It’s been five years since Texas shut down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. A lot of businesses suffered — hotels, movie theaters, concert venues, theme parks, and of course, restaurants.
In North Texas, 18% of restaurants closed between March 2020 and March 2021, according to the Texas Restaurant Association. Many still mourn the eateries that are no longer with us.
But Sarah Blaskovich, senior food reporter at the Dallas Morning News, said predictions for how many restaurants would close were much higher.
“We thought that in Texas, 30% of restaurants might close. Nationwide, some of those numbers were as high as 50%. It was a catastrophic time that first year of COVID,” she said.
“Restaurants did continue to close because of COVID and we can tell some of those sad stories. We all remember our favorites, but also so many hundreds of restaurants opened every year that we never saw a dip in restaurant numbers, which is a shock.”
Blaskovich said certain types of restaurants did better than others in the first year or more of the shutdown.
“Anecdotally, I’ll say that the middle- and high-level restaurants that cost more, that take more time for people to come sit down, tended to struggle,” she said. “We saw drive-thru places really thrive. We saw pizza delivery thrive, especially in that first year or two.
On the whole, restaurants across the board did struggle to live through COVID. But those that made those ‘pandemic pivots’ did see success. And then more to the point, we saw so many brand new places open.”
Blaskovich split the type of restaurants that opened in the last five years in North Texas into three categories. The first was what she called “The Insider” — someone from the Dallas area.
“My example here was a company called Duro Hospitality. They now own five high-end restaurants, the kind of places you spend hundreds of dollars on an anniversary dinner at. They opened four of those five in North Texas in the last five years of COVID,” she said.
“This is unprecedented and it sort of flies in the face of the idea that fine dining is dead, because this company found real estate plays and they found service models and exciting food that Dallas people still want to pay for, even after a massive health scare.”
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The second category of restaurant success story Blaskovich catalogued she called “The Outsider” — out-of-towners moving to Texas to try their luck in the restaurant game.
“New York and California restaurateurs could find good real estate in DFW,” she said, “They moved in here where they could do business in Texas even if they maybe couldn’t do it in their own home states.”
The third kind of person Blaskovich analyzed was one she labeled “The Stubborn Survivor.”
“I gave one example of Crossroads Diner, which is a breakfast spot. And it closed a few days shy of its 10th anniversary in November 2020. The numbers just weren’t working and COVID shutdowns were making business really difficult,” she said.
“Well, (the owner) spent the next four years doing other stuff and then got a new lease and reopened that breakfast place in early 2025. He said, ‘I was put on this earth to make food for people. I went and did some other stuff for a couple of years. It doesn’t make me happy. I’m back in the restaurant game.’”
