Boy, these are hard times for restaurants in the U.S., particularly for Indian restaurants that are starting to see long and dark shadows fall over them.
Real hard times, folks.
Market researcher NPD has just put out a report that traffic for casual dining restaurants in the U.S. declined 4% in this year’s spring quarter ending May 2009 compared to the same period last year while total restaurant traffic fell 2.6% for the spring quarter, the sharpest decline in traffic since 1981.
Even fast food restaurants have not been immune to the recession and are seeing a 2% decline in traffic.
NPD reports that the decline is across the board, meaning that traffic is down for all of main categories of restaurants i.e fast food, casual dining and mid-scale and down for all meal occasions – morning meal, lunch and supper.
Apparently, restaurant owners’ misery is keeping pace with the unemployment. No surprise, indeed.
NPD is not the only one talking gloom and doom.
Last week, Zagat said pretty much the same thing in its survey finding that more New Yorkers are cooking and entertaining at home. Zagat reported that of the 6,807 New York foodies who responded to its survey, 61% said they are cooking at home more since the economic downturn, and 56% are entertaining less outside the home.
Indian Restaurants – Blood On the Ground
Folks, we see a carnage ahead for Indian restaurants in the U.S.
We are already starting to see smaller crowds in some of the Indian restaurants we visit.
But then most Indian restaurants in the U.S. are pathetic pieces of shit that have no business calling themselves restaurants in the first place.
We know of at least four Indian restaurants that have closed in New Jersey in recent times: Tanjore, Malabar, Vasanta Bhavan and Chennai Ponnusamy.
Tanjore in North Brunswick was a decent restaurant that we’ve visited on a few occasions. We enjoyed our meal at Chennai Ponnusamy too. Malabar in Piscataway was a restaurant that we’d been planning to visit for quite some time and when we finally did recently the place was closed. As for Vasanta Bhavan in Hamilton, we’re surprised it even lasted this long.
By our reckoning, the next shoe to drop will be New York Indian restaurants.
In fact, the blood bath for NYC Indian restaurants may have already begun.
Satinder Sharma:
Feeling the Heat
A short while ago when we called Bombay Grill and Purima, both NYC restaurants that we’ve dined at to different degrees of pleasure, we got a recorded message that the telephone lines have been ‘temporarily disconnected.’ Go figure. Continue reading »
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