Opinion

If you care about Hong Kong restaurants’ survival, order takeaway meals directly from them

While meal delivery services are booming during the coronavirus pandemic, restaurants, with their large overheads, are struggling to survive

One restaurant group is offering some other food establishments a lifeline by inviting them to join its delivery service

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While delivery services doing a booming business during the coronavirus pandemic, Hong Kong restaurants are struggling to survive, and these services’ high charges don’t help. One restaurant group has launched its own service, and opened it to other restaurants.

Susan Jung trained as a pastry chef and worked in hotels, restaurants and bakeries in San Francisco, New York and Hong Kong before joining the Post.

Published: 6:00pm, 17 Apr 2020Updated: 6:00pm, 17 Apr 2020

Never has the future of restaurants in Hong Kong looked so bleak. Even at the height of the last health epidemic, that of Sars in 2003, fewer restaurants were in danger of going out of business, or indeed shut down.

Of course, it’s like that for many businesses during this era of Covid-19, not just in Hong Kong, but worldwide. It’s so bad that we have decided to stop publishing restaurant reviews for the time being.

What’s the point when things are changing so fast that a new spot – opened just a few months ago – has closed in the time between my visit and when I contact them to arrange a photo shoot days later?

Or when a Japanese restaurant, in one of the most expensive districts, has changed its casual after-work drinks and snacks (izakaya) concept to one of inexpensive set dinners, so it can get by with a skeleton staff of a cook and a server?

Syed Asim Hussain is the co-founder of the Black Sheep Restaurants group.

Plus, it doesn’t seem right to encourage people to go out to try new restaurants when we’re all being told to be socially responsible and stay in. Even long-established restaurants – both expensive and cheap – are closing, some for good, others just for a short time. Many restaurants are doing only takeaway.

On the other hand business is booming for restaurant delivery services, also called restaurant aggregators – and that’s a problem for Syed Asim Hussain, co-founder of the Black Sheep Restaurants group, which operates establishments including Belon, Ho Lee Fook and Carbone.