Charting the restaurant recovery

We all know the foodservice industry is doing better but not nearly back to normal levels.

A new dataset from OpenTable shows the United States is down 27 percent from normal as of May 9, based on reservations for seated diners, but down less than 20 percent earlier in the week.

Globally, the restaurant business is down 30 percent based on that metric. Ireland’s restaurant business is down 100 percent due to a lockdown, while Germany (-95 percent) and Canada (-88 percent) see similar drops with national restrictions.

Australia is at 101 percent of normal, and it’s been above 100 percent nearly every day this spring.

OpenTable says it launched this State of the Industry site to show how the pandemic and lockdowns have affected restaurants around the globe.

It’s data from 2020 compared seated diners to 2019, and early 2021 to 2020. Starting March 11, 2021, it began comparison to 2019, rather than pandemic-affected data from 2020.