As New Orleans summer drags, dining out just once or twice now can help local restaurants

Despite the name, Mammoth Espresso is not very big. But this small coffee house in downtown New Orleans made an outsized impact this week when its owners decided to give all of a full day’s revenue to its staff.

It was an acknowledgment that a very slow summer makes it hard for employees who rely on tips to earn a living. Thursday saw the shop packed with customers, and orders for coffee and specialty drinks stacked a dozen cups deep at one point.

The move was also a message that resonated much more broadly than the espresso bar.

“We’ve been losing money pretty much all summer, so going a day without revenue will add to that,” Mammoth co-owner Jonathan Riethmaier told me. “But hopefully it will draw more attention to small businesses all over the city and how they need help.”

That message spoke to many who work in the hospitality realm, and plenty who appreciate what these businesses do for the hospitality culture of New Orleans. There’s something simple we can do to help, as often as we can muster, and that’s to be the cavalry. Go out and support right now.

Cruelest month gets crueler

Forget the T.S. Eliot line about April being the cruelest month. In New Orleans that title belongs to September.

School is back in session, football season is here and the national discourses posit that after Labor Day summer is over. But in the New Orleans hospitality business, September is the worst of summer.

That’s why this year the citywide Coolinary dining deal program, which normally runs through August, extends two weeks longer to Sept. 15.

That’s also why more restaurants than ever signed up this year, nearly 150, including many for the first time. They’re trying anything to get customers in their doors, both to ring up business and to keep some money flowing to employees who get by on tips.

Coolinary has been one long-running tool to help restaurants through late summer, which everyone knows is when tourism and conventions trail off. Veterans of the business save money in the good times, knowing these times are coming.

But managing for that has gotten harder. Higher costs for food and labor are factors at play across the country, changing the hospitality business model.

The local twist of the knife is the astronomical increase in property costs from the state’s insurance crisis and higher taxes. This hits landlords, operators, staff and the customer base as well, all contending with the same spiraling costs for their mortgages or rents, cutting into dining out money.

Then comes summer, and this summer has felt especially slow. The result turns up in the sad drumbeat of closures.

That means this is the time when supporting local businesses with intention can do the most good.

Restaurants’ best customers

This is the time when restaurants need to see their best customers, the returning regulars who do form personal relationships with their favorite restaurants and bars and the people in them (and their favorite coffee shops, and wine shops, and brewery taprooms; the list could go on).

That’s what keeps them in the fight right now, and keeps their staff with some semblance of income.

My advice is not to take any restaurant you value for granted as they try to navigate these times.

Long term, it will take more than a meal out here or there in your linen and seersucker to change that picture. But right now, even for the next few weeks, doing just that will make a tangible difference in someone’s day, someone’s night, and maybe someone’s season.

There are so many good things ahead. Taylor Swift is set to basically take over New Orleans in late October. The Super Bowl is coming in February. Big meetings and conventions are coming back, with five-figure attendance events beginning later in September. They’ll bring many people who have heard all about the New Orleans restaurant scene, with its depth and richness.

Here at the bedraggled tail end of summer, it is the locals who have the biggest say in keeping it that way.