SoPo Restaurant Sales Down 88% in Week After Sandy

It doesn't take a rocket scientist?or, perhaps more accurately, a market analyst?to understand pretty immediately that business was down for Manhattan restaurants immediately after Sandy hit at the end of October. But just how bad was it? For all of Manhattan, restaurant sales were down 55 percent in the week immediately after Sandy, according to numbers from the industry analysis company Avero.

Of course, some restaurants were affected worse than others. In that first week, the downtown restaurants of SoPo lost 88.3 percent of their average weekly revenue. (Of course, sales would have been down 100 percent if not for the efforts of chefs and employees cooking in the dark.) The Midtown and Uptown restaurants that never lost power still saw a 15 percent decline in sales, though that hit seems to be simply from so many closing the actual day of the storm. Per the Avero data, restaurants that didn't lose power had above-average nights on Friday and Saturday, and through the week the dinner and late-night business was higher than normal. Also: booze sales were up 10 percent.

And what about the SoPo restaurants that were able to reopen immediately after the power came back on? On that first Saturday, restaurant sales were still less than two-thirds of their normal level. So if anyone's wondering why, even for Manhattan, things are still not quite normal, here are the numbers.
· Avero Index™ Shows Hurricane Sandy Causes a 55 Percent Decline in Manhattan Restaurant Sales [Press Release]
· All Coverage of Hurricane Sandy [~ENY~]
Katz's Deli during the blackout. [Photo]