Why 2012 Was A Terrible Year For Restaurants

As 2013 gets underway, I can’t stop thinking about what I lost in 2012. In particular, I keep thinking about the fate of Bill’s Gay Nineties.

Bill’s Gay Nineties was a very old, very awesome New York piano bar. The food consisted of shrimp cocktails and steak on toast points, stuff like that. Bill’s closed down last year, and has now been replaced with a retro concept, also called Bill’s, with a kind of art-directed décor meant to suggest the thing it displaced. That kind of processed nostalgia is a hustle and a hoax; it posits a nonexistent past for the purpose of creating a fraudulent present. But restaurants can become landmarks, and it wasn’t just Bill’s Gay Nineties that was lost. 2012 brought a blizzard of closures, including Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago and Le Bec Fin in Philadelphia. I’m betting that there is some place old and wonderful in your town that went under this year, too.

It’s been a rough stretch for restaurants. While gastrocrats continue to support supper high-end tweezer-food palaces, the middle-of-the-road places have been hit hard by the recession. According to the market research company NPD Group, restaurant visits in the U.S. fell from 62.7 billion in 2008 to 60.6 billion in 2011. In an atmosphere like that, third and fourth generation businesses are particularly vulnerable.

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