Durham packs up its Streetery early. Here’s the plan to help downtown restaurants.
Downtown Durham’s Streetery, an outdoor dining district inspired by the coronavirus pandemic, is over.
The campaign to support local restaurants ended two weeks early as weather turned to a chill and North Carolina’s COVID cases spiked to new levels.
In place of the Streetery, downtown restaurants have launched the latest initiative to save the city’s famed dining scene.
Now Durham is encouraging diners to take the Takeout Pledge, a vow to order meals to-go at least once or twice a week. With that, restaurant owners believe they can make it to sunnier weather.
“We are just on fumes,” said Seth Gross, owner of Bull City Burger and Brewery and the organizer of the #TakeoutPledge. “If you can order out one or two times a week, you’re going to save the downtown dining scene.”
This week, Gov. Roy Cooper moved North Carolina into a modified stay-at-home phase, restricting activities from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. Dining rooms will now close early, and last call was moved up to 9 p.m.
The new executive order comes as the state’s COVID case counts reach their highest levels since the beginning of the pandemic, amidst a wave that began in the middle of the fall and has climbed ever since. On Friday, the day the new restrictions went in place, the state eclipsed 7,000 new daily cases for the first time.
Those increases and the first brush with winter has kept diners away, restaurant owners say.
“In November, our numbers started to plummet, they fell right off a cliff,” said Elizabeth Turnbull, co-owner of COPA. “One week it was great, then it was bad and worse and worse and worse.”
Since the Streetery launched in September, some downtown thoroughfares were blocked off on Friday and Saturday nights, enabling more outdoor tables for dining at multiple restaurants.
Turnbull said COPA already was offering outdoor dining, but that once the Streetery got into swing, business improved drastically, peaking at 120 diners one Saturday night.
“It seemed almost like a regular Saturday night,” Turbull said. “The Streetery saved our business and saved other businesses in the neighborhood.”
What the Streetery did more than anything, Turnbull said, is buy restaurants time as business continues to suffer.
That is also the aim of the takeout pledge, she said.
“It’s meant to get us through this long, dark winter,” Turnbull said. “We know people can’t afford to eat out every night or regularly. But one to two times a week from independent restaurants would make a significant difference to the bottom line of so many restaurants.”
Durham dining scene
In recent years, Durham’s downtown has been reinvented, largely on the strength of its dining scene. Local restaurants and chefs collect regional and national praise, raising the entire Triangle into a new dining destination in the South.
That’s why Gross said it frustrates him to see fast-food lines spilling into highways and downtown restaurants struggling week to week.
“Independent restaurants are dying,” Gross said.
In the 24 hours since the takeout pledge began, Gross said Bull City Burger already had a full board of orders for Friday night, plus an influx of gift cards.
At COPA, Turnbull said the pledge is just the next pivot, but that it’s been inspiring in a short amount of time.
“We have our eye on March,” she said. “It’s clear Durham values us; maybe we stand a chance.”
