By Annie Matica, Diti Kohli, and Henry Liu
Our group wanted to compile a list of Boston area restaurant closures that have occurred due to the financial impact of COVID-19. Because of the ongoing effects of the pandemic, we could not find any definitive list or state database with this information.
So Diti used lists from The Boston Globe, Eater Boston, and Boston’s Hidden Restaurants to find out what businesses have closed since March of this year themselves. She then manually created a Google spreadsheet with the restaurant names, addresses, city, and date of closure, so that we could easily share the file with each other as a group. The dates of the closures were found from Facebook/Instagram posts and news stories publicly available online. To add the geographic coordinates of these restaurants, she installed a geocode plug-in for Google sheets. This allowed us to quickly convert the addresses into longitude and latitude — measures that were helpful while making our map visualizations later on.
Each of us individually converted this data in Excel spreadsheets or CSV files to create two of the three visualizations for this project.
Our dataset focused on the Greater Boston area. Some of these restaurants are located as far as Plymouth and Gloucester, up to 40 miles from the city, which is not commonly regarded as a part of Greater Boston. Still, every restaurant included in the list is located among the region to the West of the Blue-Star Memorial Highway, also known as Interstate-495.
Our dataset is the most exhaustive by far as we can find. However, it is not as complete as possible, since none of the three websites we consulted claim they have a comprehensive list of restaurant closures. Diti also consulted the Massachusetts Restaurant Association, their public relations contact (JP Faiella), and Eater Boston via email to make sure we included as many shuttered spots as possible.
The dataset was last updated on Dec. 7.
The list excludes restaurants that are hibernating for the cold-weather season (as tracked here by The Boston Globe). These restaurants are slated to return at a more profitable time period. Hibernation then is a cost-saving measure. Hibernating restaurants can be difficult to differentiate from the closed restaurants, if the news outlet broadcasting the information did not verify with the owner.
For our project, we wanted to know in which month the highest number restaurants had shut down and if any government policies led to their closure. As a result, Henry created a bar graph in Tableau that documented the number of restaurants closed each month.
After importing the data into Tableau, he grouped the restaurants by the date they officially had to close their doors for good, as recorded in our dataset. He then altered the time frame to show the number of restaurant closures per month and plotted it on the simple graph.
From this chart, we can see that there was a sharp increase of restaurant closures from March to the end of July. The highest peak was in July with a total of 38 of 160, or 23.75 percent, businesses closing. The amount of restaurant closures then began to decrease through the rest of the summer. We deleted the bar of December because the data was last updated on Dec. 8.
In our second visualization, Annie plotted all 160 restaurants’ coordinates in an interactive map, hoping to figure out any patterns of the distribution. This too was done in Tableau using the addresses, longitudes, and latitudes from the data set.
After creating this chart, we discovered that the most concentrated places for business closures were in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville — also the cities with the highest number of restaurant licenses. Our findings were not surprising as they matched information we received from our sources, and these cities are also some of the most densely populated in the state.
Annie then created a second map which included the names of Massachusetts towns to be able to provide a more comprehensive and interactive map for users. This second map allows users to zoom in and out, helping them locate specific neighborhoods and streets. Users are also able to click on each restaurant location to find out the exact address and name of each business.
After analyzing the data and creating visualizations, the three of us began looking for restaurant owners in the Boston area who had to close their businesses because of COVID-19. We reached out to these sources through social media, email, and their business websites asking if they would be open to talking with us about their experiences.
We interviewed Massachusetts Restaurant Association president Bob Luz about how COVID-19 had affected the restaurant industry in Boston. We also spoke with restaurant owners about how they lost their business under the pressure of the pandemic as well as government regulations aimed to tackle the pandemic. We interviewed Rebecca Caloggero who was one of the owners of Whiskey’s, a restaurant and bar located in Back Bay. We also spoke with the owner of Anthea Peters, the owner of the Adventure Pub, a board game theme restaurant in Arlington, and Ace Gershfield, one of the owners of Stoddard’s, a bar and restaurant located in downtown Boston.
From our interviews, we began writing the narrative portion of our project which describes the overall impact of COVID-19 on restaurants in Boston and the individual effects these closures have had on business owners and the community at large.
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