For Jeannie Kim, owner of SAMS American Eatery, what was a one-hour inconvenience turned into a one-day challenge and then morphed into a one-weekend nightmare that has now become an extended, financially devastating crisis.
More than two days after a fire at a Pacific Gas & Electric substation caused widespread outages across San Francisco, her Market Street restaurant is still without power.
The utility company has said that service will likely be restored by Tuesday morning, but after days of missed deadlines, Kim’s not holding her breath. Whenever her electricity comes back online, she estimates it will take at least a full day to clean out spoiled food, cool fridges and freezers, order new inventory, and prep for service.
“We are just losing so much,” she said. “It’s such a huge impact. This was supposed to be our biggest season of the year, so this is the worst timing.”
The financial hit — encompassing the wasted food and lost sales — will total tens of thousands of dollars.
While Kim’s Mid-Market neighborhood has suffered among the most persistent outages (opens in new tab), that story has played out in bars and restaurants across the city, from fine-dining hotspots to fast-service pizzerias.
“That Saturday is the crux of the holiday season, and we were set to have a monster night,” said Evan Rich, who along with his wife, Sarah, owns Rich Table, RT Rotisseries, and RT Bistro. “We expected tons of people, had all the staff in place, got everything ready. And then the outage ruined everything.”
While the Bistro was able to rescue a 4 p.m. buy-out on Saturday with cold appetizers, an improvised selection of passed hor-dourves, plenty of booze, and cozy candlelight, the team decided to close completely once it became clear that power wouldn’t return around 6 p.m., like originally announced.
Rich’s businesses lost sales and inventory, while staff members missed out on what was supposed to be an evening of generous holiday tipping. Diners, meanwhile, had to scramble to find other plans, sometimes as out-of-towners or with picky family members in tow.
“We can’t dwell on it, but the most frustrating part was that it was totally out of our hands and control,” Rich said. “We were at the whim of the power company that we’re forced to use.”
Mayor Daniel Lurie said during a press conference on Monday that he told PG&E executives that “tens and tens of millions of dollars is probably an undercount” for the economic impact of the extended blackout.
“It was a huge financial hit to our city, and as we are recovering, it is one that we will take note of, and we will be looking for help from them,” he added, while encouraging every small business owner and resident who lost food or sales to file a claim.
District 4 Supervisor Alan Wong said he stopped by BBQ King on Irving St. in the Sunset on Sunday, where the owner told him the outage ruined all the ducks hanging for Cantonese barbecue, forcing them into the trash.
The owner of the BBQ King restaurant has thrown away all of the ducks hanging to make Cantonese barbecue. | Source: Alan Wong
Wong has called for a hearing to investigate the cause of the outage and is advocating for the affected small businesses to get compensation. Restaurants already have razor-thin margins, making additional losses — especially around the holidays — particularly brutal.
Tony Lee, owner of Sun Maxim’s dim sum restaurant on Irving, said the blackout cost him thousands of dollars a day.
“We had to throw out dim sum, meat, and fresh seafood — a huge loss,” Lee told The Standard in Cantonese.
The timing made it worse. The outage hit during Dongzhi, or the winter solstice holiday, one of the busiest periods of the year. Lee said he’s begun filing paperwork to seek compensation from PG&E.
Chef James Yeun Leong Parry of the acclaimed new Chinese restaurant Happy Crane said he and his team felt a profound “sense of helplessness” as they called would-be customers on Saturday to cancel reservations. “We’re a new restaurant that’s still trying to make money. To close on Saturday night during the busiest season? It’s such a challenge.”
He’s not optimistic about fully recouping his losses from PG&E. In addition to spoiled cod, shellfish, and oysters and missed sales from booked tables, the team suffered from lost walk-in revenue and reputational damage. “They won’t make it easy for us, I’m sure,” he said.
Happy Crane’s Chef James Yeun Leong Parry felt a profound “sense of helplesness” when he had to cancel highly sought-after reservations on Saturday. | Source: Kelsey McClellan for The Standard
For casual Tenderloin pizzeria Outta Sight, the uncertainty and lack of communication from PG&E made it nearly impossible to plan.
“All these small business owners like us were trying to play crystal ball,” said chef and owner Eric Ehler. “You don’t know what’s going to go bad, and you have staff standing around who can’t really do anything.”
The team ended up giving away a bunch of pizzas, but still lost sales and some unsalvageable ingredients. “It’s just a really shitty feeling all around,” he said. He fears that PG&E won’t be held accountable, either. “We rely on them, we have no control, and they screw us year after year.”
For another pizzeria — the red-hot Jules Pizza in the Lower Haight — Saturday’s blackout was the second time in a week that a PG&E outage had meant lost sales: It had to close early on Thursday because the utility had scheduled a planned outage that night.
“That was already kind of a nightmare for us,” he said, in part because the firm changed the timing with little notice. The restaurant had planned to shut this week for the holiday, so the two extra nights of cancelled service meant wasted stock, vanished sales, and complaints from would-be customers.
“My business just lost somewhere between $10-and-15,000 in the week before we were going to be closed,” he said. “I’m not sure I can afford Christmas presents, you know, and people are mad that they had their dinner reservations cancelled.”
While most would-be diners were understanding, the restaurateurs said, cancelling reservations stung, as did the rare negative comments. What comes next is the laborious information gathering and paperwork necessary to file claims, and then a waiting game to see what PG&E will approve.
In Kim’s case, the unpredictability extends to whether she’ll be able to reopen at all before Christmas.
“We’re in the dark, for now, figuratively and literally,” Kim said. “Having gone through the pandemic, I’m just trying to stay calm for my staff, while I figure out a way to survive.”