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One of my favorite restaurants a couple towns over has been excellent for years, decades. T was always crowded and noisy, well known by everyone I encountered. It became my favorites on road trips from college, continued being my favorite as I dated and eventually married. It was still my favorite as I raised my kids to teenagers.
Then I really hadn’t gone since COViD, so my kids took me for Fathers Day this year. It should have been a red flag that the place apwas empty, quiet. Most of the microbrews were gone, service was horrible, half the menu was missing, they no longer put corn bread on the table. Then we got the food, and instead of home made everything, it all tasted like from a Sysco menu. They. O longer even had real plates or flatware. This all-star bbq place might as well be just dashing ketchup on top of microwaved food and opening a can of beans. What the heck happened?
Aww man, Play sounds like it was awesome what a horrible loss.
Covid destroyed a lot of restaurants. Without intimate details of the actual location and history I can only make guesses.
They might have changed hands due to money or an older generation owner might have passed. They might have just changed their business plan all together to stay open.
When COVID hit the first thing that generally happened was the wait staff was let go. Normally for a business that's not a death sentence, but when it happened it happened everywhere and servers were more or less forced to find jobs not serving food. All the skilled labor exiting the work pool's a big deal. It's still rare, 5 years later, to find a restaurant that doesn't have a now hiring sign out front.
Now you no longer have customer volume but you still have a fair amount of wages. You can raise prices but people aren't going to put up with that a lot of them are out of work. You stop ordering the more expensive ingredients. You cut back portion sizes and stop freebies.
Congratulations you're still operating but you're only operating on the name you made for yourself your current menu is garbage. This is the end downward spiral phase. A mom and pop shop will barely recognize their customer base disappearing. You're not going to go back there now, your kids probably aren't going to go back there now. They're going to struggle for three generations from alienating their current customer base.
Even if they could run a marketing campaign and get people to try them again, they're not making enough money to rebuild the shop as it previously was. At this point you either sell it off or take on a financial partner who now has say in your business. If the financial partner doesn't know what they're doing with restaurants you'll have a hard time convincing them to return the place to its former glory.
The best they can probably hope for is that someone like you comes along with fond memories of the place buys them out at a discount managers to hire a respectable cook and a decent weight staff and pours money into the place to bring it back to where it was. Assuming it was even operating at a reasonable profit back then...