Pete’s Fresh Market.
Two Fish sells more than one million frozen packages annually. Curtis declined to share company revenue but said it has grown to a multi-million dollar business.
“I didn’t know I was creating a disruption in the seafood market,” she said.
Yet there have been plenty of challenges such as climbing costs for ingredients, supplies and labor at both businesses. Her restaurant, at 641 E. 47th St., is still open, but it’s not as bustling as it once was and hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Two Fish Crab Shack has about 14 employees, down from 30 at the start of the pandemic. The seafood facility has 27.
The Illinois Restaurant Association said “it’s still a very difficult time, as many face years of debt, higher food costs, supply issues and staffing challenges.”
“For every dollar a restaurant takes in, 95 [cents] to 97 cents goes right back into the food, employees and everything else that goes with running the place,” the association said. Margins are tight for restaurants even under normal circumstances, but in recent years, many are being squeezed more than before the pandemic.
As of November 2024, employment at Chicago’s full-service restaurants was 7.7% below its February 2020 level, amounting to 10,300 jobs lost, according to the Illinois Restaurant Association. Nationwide, employment at full-service restaurants was down 4% in the same time period, said the National Restaurant Association.
Food costs for the average U.S. restaurant have increased 29% and labor costs have jumped 31% since 2021, said the National Restaurant Association. And 43% of restaurant operators nationwide reported they were still carrying debt accumulated during the pandemic.
Curtis’ businesses face another obstacle — tariffs. She imports snow crab legs from Canada, which faces looming import tariffs of 25%. She estimates her overall ingredient costs have surged 50% in the last two months, amid the recent economic turmoil.
Before January, Curtis didn’t know tariffs were a threat for seafood or imports from Canada. “I didn’t think it was an industry that would be affected. Canada is our ally, our neighbor. I’ve always known them to be our friends,” she said.
In spite of challenges, she has ideas to expand and attract restaurant customers by offering specials.
Blind Faith
David Lipschutz, owner of Blind Faith Cafe in Evanston, remembers the lead-up to the shutdown.
He was catering an event in Highland Park, while absorbing news about the dangers of COVID-19. As he looked around the crowded room, he thought, “Wait a minute, what are we doing here?”
The early weeks of the pandemic were nerve-wracking for restaurant owners like Lipschutz. “There was not a restaurateur in the world that wasn’t calculating cash flow and expenses and wondering how [their] people are going to survive,” he said.
The pandemic tested the mettle of restaurants who “learned how to pivot more quickly as needed: tighten the menu, try out this to-go option, switch up vendors, do whatever it takes to stay in business and thrive again in the future,” the Illinois Restaurant Association said in an emailed statement.
Lipschutz said Blind Faith, established in 1979, was “one of the fortunate ones. For us to pivot was not that difficult.” Before the pandemic, it already did carryout and delivery then ramped up more services from DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub.
Blind Faith’s affluent customers had the means to order its healthy vegetarian offerings such as the shiitake walnut loaf, seitan marsala and macrobiotic plate. Its menu is higher-end but still at the right price for carryout unlike fine dining, which doesn’t translate well to takeout, Lipschutz said.
He also jumped at the chance to apply for a Paycheck Protection Program loan. When he got it, he “breathed a sigh of relief” because he could keep paying employees. Without that aid, “I believe half of restaurants would not have survived,” Lipschutz said.
But Blind Faith’s business has still not returned to pre-pandemic levels. Before COVID-19, 80% of customers dined in, but now sit-down business hasn’t risen above 65%, Lipschutz said.
The restaurant has reduced opening hours to adjust for fewer customers overall. Instead of closing at 10 p.m., it closes at 8:30 p.m. Pre-pandemic, Blind Faith seated customers until 9:30 p.m. on weekends. Now, people don’t come in after 8 p.m., he said.
Meanwhile, costs of ingredients and supplies have increased by about 25% to 30% over the past three years.
Blind Faith’s menu prices have crept up, but they don’t reflect the full extent of the restaurant’s higher expenses. “By no means have we passed that onto the customer. They would get sticker shock. We’re eating some of it ourselves,” he said.
Average U.S. menu prices increased 27.2% between February 2020 and June 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Restaurants are hiking menu prices to cope with higher costs but that contributes to people cutting back on dining out or ordering less.
Lipschutz said Blind Faith’s customers are spending less overall and are now more cost-conscious.
“They don’t buy dessert, or they’re splitting an entree or they don’t get a cocktail,” he said.
